This groundbreaking study is a history of the dream as a fundamental aspect of identity and culture from the mid-nineteenth century, to the late twentieth century. Drawing on a complex and diverse archive, including popular dream books, lectures, novels, poems, visual media, diaries, letters, scholarly texts, and newspaper and journal articles, Dreams and Modernity analyses how the explosion of interest in dreams informed the psychic, imaginative and intimate life of the modern subject. The unauthorized nature of dream material and its formulation as a "history from below" makes it singularly illuminating for a broader cultural history of this period.

Chapter One: Introduction. Chapter Two: Popular Traditions of Dream Interpretation in the Early to Mid-Nineteenth Century. Chapter Three: The Dream as Revelation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Psychology. Chapter Four: Phantasms of the Living: Dreaming in the Wake of the Society for Psychical Research. Chapter Five: The British Reception and Extension of Freud's Dream Book. Chapter Six: 'Dream Kitsch': Surrealism, Walter Benjamin and the Agency of the Dream. Chapter Seven: The Dream Archive: Mass-Observation and Everyday Life.

Helen Groth is an Associate Professor in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. She is the author of Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia (OUP, 2003) and Moving Images. Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices (EUP, 2013). She has also written a wide range of articles on photography, Victorian visual technologies, anachronism, noise and has recently co-edited Mindful Aesthetics: Literature and the Science of Mind (Continuum, 2013).

Natalya Lusty is Associate Professor in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Ashgate, 2007) and a recently co-edited collection of essays, Modernism and Masculinity: Literary and Cultural Transformations (CUP, 2013). Her research examines various movements and cultures of modernity, including feminism, psychoanalysis, the avant-garde, fashion and everyday life.