The Dream and the Text

Essays on Literature and Language

Edited by Carol Schreier Rupprecht

Subjects: Narrative
Series: SUNY series in Dream Studies
Paperback : 9780791413623, 325 pages, July 1993
Hardcover : 9780791413616, 325 pages, July 1993

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Table of contents

Foreword by Norman N. Holland

Acknowledgements

1. Reading Yourself to Sleep: Dreams in/and/as Texts
Carol Schreier Rupprecht and Kelly Bulkley

Part I Foregrounding Theory

2. Bizarreness in Dreams and Other Fictions
Bert O. States

3. Real Dreams, Literary Dreams, and the Fantastic in Literature
Laurence M. Porter

4. In Defense of Nightmares: Clinical and Literary Cases
Jane White-Lewis

Part II Historical, Political, Cultural, and Social Aspects

5. Dreams, Divination, and Statecraft: The Politics of Dreams in Early Chinese History and Literature
John Brennan

6. Talmudic Dream Interpretation, Freudian Ambivalence, Deconstruction
Ken Frieden

7. Divinity, Insanity, Creativity: A Renaissance Contribution to the History and Theory of, Dream/Text(s)
Carol Schreier Rupprecht

8. Dreaming of Death: Love and Money in The Merchant of Venice
Kay Stockholder

Part III A Dreamer and a Text: Case Studies

9. The Evil Dreams of Gilgamesh: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Dreams in Mythological Texts
Kelly Bulkley

10. Hermia's Dream
Norman N. Holland

11. Self and Self-validation in a Stage Character: A Shakespearean Use of Dream
Joseph Westlund

12. A Challenge to Apollonian Mastery: A New Reading of Henry James's "Most Appalling Yet Most Admirable" Nightmare
Suzi Naiburg

Part IV Dreams in Texts

13. The Marqués de Santillana: Master Dreamer
Harriet Goldberg

14. Xerxes and Alexander: Dreams of America in Claramonte's El nuevo rey Gallinato
Frederick A. de Armas

15. Variations of the Prophetic Dream in Modern Russian Literature
C. Nicholas Lee

Contributors

Index

Description

This book partakes of a long tradition of dream interpretation, but, at the same time, is unique in its cross-cultural and interdisciplinary methods and in its mix of theoretical and analytical approaches. It includes a great chronological and geographical range, from ancient Sumeria to eighteenth-century China; medieval Hispanic dream poetry to Italian Renaissance dream theory; Shakespeare to Nerval; and from Dostoevsky, through Emily Brontë, to Henry James. Rupprecht also incorporates various critical orientations including archetypal, comparative, feminist, historicist, linguistic, postmodern, psychoanalytic, religious, reader response, and self-psychology.

Carol Schreier Rupprecht is Professor of Comparative Literature at Hamilton College.

Reviews

"The book offers wonderful and important commentary about the interface between dreams and texts of various sorts, about how they can inform each other, and about mutual shaping of dreams and culture." — Johanna M. King, California State University, Chico