Queering the Soul: Sexuality and Self-Construction in Victorian Poetry

我提议的项目将考察维多利亚时期诗歌中的“酷儿灵魂”，调查19世纪中叶一群特定的作家如何通过(非)具体化的灵魂在他们的作品中想象自己之外的自我。通过这样做，他们展示了在19世纪末对性的广泛文化理解出现之前，他们试图理解和阐明非异性恋男性身份的尝试。我将在我的研究中涉及以下中心问题：在19世纪，(脱体的)灵魂的主题是如何被用作概念化同性恋自我的一种手段？与那个时期文学中的其他自我构建方法相比，如何对灵魂提出质疑？最后，同性恋灵魂的使用如何反映了一种新兴的文化转变，即将性理解为人的存在的一个组成部分(在此之前，明确的性身份的概念并不存在)？虽然主要集中在诗歌上，但这项研究也将以跨学科的方法考虑视觉艺术作品，跨越文学、艺术史和性爱历史之间的边界，这将使我们能够在那个时期的创作成果中对同性恋自我探索进行原创和彻底的调查。因此，我将主要考虑的作家和艺术家的选择反映了这些重叠的学科：西蒙·所罗门、约翰·阿丁顿·西蒙兹、但丁·加布里埃尔·罗塞蒂、塞维尔·马尔齐亚斯和阿尔热农·查尔斯·斯温本。该项目将探索这些诗人和艺术家如何想象一个自我分裂的过程--例如一个男性演讲者爱上他自己(离异)的男性灵魂或与他的女性灵魂分离--剖析(非规范的)性别身份对他们自己和整个世界意味着什么。

My proposed project will examine the 'queer soul' in Victorian poetry, investigating the ways in which a particular group of mid-nineteenth-century writers imagine in their works a self outside of themselves through the (dis)embodied soul. In doing so, they exhibit an attempt to comprehend and articulate nonheterosexual male identities prior to the emergence of a widespread cultural understanding of sexuality at the end of the nineteenth century.I will engage with the following central questions in my research:How is the motif of the (dis)embodied soul used as a means of conceptualising a queer self in the nineteenth century?How does 'queering the soul' compare to other methods of self-construction in the literature of the period? And finally, how does the use of the queer soul reflect an emerging cultural shift toward understanding sexuality as an integral part of one's being (where previously the notion of an explicit sexual identity did not exist)? Though primarily concentrating on poetry, this research will also consider works of visual art in an interdisciplinary approach that traverses the boundaries between literature, art history, and the history of sexuality, which will enable an original and thorough investigation of queer self-exploration in the creative output of the period. The selection of writers and artists that I will principally consider is thus reflective of these overlapping disciplines: Simeon Solomon, John Addington Symonds, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Théophile Marzials, and Algernon Charles Swinburne.The project will explore the ways in which these poets and artists imagine a process of self-division - such as that of a male speaker falling in love with his own (dis)embodied male soul or becoming separated from his female soul - to dissect what (non-normative) sexual identity means to themselves and to the world at large.