The romantic dream
Subtitle: Wordsworth and the poetics of the unconscious
By: Douglas B. Wilson.
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 1993
Place of publication: Lincoln, Neb.
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 200
ISBN-13: 9780803247611
Subjects: Wordsworth, William, 1770-1850 -- Knowledge -- Psychology; Subconsciousness in literature; Psychoanalysis and literature -- England; Poetry -- Psychological aspects; Dreams in literature; Romanticism -- England; Poetics -- History -- 19th century
Description: Although criticism on the medieval and Renaissance dream abounds, a strange lacuna exists in the critical literature of dream in the English Romantics. Every major Romantic poet relied frequently and explicitly on dream imagery, and Romantic poems conduct a long discussion about the meaning, power, value, and provenance of dreams. Douglas B. Wilson's book traces the wide web of connections that the Romantics wove between dreams and other expressions of consciousness: sensation, emotions, illusions, creativity, personality, and memory. Situating his study of the Wordsworthian dream between ancient interpretation and Freudian interpretation, Wilson gains a new perspective on the oneiric moment of Romanticism while liberating it from a narrowly psychoanalytic reading. Wordsworth embodies virtually all of the dream theory of his time, thus making him the perfect object of Wilson's multiple approaches to dream activity as poetic creation. - Back cover.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: Dream and the uncanny; title: In dreams begin communities; title: Dream displacement : projecting the abandoned woman; title: Carnage and its consequences : reveries of power; title: The dream prospect : imagination regained; title: Wordsworth's self-analysis : the Arab dream