Description
Book SynopsisA collection of essays exploring how biocultural and literary dynamics acted together to shape conceptions of sleep states in the early modern period. Essays envision sleep states as a means of defining the human, both literally and metaphorically.
Trade Review“This fascinating book argues that human sleep and sleeplessness is (and was) shaped as much by social and cultural factors as by human biology. Its pages represent an important justification of literary and historical inquiries into the extraordinary variability of human sleep habits that can be traced across time and space. Those who choose to read this book will soon appreciate why humanities scholarship is so essential to understanding one of the features of human life.”
—Sasha Handley,author of Sleep in Early Modern England
“A multifaceted and provocative collection of essays that focus on answering the pertinent question of how biocultural and literary forces combined to influence conceptualizations and epistemologies of sleep, subjectivity, and human consciousness.”
—Janine Rivière Journal of British Studies
“This collection is the first to consider the broad range of meanings of sleep and consciousness in the early modern imagination. It examines representations of sleep in poetry, drama and long-form writing (epic and prose), using the lenses of formalism, biopolitics, Marxist theory, trauma theory and affect theory.”
—Elizabeth K. Hunter Kritikon Litterarum
“Forming Sleep offers a rich, wide-ranging set of perspectives on a field that still merits much more scholarly attention.”
—Per Sivefors Renaissance Quarterly
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Forming Sleep
Margaret Simon and Nancy Simpson-Younger
Part I: Sleep States and Subjectivity in Early Modern Lyric
1. Thinking Sleep in the Renaissance Sonnet Sequence
Giulio J. Pertile
2. Rest and Rhyme in Thomas Campion’s Poetry
Margaret Simon
3. “Still in Thought with Thee I Go”: Epistemology and Consciousness in the
Sidney Psalms
Nancy Simpson-Younger
Part II: Sleep, Ethics, and Embodied Form in Early Modern Drama
4. Making the Moor: Torture, Sleep Deprivation, and Race in Othello
Timothy A. Turner
5. Sleep, Vulnerability, and Self-Knowledge in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Jennifer Lewin
6. “The Heaviness of Sleep”: Monarchical Exhaustion in King Lear
Brian Chalk
Part III: Sleep and Personhood in the Early Modern Verse Epic and Prose Treatise
7. Life and Labor in the House of Care: Spenserian Ethics and the Aesthetics of Insomnia
Benjamin Parris
8. “Sweet Moistning Sleepe”: Perturbations of the Mind and Rest for the Body in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy
Cassie M. Miura
9. The Physiology of Free Will: Faculty Psychology and the Structure of the Miltonic Mind
N. Amos Rothschild
Afterword: Beyond the Lost World: Early Modern Sleep Scenarios
Garrett A. Sullivan Jr.
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
