Sleep and Its Spaces in Middle English Literature: Emotions, Ethics, Dreams - Paperback
$63.18
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Sleep and Its Spaces in Middle English Literature: Emotions, Ethics, Dreams - Paperback
$63.18
by Megan Leitch (Author)
Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau.
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Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. An examination of sleep can shed light on what it enables (dreams and dream poetry) and what it stands in for or supersedes (desire and sex).
This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns in ways that have ethical, affective, and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama, and fabliau. While concentrating on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the book attends to a longue dur?e in the literature about sleep circulating from the twelfth century to the early seventeenth. It focuses on continuities in the construction of sleep across this period - scientific, social, spiritual, and spatial - and explores the cultural specificity of premodern English literature's widespread interest in the subject. Analysing how representations of sleep animate ethical codes and emotive scripts, Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature demonstrates the significance of sleep-related motifs to Middle English romance and offers a more embodied understanding of dream visions by Chaucer, Langland, and the Pearl-poet.Author Biography
Megan G. Leitch is Reader in English Literature at Cardiff University
Number of Pages: 296
Dimensions: 0.61 x 8.5 x 5.5 IN
Publication Date: March 21, 2023
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