Forming Sleep

Nancy L. Simpson-Younger is Assistant Professor of English at Pacific Lutheran University.Margaret Simon is Associate Professor of English at North Carolina State University.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Forming SleepMargaret Simon and Nancy Simpson-YoungerPart I: Sleep States and Subjectivity in Early Modern Lyric1. Thinking Sleep in the Renaissance Sonnet SequenceGiulio J. Pertile2. Rest and Rhyme in Thomas Campion’s PoetryMargaret Simon3. “Still in Thought with Thee I Go”: Epistemology and Consciousness in theSidney PsalmsNancy Simpson-YoungerPart II: Sleep, Ethics, and Embodied Form in Early Modern Drama4. Making the Moor: Torture, Sleep Deprivation, and Race in OthelloTimothy A. Turner5. Sleep, Vulnerability, and Self-Knowledge in A Midsummer Night’s DreamJennifer Lewin6. “The Heaviness of Sleep”: Monarchical Exhaustion in King LearBrian ChalkPart III: Sleep and Personhood in the Early Modern Verse Epic and Prose Treatise7. Life and Labor in the House of Care: Spenserian Ethics and the Aesthetics of InsomniaBenjamin Parris8. “Sweet Moistning Sleepe”: Perturbations of the Mind and Rest for the Body in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of MelancholyCassie M. Miura9. The Physiology of Free Will: Faculty Psychology and the Structure of the Miltonic MindN. Amos RothschildAfterword: Beyond the Lost World: Early Modern Sleep ScenariosGarrett A. Sullivan Jr.BibliographyList of ContributorsIndex

“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 features of human life.”—Sasha Handley, author of Sleep in Early Modern England