'Accidents of Size': The Scalar Poetics of Coleridge, Blake, and Clare

我的研究将阐明柯勒律治、布莱克和克莱尔的诗学中尺度的概念是如何运作的。具体地说，我将试图准确地阐明浪漫主义时代在科学、技术和自然历史方面的发展是如何为我们所讨论的诗人提供了一种审美策略和一种感性模式的基础的，这种模式在欧洲启蒙思想的工具理性主义倾向中移动，但又深深地抵制。跨越阶级和地理划分，我认为，每个诗人发展，相对独立，一个特殊的形象和使用的方式不稳定的单一视角的概念规模，推进，而不是多个Vantage位置，从而创造了一种手段，超越这些相同的分歧分开他们的文学实践。本文强调想象力是历史偶然的，将描绘诗人所处的历史环境与他们写作的生产实践之间的关系。特别是，我将强调的方式，他们的思想，通过规模是可能的特定对象和观点，如显微镜透镜在柯勒律治的'道歉Pro Vita Sua'（1800年），或昆虫学视野中的克莱尔的'昆虫世界'（1827-35年）。我相信，以这种方式探索浪漫主义的等级话语，将有助于从历史上解决我们当前对人类等级问题的迫切要求。

My research will elucidate how the notion of scale operates in the poetics of Coleridge, Blake, and Clare. Specifically, Iwill seek to articulate precisely how Romantic-era developments in science, technology, and natural history provided thepoets in question with the basis of an aesthetic strategy and a perceptual mode which moved within, yet was deeplyresistant to, instrumental-rationalist strains of European Enlightenment thought. Working across class and geographicaldivisions, I argue that each poet developed, with relative independence, a peculiar figuration and a way of using scalethat destabilises the notion of singular perspective, advancing instead a multiplicity of vantage points, and therebycreating a means of transcending those same divides which separated their literary practices. Emphasising the way inwhich the imagination is historically contingent, the dissertation will chart the relationship between the historicalconditions in which the poets were immersed, and the productive practices by which they wrote. In particular, I will stressthe ways in which their thinking-through of scale was made possible by particular objects and perspectives, such as themicroscopic lens in Coleridge's 'Apologia Pro Vita Sua' (1800), or the entomological field of vision in Clare's 'The InsectWorld' (1827-35). Exploring Romantic scalar discourse in this way will help, I believe, to historically situate our currentexigencies concerning the question of human scale.