Imagining Dark Age Britain. The Birth of Literature from the Darkness of History

该项目考察了一个矛盾的文学历史配置：过去之前的过去，因为它在黑暗时代的概念中成为英国文学的体现。我们的主要论点是，对起源神话中“历史”知识的拼凑性和矛盾性的元诗歌反映导致了文学性的隐含或表演概念的发展。因此，文本对过去知识的局限性被创造性地用来产生一种文学概念，这种概念支持小说作为一种使新话语成为可能的手段。因此，病因学的主要作用不是建立连贯性或提供历史解释，而是在元文学层面上利用过去的模糊性和可变性，从而提高其审美价值。我们将重点关注公元1000年、1400年、1600年和2000年四个历史星座的经典文本。这些星座之间的比较是可能的，因为这些时期文学中出现的主题和传统之间的相似性，以及同时在英国与不列颠群岛其他国家关系的背景下对英国身份的重新谈判，这反映在其他事情中，与过去的接触在此期间，英国不同种族群体之间的关系是不稳定的。

The project examines a paradoxical literary-historical configuration: the past before the past as it becomes manifest in English literature in the concept of the dark ages. Our main thesis is that the meta-poetic reflection of the patchiness and contradictions of the “historical” knowledge transported in myths of origin leads to the development of implicit or performative concepts of literariness. The limitations of the texts’ knowledge of the past is thus used creatively to generate a concept of literature that endorses fiction as a means of making possible new discourses. Hence, aetiology would not primarily serve to establish coherence or offer historical explanations but to utilize the obscurity and alterity of the pre-past on a meta-literary level and thereby to enhance its aesthetic value. We will focus on exemplary texts from four historical constellations, 1000, 1400, 1600 and 2000 CE. Comparison between these constellations is made possible by the similarity between the motifs and traditions emerging in the literature of these times as well as by concurrent re-negotiations of English identity in the context of its relationship to other nations in the British Isles, which is reflected, amongst other things, in an engagement with a pre-past during which the relations between different ethnic groups in Britain had been fluid.