1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910795840703321

Autore

Parris Benjamin <1977->

Titolo

Vital strife : sleep, insomnia, and the early modern ethics of care / / Benjamin Parris [[electronic resource]]

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Ithaca : , : Cornell University Press, , 2022

ISBN

1-5017-6452-7

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (301 pages)

Collana

Cornell scholarship online

Disciplina

809.933561

Soggetti

Literature, Modern - 15th and 16th centuries - History and criticism

Literature, Modern - 17th century - History and criticism

Sleep in literature

Sleep - Philosophy

Literature

Literature: history & criticism

Philosophy of mind

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Also issued in print: 2022.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Heavy with care: Sleep and ethical life from ancient Greece to early modern England -- Hercules asleep: Stoic oikeiôsis in Jasper Heywood's Hercules Furens -- "The body is with the king, but the king Is not with the body": Sovereign sleep in the tragedies of Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear -- "Watching to banish care": sleep and insomnia in The Faerie Queene -- "Inhabit lax": Insomniac vare and the vital virtue of sleep in Paradise Lost -- Coda: A vital rationality.

Sommario/riassunto

The plays, poems, and philosophical essays at the heart of this book - by Jasper Heywood, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish - explore the unconscious motions of corporeal life and the drowsy forms of sentience at the boundaries of human thought and intentionality. The book shows how these writers, although trained under the Renaissance humanist paradigm of attentive care, begin to dissolve the humanist coupling of virtue with vigilance by giving credence to the vital power of sleep.