The Romantic Dream

Download or read book The Romantic Dream written by Douglas B. Wilson and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.