Forming Sleep asks how biocultural and literary dynamics act together to shape conceptions of sleep states in the early modern period. Engaging with poetry, drama, and prose largely written in English between 1580 and 1670, the essays in this collection highlight period discussions about how seemingly insentient states might actually enable self-formation.
Looking at literary representations of sleep through formalism, biopolitics, Marxist theory, trauma theory, and affect theory, this volume envisions sleep states as a means of defining the human condition, both literally and metaphorically. The contributors examine a range of archival sourcesincluding texts in early modern faculty psychology, printed and manuscript medical treatises and physicians' notes, and printed ephemera on pathological sleepthrough the lenses of both classical and contemporary philosophy. Essays apply these frameworks to genres such as drama, secular lyric, prose treatise, epic, and religious verse. Taken together, these essays demonstrate how early modern depictions of sleep shape, and are shaped by, the philosophical, medical, political, and, above all, formal discourses through which they are articulated. With this in mind, the question of form merges considerations of the physical and the poetic with the spiritual and the secular, highlighting the pervasiveness of sleep states as a means by which to reflect on the human condition.
In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Brian Chalk, Jennifer Lewin, Cassie Miura, Benjamin Parris, Giulio Pertile, N. Amos Rothschild, Garret T. Sullivan Jr., and Timothy A. Turner.
Acknowledgments
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
“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 most essential features of human life.”
—Sasha Handley, author of Sleep in Early Modern England
