England's dreaming: dreams, inwardness, and the self in Renaissance England.

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

What do dreams tell us about the English Renaissance self? In this period, dreams raised fundamental issues about inwardness. Dreams were a potential source of knowledge, but also a moment of anarchy, when the senses delivered scrambled messages, and the faculty of fantasy toppled that of reason. What was the nature of the private self that thought and felt during wakefulness, and what relation did it bear to the dreaming self, with its bizarre actions and experiences? This project uses evidence from domestic environments, diaries, pamphlets, and plays to explore sleeping and dreaming, and ask how these contributed to-and disrupted-the sense of an inner self at a point of major cultural and religious transition. It reconstructs experiences of dreaming lost in the post-Freudian era. It also provides significant new perspectives on an important moment in the history of the self, and explores how inwardness was both expressed through and complicated by dreams in text and performance.