Both Robert Ford Campany's and Lynn A. Struve's recent monographs center on dreams in China. The two works underscore the import of integrating dreams into a mainstream understanding of all dimensions of historical life. Neither work is meant to be read as a survey of dreams or dream narratives; rather, both offer a compelling and complicated picture of how dreams were understood in a particular time period. Because of the nature of the topic of dreams, both works are introspective and self-reflective.
The similarities end there. Apart from the obvious difference of temporal boundaries, Campany in The Chinese Dreamscape writes from the perspective of a philosopher, while Struve in The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World writes from the perspective of an intellectual or cultural historian. While Campany focuses on a series of dream-text-inspired paradigms to understand the place of dreams in the Chinese worldview, Struve uses...
