Sleepwalking, subjectivity and the nervous body in Eighteenth-Century Britain

This article offers an in-depth study of sleepwalking in the long eighteenth century. It explores how and why the physical condition of sleepwalking was conceptually transformed into a modish nervous disorder that was central to explorations of the human mind, imagination and personal identity in the final decades of the century. This cultural revaluation of sleepwalking, or ‘somnambulism’ as it was increasingly termed, is situated within the context of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century medical and philosophical thought surrounding the physical act of sleep and its disorders, and within the cults of sensibility and Romanticism.