Middleness: Provincial Fiction and the Aesthetics of Dull Life
Middleness: Provincial Fiction and the Aesthetics of Dull Life
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中间性：乡土小说与沉闷生活的美学
DOI：
10.1093/jvcult/vcad029
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发表时间：
2023
影响因子：
0.3
通讯作者：
Livesey R
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Livesey R
本文认为，19世纪60年代英国乡土小说的兴起，引发了一种对日常歧视的激进的民主化审美。这篇文章通过伊丽莎白·盖斯凯尔和乔治·艾略特作品中的例子表明，乡土小说体现了一种被称为“中等”的美学：一种阅读方式，在这种阅读方式中，社会、文化和地理的中等成为仔细评估判断的对象。本文考察了这种形式的美学启示与Sianne Ngai对“有趣”范畴的探索有关。它将这种关注普通和沉闷的实践与马修·阿诺德同时代对地方主义的批评形成对比，地方主义是英国文化走向民主的核心的主要弱点。如果说阿诺德在他的评论文章中的使命是建立一种全球品味标准——基于对“世界上最好的思想和已知的东西”的判断的集体协议——那么乡土小说影响了另一种审美群体：一个重视普通和沉闷的群体。
This article argues that the rise of the provincial novel in Britain during the 1860s set loose a radically democratizing aesthetic of everyday discriminations. The article suggests – through examples from the works of Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot – that provincial fiction embodies an aesthetics of what is termed ‘middleness’: a means of reading in which the social, cultural and geographical middle became an object of careful evaluative judgment. The article examines the aesthetic affordances of this form in relation to Sianne Ngai’s exploration of the category of the ‘interesting’. It places this practice of attention to the common and the dull in contrast to Matthew Arnold’s contemporaneous critique of provincialism as the chief weakness at the heart of English culture as it moved towards democracy. If Arnold’s mission in his critical essays was to establish a global standard of taste – collective agreement grounded in the judgement of what was ‘the best that has been thought and known in the world’ – then provincial fiction effected another sort of aesthetic community: one that valued the common and the dull.