Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination

by Jennifer Ford

• ISBN13: 9780521021784
• ISBN10: 0521021782
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-11-03
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book is the first in-depth investigation of Coleridge's responses to his dreams and to contemporary debates on the nature of dreaming, a subject of perennial interest to poets, philosophers and scientists throughout the Romantic period. Coleridge wrote and read extensively on the subject, but his richly diverse and original ideas have hitherto received little attention, scattered as they are throughout his notebooks, letters and marginalia. Jennifer Ford's emphasis is on analysing the ways in which dreaming processes were construed, by Coleridge in his dream readings, and by his contemporaries in a range of poetic and medical works. This historical exploration of dreams and dreaming allows Ford to explore previously neglected contemporary debates on 'the medical imagination'. By avoiding purely biographical or psychoanalytic approaches, she reveals instead a rich historical context for the ways in which the most mysterious workings of the Romantic imagination were explored and understood.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Editorial symbols used in manuscript and published notebooks

Introduction

1. Dreaming in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

2. Dramatic dreaming spaces

3. The language of dreams

4. Genera and species of dreams

5. Nightmares

6. The mysterious problem of dreams

7. Translations of dream and body

8. The dreaming medical imagination

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index.