Conceptions of Dreaming from Homer to 1800

Conceptions of Dreaming from Homer to 1800 traces the history of ideas about dreaming during the period when the admonitory dream was the main focus of learned interest—from the Homeric epics through the Renaissance—and the period when it began to become a secondary focus—the eighteenth century. The book also considers the two most important dream theorists at the turn of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud and Sante de Sanctis. While Freud is concerned with questions of what a dream means and how to interpret it, de Sanctis offers a synthesis of nineteenth-century research into what a dream is and represents the Enlightenment transition from particular facts to general laws.

About the Author

G. W. Pigman III is professor of English at the California Institute of Technology, USA. He is the author of Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (1985), editor of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (2000), and editor and translator of Giovanni Gioviano Pontano’s The Virtues and Vices of Speech (forthcoming).