Bernard Dieterle Ordre des livres

The essays in this volume trace the development of dream cultures through time both in synchronic and diachronic case studies. The scope of the contributions ranges geographically from New Zealand and China, over India, Mesopotamia, and Africa, to diverse European countries, and historically from Antiquity to the present. The volume covers various media and disciplines, such as literature, historiography, philosophy, painting, film, and TV series, and includes studies on Addison, Ammianus Marcellinus, Bachmann, Bembo, Bhasa, Blake, Buñuel, Cáo Xueqín, Chaucer, Dalí, De Quincey, Deren, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, van den Eeckhout, Eich, Flaubert, Grace-Smith, E. W. Happel, Herodotus, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Joyce, Kalidasa, Keller, Kleinschroth, Kouka, Kourouma, Lamkos, Langfus, Levi, Lessing, M. G. Lewis, C. F. Meyer, Michaux, Moreau de Tours, Nerval, Nietzsche, Petrarch, Plato, Subandhu, Tacitus, Tang Xianzu, Tiepolo, Tolstoy, Wieland, and others.

An important part of age-old human attempts to cope with the otherness of the dream is the so-called ‘dream-discourse’, which tries to explain the origin of dreams, their bizarre appearance, their functions, and the methods for detecting the information which they may contain. This collection of essays will reconstruct dream-discourses from many cultures and time periods, together with the dream knowledge of important literary authors. The scope of the contributions ranges geographically from India, China, and Korea to diverse European countries and historically from Antiquity to the present.

Writing a factual or fictional dream is a difficult task as its ›otherness‹ will challenge all of our accustomed modes of narration. So the existence of established cultural and textual patterns is a welcome help. This collection of essays describes these patterns, their historical and individual modifications and their relation to the dream-discourse in selected case studies and general considerations. The scope of the contributions ranges geographically from the Near East and Europe to Northern America, Africa, China and Japan and historically from Antiquity to the present, including studies on the Old Testament, the Babylonian Talmud, Dante, Tang Xianzu, La Fontaine, Cáo Xu? eqín, Bräker, Jean Paul, Manzoni, Heine, Keller, Freud, S¯oseki, Schnitzler, McCay, Éluard, Bâ, Sassine, Fantouré, Kipphardt, Bächler, Sarris, Gaiman and others.