Overview

In today's media-saturated, hyper-connected society, increasing numbers of people are finding it hard to switch off their over-stimulated brains and escape the demands of daily life. We are becoming, it seems, a world of insomniacs - but this condition of perpetual unrest has plagued people for centuries. In this fascinating study, Eluned Summers-Bremner shows that the roots and effects of insomnia are complex, and reveals how humans have employed art, science and witchcraft to understand and treat the affliction.

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9781861893178

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Summers-Bremner's excellent account of insomnia shows that the consideration of our waking moments is indicative of the changing ways we think about life. As crime fiction and drug prescriptions will attest, the inability to sleep is also a condition of modernity of capitalist cultures founded on protestant work ethics, on 18th-century slavery and on the subsequent devaluation of sleep as an important activity in our 24-hour wired-up world. Wasn't it Margaret Thatcher who said that sleeping was for wimps? Financial Times magazine Summers-Bremner's account of literary usages of insomnia, from Gilgamesh to Garcia Marquez, is a rich one, sufficient to make the case that insomnia is a recurrent theme in Western culture. Wall Street Journal a fascinating study ... Daily Telegraph a well-informed and important book Times Higher Education a whimsical tour of the history of how different cultures have viewed not only insomnia but also the night itself, sleep, dreams, darkness, and activities that occur in the dark ... covers a wide swath of territory and poetically describes what historical figures wrote or thought about insomnia. The New England Journal of Medicine Summers-Bremner's cultural history of insomnia is surely enough to make us all question the grounding of our science, as well as to keep any sleeper awake. Brain: A Journal of Neurology

Author Information

Eluned Summers-Bremner is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

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