Conceptions of Dreaming from Homer to 1800

by G. W. Pigman III

Overview

Conceptions of Dreaming from Homer to 1800 traces the history of ideas about dreaming during the period when the admonitory dream was the main focus of learned interest—from the Homeric epics through the Renaissance—and the period when it began to become a secondary focus—the eighteenth century. The book also considers the two most important dream theorists at the turn of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud and Sante de Sanctis. While Freud is concerned with questions of what a dream means and how to interpret it, de Sanctis offers a synthesis of nineteenth-century research into what a dream is and represents the Enlightenment transition from particular facts to general laws.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783088881
Publisher:	Anthem Press
Publication date:	01/31/2019
Pages:	294
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

G. W. Pigman III is professor of English at the California Institute of Technology, USA. He is the author of Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (1985), editor of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (2000), and editor and translator of Giovanni Gioviano Pontano’s The Virtues and Vices of Speech (forthcoming).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; Introduction: The Period of the Admonitory Dream; 1. The Ancient World; 2. The Middle Ages; 3. The Early Modern Period; Epilogue: Freud and De Sanctis; Bibliography.; Index.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This shining example of Geistesgeschichte is a treasury of all the conceptions of dreams coming down to us from Antiquity to the end of the Enlightenment. It supersedes a whole library on the topic and will be an indispensable resource for further cultural dream studies.”
—Stefan Goldmann, Senior Research Fellow, Institut für Geschichte der Medizin, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany