Dreams and Modernity : A Cultural History

This groundbreaking study is a history of the dream as a fundamental aspect of identity and culture from the mid-nineteenth century, to the late twentieth century. Drawing on a complex and diverse archive, including popular dream books, lectures, novels, poems, visual media, diaries, letters, scholarly texts, and newspaper and journal articles, Dreams and Modernity analyses how the explosion of interest in dreams informed the psychic, imaginative and intimate life of the modern subject. The unauthorized nature of dream material and its formulation as a "history from below" makes it singularly illuminating for a broader cultural history of this period.

Dreams and Modernity: A Cultural History explores the dream as a distinctively modern object of inquiry and as a fundamental aspect of identity and culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

While dreams have been a sustained object of fascination from the ancient world to the present, what sets this period apart is the unprecedented interest in dream writing and interpretation in the psychological sciences, and the migration of these ideas into a wide range of cultural disciplines and practices.

Authors Helen Groth and Natalya Lusty examine how the intensification and cross-fertilization of ideas about dreams in this period became a catalyst for new kinds of networks of knowledge across aesthetic, psychological, philosophical and vernacular domains. In uncovering a complex and diverse archive, Dreams and Modernity reveals how the explosion of interest in dreams informed the psychic, imaginative and intimate life of the modern subject.

Individual chapters in the book explore popular traditions of dream interpretation in the 19th century; the archival impetus of dream research in this period, including the Society for Psychical Research and the Mass Observation movement; and the reception and extension of Freud’s dream book in Britain in the early decades of the twentieth century.

This engaging interdisciplinary book will appeal to both scholars and upper level students of cultural studies, cultural history, Victorian studies, literary studies, gender studies and modernist studies.