Emily Dickinson and Victorian Poetry

艾米莉·狄金森和维多利亚诗歌

• 批准号: AH/J005347/1
• 负责人: Paraic Finnerty
• 金额: $ 3.63万
• 依托单位: University of Portsmouth
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Fellowship
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2013 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FJ005347%2F1
• 关键词: Emily; Dickinson; Victorian; Poetry

The American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) is best known for her elliptical, enigmatic and highly original poems and her extreme reclusiveness, culminating in her confinement in her father's house for the last twenty years of her life. It is only very recently that Dickinson scholarship has challenged this popular conception by demonstrating her innovative and daring interventions in the historical, social, cultural and literary world from which she apparently secluded herself. My project offers a new and original advancement on this work by examining her often provocative responses to her favourite British poets: the Brontës, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson and George Eliot. It begins by combining analysis of Dickinson's epistolary references to these poets and the marginalia in her editions of their works with an exploration of the predominant ways in which these poets were read in nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture. Having reconstructed aspects of the cultural milieu in which Dickinson read these poets, the project then compares Dickinson's poems with those of her contemporaries as a means of delineating shared and common features of nineteenth-century Anglo-American poetry. For example, it examines similar recurring topics, tropes and image-clusters in their works and the comparable ways ideas about the function of poetry and the role of the poet shaped their authorial identities. By positioning Dickinson's work within this context, she emerges as a writer who did not make distinctions between British and American writers, nor promote American cultural nationalism as did her contemporaries, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. Yet even these writers, like Dickinson, engaged with and admired the works of British poets, and, accordingly, Dickinson's attitude is more representative than it at first appears, deriving as it does from a transatlantic nineteenth-century culture in which writers were shared between ever-increasing Anglo-American communities of readers. This research counters approaches to nineteenth-century literature that ignore this transatlantic context and instead emphasise a cultural opposition between Britain and America, which is emergent in this period but has not yet become an overpowering reality.

美国诗人艾米莉·狄金森（1830-1886）以其隐晦、神秘和极具原创性的诗歌和极度的隐居而闻名，她在父亲家中度过了生命的最后二十年。直到最近，狄金森学者才通过展示她对历史、社会、文化和文学世界的创新和大胆的干预来挑战这种流行的观念，而她显然是与世隔绝的。我的项目通过研究她对她最喜欢的英国诗人（Brontës、伊丽莎白·巴雷特·勃朗宁、罗伯特·勃朗宁、阿尔弗雷德·丁尼生勋爵和乔治·艾略特）经常做出的挑衅回应，为她的作品提供了一个新的、原创的进展。它首先结合了狄金森对这些诗人的书信参考和她在他们作品的版本中的旁注的分析，并探索了这些诗人在19世纪英美文化中的主要阅读方式。在重建了狄金森阅读这些诗人的文化环境之后，该项目将狄金森的诗歌与她同时代的诗歌进行了比较，以此来描绘19世纪英美诗歌的共同特征。例如，它研究了他们作品中类似的反复出现的主题、比喻和意象群，以及关于诗歌功能和诗人角色的类似方式塑造了他们的作者身份。通过将狄金森的作品置于这种背景下，她成为了一位没有区分英美作家的作家，也没有像同时代的拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生、沃尔特·惠特曼和赫尔曼·梅尔维尔那样推动美国文化民族主义的作家。然而，即使是这些作家，比如狄金森，也喜欢并欣赏英国诗人的作品，因此，狄金森的态度比最初看起来更有代表性，因为它来自于十九世纪的跨大西洋文化，在这种文化中，作家在不断增加的英美读者群体之间共享。这项研究反驳了那些忽视跨大西洋背景的19世纪文学研究方法，而是强调英美之间的文化对立，这种对立在这一时期出现，但尚未成为压倒性的现实。