Edward FitzGerald, Aestheticism, and the Poetry of Nonentity

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This study raises the poet-translator Edward FitzGerald (1809-83) to critical attention by placing him at the vanguard of the Aesthetic movement of the late 19th Century. His Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859) was a bestselling phenomenon, and frequently referenced by Aesthetic/Decadent writers; yet despite this, FitzGerald has been consistently sidelined in studies of Victorian literature, and his impact on the Aesthetic movement remains underexplored. As part of the wider critical revaluation of Aestheticism and Decadence as existential movements driven by an anxiety about the individual's place in society, my study intervenes by showing how these responses were presaged, even transcended by FitzGerald, who stands as a poet uniquely intuitive of the fundamental insubstantiality of identity and selfhood.This reading opens new avenues in translation studies by deriving from FitzGerald a radically non-hierarchical mode of relation between self and other. Discourse on the Rubáiyát's nature as a translation was originally a question of scholarly accuracy; more recently, with the emergence of postcolonial studies, criticism of his translation has taken a more ethical angle, invoking Edward Said's framework of 'Orientalism'. A representative example is Barbara J. Black's On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (2000), wherein she describes FitzGerald as an agent of 'popular imperialism' who domesticated the 'exotic' poems of Khayyám. This is an oversimplistic interpretation that does not account for FitzGerald's personal, anti-colonial sentiments, nor does it reckon with the ways in which his fundamental, self-annihilating apathy challenges the very assumptions that underpin orientalist narratives of intercultural exchange. In this respect, his translations are more expressions of his own poetic instincts. Thus, it is time we move beyond treating him simply as a translator and read him as a major author in his own right. My study will provide the first comprehensive reading of FitzGerald as a whole poetic personality unique within the canon of English poets.A critical revaluation of FitzGerald's apathy, premised on a principle of 'Aestheticist Nonentity', has a radical significance in our identity- and affect-charged contemporary age. If a feature of our age, as observed by critics like Byung-Chul Han (Psychopolitics (2017)) and Hans-Georg Moeller (You and Your Profile (2021)), is the increasing demand to self-optimise and self-expose, emptying interiority to exploit care and desire, then FitzGerald offers a philosophy of living that is truly subversive in its unexploitable disregard for selfhood and the relinquishing of care itself.