Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment

Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr is Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (1998) and Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster (2005). He has also edited numerous works, among which are The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy (with Emma Smith, 2010), Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England (with Mary Floyd-Wilson, 2007), Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion (with Patrick Cheney and Andrew Hadfield, 2007) and The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature (co-general editor with Alan Stewart, 2012).

• Introduction; Part I. Aristotelian Vitality Ascendant: 1. 'Both plant and beast together': temperance, vitality and the romance alternative in Spenser's Bower of Bliss; 2. Sleeping minds: romance, affect and environment in Sidney's The Old Arcadia; 3. Sleep, history and 'life indeed' in Shakespeare's 1 and 2 Henry IV and Henry V; Part II. Aristotelian Vitality Embattled: 4. 'From the root springs lighter the green stalk': vegetality and humanness in Milton's Paradise Lost; Part III. Aristotelian Vitality Undead: 5. 'Desperate sloth, miscalled philosophy': Descartes and the post-Aristotelian romance episode in Dryden's All for Love; Coda: beyond undeath.

'This is a major new study with wide ranging implications for a variety of early modern interests - in the contested category of the human, in the ecological place of the human body in relation to its environment, in the legacy of Aristotelianism against the advent of Cartesianism, and in the relations between epic and romance.' Gail Paster, Folger Shakespeare Library