Nightmares in the Long Nineteenth Century

From Johann Heinrich Füssli’s 1781 oil painting The Nightmare, which was to become the iconic image of a newly emergent sensibility, to the first psychoanalytic studies culminating in ＂On the Nightmare＂ by Ernest Jones, first published in 1911, the long nineteenth century was characterised by a pervasive fascination with nightmares, both as frightening dreams and, in their personified form, evil spirits or monstrous creatures. This volume investigates the extensive and multifaceted presence of nightmares in the literature and culture of this period from a cross-disciplinary and cross-national perspective, shedding new light on the remarkably widespread nature of the nineteenth-century interest in nightmares as well as on common threads and features that inform and animate it. Its contributions by scholars from different fields reveal how nineteenth-century representations of nightmare, across and beyond Europe, explored fundamental questions about the limits of consciousness and reason, the complex interplay of body and mind, the elusive boundaries between self and other, and the dread of alterity, giving voice to deep-rooted fears and anxieties in a period when these notions were undergoing radical rethinking.

Frances Clemente is MHRA Research Scholar in European Modern Languages and Lecturer in Italian at St Hilda’s College at the University of Oxford, UK. Her research focuses on notions of alterity and how they relate to normative patterns of thinking and behaving in nineteenth- and early twetienth-century Italian culture and literature, especially from a gender perspective. She has published articles in journals such as Italian Studies, Quaderni d’italianistica, and The Italianist.

Greta Colombani has recently completed an AHRC-funded PhD on communication with the Other World in British Romantic poetry at the University of Cambridge, UK. She is the author of two monographs: A gordian shape of dazzling hue: Serpent Symbolism in Keats’s Poetry (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017) and Talking across Unbridgeable Distances: Anglo-American Fiction and the Theme of Supernatural Communication in the Early Nineteenth Century (Edizioni ETS, 2023).