The ecocritical unconscious: Early modern sleep as "go-between"

The author claims that although the matter of sleep (not to mention early modern representations of it) seems a very unlikely topic for ecocriticism, the topic does in fact connect with ecocriticism in several important ways. Sleep raises questions about the boundaries of "the human" and functions as a sort of "go-between" in the early modern imagination. It raises questions about what the early moderns imagined as "natural" daily patterns and about the imagined consequences for going against such patterns. Moreover, since musings on sleep almost uniformly share inherent antipathies toward diurnal wakefulness, conceptualizations of darkness as sites of evil that are associated with the natural world have obvious and compelling implications to questions about race. Finally, the author maintains that a strategic thematic ecocriticism has some functional value, since it can help lay conceptual foundations that might otherwise be overlooked-as has certainly been the case with sleep and its relations to ecocriticism.