Dream and Literary Creation in Women's Writings in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Description

This edited collection deals with dream as a literary trope and as a source of creativity in women's writings. It gathers essays spanning a time period from the end of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, with a strong focus on the Romantic period and particularly on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in which dreams are at the heart of the writing process but also constitute the diegetic substance of the narrative. The contributions re-examine the oneiric facets of the novel and develop fresh perspectives on dreams and dreaming in Mary Shelley's fiction and on other female authors (Anne Finch, Ann Radcliffe, Emily and Charlotte Bronte and a few others), re-appraising the textuality of dreams and their link to women's creativity and creation as a whole.

Isabelle Hervouet is Senior Lecturer in British literature at Universite Clermont-Auvergne in Clermont-Ferrand. Her research focuses on the Gothic novel in Britain, Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte. Anne Rouhette is Senior Lecturer in British literature at Universite Clermont-Auvergne in Clermont-Ferrand. Her research focuses on women's writings in Britain (18th-19th centuries).

"This superb collection of interdisciplinary work on dreams in 18th and 19th century literature is essential reading for students of the period. As a student and teacher of works in the long nineteenth century, I encountered fresh approaches to works I thought I knew well, such as Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, and I especially appreciate that the collection puts the dreams of 18th and 19th century dreaming into a longer framework that includes scientific approaches to dreams as well as other literary works that include Pilgrim's Progress and more recent writers: Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Sayers, Irish Murdoch, and Margaret Drabble." - Carol A. Senf, Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, US "Going beyond an exclusive focus on the gothic, this collection of essays teases out the reader's 'hermeneutic task' in famous and lesser-known literary texts, providing thought-provoking views of narrative strategies constructed around dreams, be they 'real' or fictional, from a period not yet under the spell of Freud and Jung."-Professor Anne Bandry-Scubbi, University of Strasbourg, France. "Dream in women's writings ? A brilliant idea. This original gendered investigation of literary creativity is based on a wide corpus, from Frances Burney and Mary Shelley to Emily Bronte. The book also includes a fine postscript by Margaret Ann Doody" - Jean Vivies, Professor of British literature, Aix-Marseille University, France