The Love of Strangers: Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle

这项研究将导致一本名为《陌生人的爱》的书：文学世界主义在英语“世纪末”，以及两个研讨会和一个国际会议，旨在探讨世界主义内外的特定历史背景的1890s.Throughout，我的目的是表明，知道如何世界主义是理解在1890年代可以提高我们的理解，并参与，关于国家认同和全球化的辩论，这是我们今天的潮流。世界主义（Cosmopolitanism）源自古希腊语，意为“世界公民”（world citizenship），它为民族主义意识形态提供了一种激进的替代方案，要求个人将自己想象为超越国家和语言界限的全球社区的一部分。19世纪90年代见证了一场关于世界主义的广泛的公共辩论：在英国和整个欧洲，这一时期出现了跨国合作和普遍主义的意识形态之间的冲突，部分是由现代交通和通信技术推动的，民族主义的兴起将在第一次世界大战中达到高潮。我的研究将表明，19世纪90年代围绕世界主义的争论，到目前为止基本上是未知的，是对这十年的文学文化的塑造影响，这十年一直被认为是文学史上的一个关键转折点。文学世界主义的倡导者质疑文学、民族身份和民族语言之间所谓的根本联系：他们故意在作品中寻找陌生和外国的东西，以创造新的阅读和写作方式，这种方式跨越了语言和文学流派之间的界限，也跨越了不同民族之间的界限。这些做法被世界主义的批评者谴责为政治和道德上的怀疑，他们强调文学对地方社区和国家的责任。我的目的是表明，对世界主义辩论的细致入微和历史准确的理解改变了我们对世纪末文学文化的理解，使我们能够超越颓废，印象主义和象征主义的类别，这些类别主导了批评传统。为了做到这一点，我将重点放在那些拥抱世界主义理想，但同时又谨慎地界定围绕这一理想的争议中的利害关系的作家身上，因此，我的专著将分为五章，分别考察奥斯卡·王尔德、乔治·埃杰顿（玛丽·邓恩·布莱特）、维达（玛丽亚·路易斯·拉米）、约翰·阿丁顿·西蒙兹和哈夫洛克·埃利斯以及亨利·詹姆斯。引言主要以期刊上的文章为基础，旨在为19世纪90年代的读者重建“世界主义”一词的含义和联想，梳理其文学含义;而结论将把19世纪90年代关于世界主义的争论与我们目前关于全球/地方身份的讨论联系起来。我的个案研究已经选择，以打破规范和边缘作家，“高”和流行文学，男性和女性作者之间的现有区别。我将说明，关于世界主义的辩论涉及到具有截然不同的美学和政治议程的作者和读者。每一章都借鉴了出版和档案材料，以拼凑文学网络，将这一时期的英语作品与一系列法语，斯堪的纳维亚，意大利和德国的来源联系起来。我的方法的一个特别原始的方面是强调性别：我认为，在政治和社会上被边缘化的群体，如妇女和同性恋男子被吸引到世界主义的理想作为一个乌托邦的道路，以艺术和个人自由;相反，世界主义，其攻击传统的国家身份模式，产生了新的方式来理解身体，性别和性身份。

The proposed research will lead to a book entitled The Love of Strangers: Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English 'Fin de Siècle', as well as to two workshops and an international conference designed to explore cosmopolitanism within and beyond the specific historical context of the 1890s.Throughout, I aim to show that knowing how cosmopolitanism was understood in the 1890s can enhance our understanding of, and participation in, the debates around national identity and globalisation that are current in our own day. Cosmopolitanism, derived from the ancient Greek for 'world citizenship', offers a radical alternative to the ideology of nationalism, asking individuals to imagine themselves as part of a global community that goes beyond national and linguistic boundaries. The 1890s witnessed a widespread public debate on cosmopolitanism: in Britain and throughout Europe, this period saw a clash between ideologies of trans-national cooperation and universalism, partly promoted by modern transport and communication technologies, and the rising nationalism that would culminate in the First World War. My research will show that the 1890s controversy around cosmopolitanism, largely uncharted so far, is a shaping influence on the literary culture of this decade which has long been recognised as a crucial turning point in literary history. Promoters of literary cosmopolitanism questioned the supposedly fundamental link between literature, national identity, and national language: they deliberately sought out the strange and foreign in their works in order to create new ways of reading and writing that crossed boundaries between languages and literary genres as much as between different nations. These practices were denounced as politically and morally suspect by the detractors of cosmopolitanism, who stressed the responsibilities of literature towards local communities and the nation. I aim to show that a nuanced and historically-accurate understanding of the debate on cosmopolitanism transforms our understanding of the literary culture of the fin de siècle, allowing us to move beyond the categories of decadence, impressionism, and symbolism that have dominated the critical tradition. In order to do so, I concentrate on authors who embrace the cosmopolitan ideal but are also careful to define what is at stake in the controversy surrounding it. My monograph will therefore be divided into five chapters that examine, respectively: Oscar Wilde; George Egerton (Mary Dunne Bright); Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé); John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis; and Henry James. Drawing mainly on articles in the periodical press, the introduction will aim to reconstruct the meaning and associations of the term 'cosmopolitanism' for readers in the 1890s, teasing out its literary implications; while the conclusion will relate the 1890s debate on cosmopolitanism to our current discussion about global/local identities. My case studies have been chosen in order to break down existing distinctions between canonical and marginal writers, 'high' and popular literature, male and female authorship. I will show that the debate on cosmopolitanism involved authors and readerships with very different aesthetic and political agendas. Each chapter draws both on published and archival material in order to piece together literary networks that connect English works from this period with a range of French, Scandinavian, Italian, and German sources. A particularly original aspect of my approach is the emphasis on gender: I argue that politically and socially marginalised groups such as women and homosexual men were drawn to the cosmopolitan ideal as a utopian path towards artistic and personal freedom; and conversely, that cosmopolitanism, with its attack on traditional models of national identity, generated new ways of understanding the body, gender, and sexual identities.