Bedlam: An Anthology of Sleepless Nights - Messer, Jane (ed)

While what is felt in one's sleep and dreams has long been regarded as revealing - in life as well as in literature - the experience of insomnia has remained a blank. Yet many of literature's well-known characters have spent nights sleepless: Heathcliff roamed the moors, Hemingway's waiter didn't want to close up for the night, Plath's teenage self stayed up for a month. And there are many others who can't sleep for lust, for joy, for the burden of memory or madness, for despair or their unremitting consciousness. Each of these insomniacs has something special to tell us about the night, those secret hours when all good citizens should be asleep. Bedlam presents passages on insomnia from world literature past and present.

Softcover. English. Unwin Hyman. 1996. ISBN: 9781864480726. 324 pp. Fair/good. Book No: 82967