Dream, Creativity, and Madness in Nineteenth-Century France

This is an important new analysis of the problematic relationship between dreams and madness as perceived by nineteenth-century French writers, thinkers, and doctors. Tony James shows how doctors (such as Esquirol, Llut, and Janet), thinkers (including Maine de Biran and Taine), and writers (for example, Balzac, Nerval, Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, and Rimbaud) grappled in very different ways with the problems raised by the so-called `phenomena of sleep' - and particularly the question: might dreams be a source of creativity?