Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment: Vitality from Spenser to Milton - Softcover

Sullivan Jr, Garrett A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1316505332 ISBN 13: 9781316505335

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Garrett Sullivan explores the changing impact of Aristotelian conceptions of vitality and humanness on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature before and after the rise of Descartes. Aristotle's tripartite soul is usually considered in relation to concepts of psychology and physiology. However, Sullivan argues that its significance is much greater, constituting a theory of vitality that simultaneously distinguishes man from, and connects him to, other forms of life. He contends that, in works such as Sidney's Old Arcadia, Shakespeare's Henry IV and Henry V, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Milton's Paradise Lost and Dryden's All for Love, the genres of epic and romance, whose operations are informed by Aristotle's theory, provide the raw materials for exploring different models of humanness; and that sleep is the vehicle for such exploration as it blurs distinctions among man, plant and animal.

About this title

Book Description:

Contributing to the histories of genre, embodiment and vitality, this study shows the impact of Aristotelian and Cartesian conceptions of humanness on works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton and Sidney. Sullivan shows how, through the representation of sleep, epic and romance model the distinctive relationships between man, plant and animal.

About the Author:

Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr is Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (1998) and Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster (2005). He has also edited numerous works, among which are The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy (with Emma Smith, 2010), Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England (with Mary Floyd-Wilson, 2007), Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion (with Patrick Cheney and Andrew Hadfield, 2007) and The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature (co-general editor with Alan Stewart, 2012).

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1316505332
• ISBN 13: 9781316505335
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 218