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Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature

Emotions, ethics, dreams

By Megan Leitch

Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature
Hardcover +
  • Price: £25.00
  • ISBN: 9781526151100
  • Publish Date: Jun 2021
  • Publisher: Manchester University Press
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    Paperback +
  • Price: £25.00
  • ISBN: 9781526171597
  • Publish Date: Mar 2023
  • Publisher: Manchester University Press
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    eBook -
  • Price: £25.00
  • ISBN: 9781526151094
  • Publish Date: Jul 2021
  • Publisher: Manchester University Press
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    Book Information

    Description

    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.

    Reviews

    Leitch's book expands our understanding of a neglected area of medieval mentalité, enabling new interpretations of key texts. Arthurian scholars will enjoy rethinking the many sleep-related scenes in the romance corpus through the insights presented in this fascinating book.
    Carolyne Larrington,St John's College, University of Oxford, Arthurian Literature 2023

    Contents

    Introduction: remarkable sleep
    1 Emotions, epistemology and the nature of sleep
    2 Ethics, appetite and the dangers of sleep
    3 Sleeping spaces and the circumscription of desire
    4 The hermeneutics of sleep in Chaucer's dream poems
    Coda: 'all good letters were layde a slepe': medieval sleep and early modern heirs
    Index

    Author

    Megan G. Leitch is Reader in English Literature at Cardiff University

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