Twilight States: Sleepwalking, Liminal Consciousness, and Sensational Selfhood in Victorian Literature and Culture
TWILIGHT STATES: SLEEPWALKING, LIMINAL CONSCIOUSNESS, AND SENSATIONAL SELFHOOD IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE by Rebecca Wigginton B. A. in English, University of Kentucky, 2005 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2014 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Rebecca Wigginton It was defended on September 29, 2014 and approved by Philip E. Smith, PhD, Associate Professor, English Jonathan Arac, PhD, Andrew W. Mellon Professor, English Marah Gubar, PhD, Associate Professor, English John Twyning, PhD, Associate Professor, English Christopher Drew Armstrong, PhD, History of Art & Architecture Dissertation Advisor: Philip E. Smith, PhD, Associate Professor, English ii Copyright © by Rebecca Wigginton 2014 iii TWILIGHT STATES: SLEEPWALKING, LIMINAL CONSCIOUSNESS, AND SENSATIONAL SELFHOOD IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE Rebecca Wigginton, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2014 Twilight States: Sleepwalking, Liminal Consciousness, and Sensational Selfhood in Victorian Literature and Culture argues that sleepwalking was everywhere in nineteenth-century culture, both as a topic for scientific, legal, and public debate, but also as a potent symbol in the Victorian imagination that informed literature and art. Furthermore, the nineteenth-century interest in the somnambulist was provoked by what the figure represented and revealed to the Victorians: namely, themselves. The sleepwalker represented the hidden potential within the self for either greatness or deviance, or, more mundanely, simply a fuller existence than consciousness has an awareness of. Sleepwalking writ large the multi-layered self at a time when the self—by psychiatry and society at large—was being accepted as increasingly multivalent.
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