Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World, Paperback / softback Book

The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World Paperback / softback

Paperback / softback

Out of stock

Description

From the mid-sixteenth through the end of the seventeenth century, Chinese intellectuals attended more to dreams and dreaming-and in a wider array of genres-than in any other period of Chinese history.

Taking the approach of cultural history, this ambitious yet accessible work aims both to describe the most salient aspects of this "dream arc" and to explain its trajectory in time through the writings, arts, and practices of well-known thinkers, religionists, litterateurs, memoirists, painters, doctors, and political figures of late Ming and early Qing times. The volume's encompassing thesis asserts that certain associations of dreaming, grounded in the neurophysiology of the human brain at sleep-such as subjectivity, irrationality, the unbidden, lack of control, emotionality, spontaneity, the imaginal, and memory-when especially heightened by historical and cultural developments, are likely to pique interest in dreaming and generate florescences of dream-expression among intellectuals.

The work thus makes a contribution to the history of how people have understood human consciousness in various times and cultures. The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World is the most substantial work in any language on the historicity of Chinese dream culture.

Within Chinese studies, it will appeal to those with backgrounds in literature, religion, philosophy, political history, and the visual arts.

It will also be welcomed by readers interested in comparative dream cultures, the history of consciousness, and neurohistory.

Information

Other Formats

£31.95

Out of stock
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information