Freddy Conway-Shaw (KCL) - 2025-26 Students
freddy.conway-shaw@kcl.ac.uk

Oneiric Modernism: Writing Dreaming and Dreaming Writing, 1899–1939

This project is interested in the interrelation of dreaming and writing in the early twentieth century.

I examine a period — one I term the “oneiric milieu” — in which scientific and cultural discourses are particularly invested in tracing the contours and possibilities of oneiric experience. I aim to illustrate how many of the concerns and preoccupations of British literary modernism can be felt in the period’s reconsideration of dreaming. As much as this elucidates the role of dreaming and its transitional position between science and culture in the period, it also highlights modernist thinkers’ shifting understanding of writing and its relation to representation, (un)consciousness, and psychic experience.

My chapters focus, in the main, on four writers: George Bernard Shaw, and the role of dreams in his theory of Creative Evolution; May Sinclair, and her position between novelist and early psychoanalytic theorist; W. B. Yeats, and the role of dream and visionary experience in his occult System; and James Joyce, and the dreamwork of “Finnegans Wake”. Alongside this close focus on the texts of four writers, marked out by their sustained interest in the literation (or making literary) of dreams, this is a project with a wider, international scope that engages with writers and thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, Gaston Bachelard, Walter Benjamin, and others.

My project hopes to demonstrate, in sum, that an understanding of British literary modernism is incomplete without reference to the dreamwork of its writers.

Principal supervisor: Professor Steven Connor