Sleep and Its Meanings

A wide-ranging collection exploring the many meanings of sleep, within the context of the humanities and social sciences.

Sleep has been an object of specialized medical research for more than a century now. Yet it is only in the twenty-first century that sleep has firmly become a significant focus for the humanities and social sciences, a growing interest that has been termed critical sleep studies. Featuring essays by leading international scholars, Sleep and Its Meanings is the first collection devoted to this multidisciplinary field. Taken together, the book’s essays probe the social, cultural, political, historical, philosophical, and aesthetic meanings of sleep. For it is only by considering these meanings that we can begin to understand sleep not just as a biological fact of life but as profoundly intertwined with the world the sleeper inhabits.

The book’s essays showcase some of the diverse disciplines that make up critical sleep studies, including both the ones that have been prominent in the field’s development from the outset—sociology, anthropology, history—and those that have turned to sleep only more recently and have therefore been so far under-represented—literary and cultural studies, as well as studies of arts, design, and media.