Imagining Dark Age Britain. The Birth of Literature from the Darkness of History

该项目考察了一种自相矛盾的文学-历史配置：在黑暗时代的概念中，过去在英国文学中变得明显。我们的主要论点是，对起源神话中所传递的“历史”知识的片段性和矛盾性的元诗学反映导致了隐含的或表现的文学性概念的发展。因此，文本对过去知识的局限性被创造性地用来产生一种文学概念，支持小说作为一种可能的新话语的手段。因此，病因学不会主要服务于建立连贯性或提供历史解释，而是在元文学水平上利用过去的晦涩和交替，从而增强其美学价值。我们将重点介绍公元1000、1400、1600和2000年四个历史星座的典范文本。这些星座之间的比较是可能的，因为在这些时代的文学中出现的主题和传统之间的相似性，以及在不列颠群岛与其他国家的关系的背景下同时重新谈判英国的身份，这除其他外，反映在与英国不同种族之间的关系一直不稳定的过去的接触中。

The project examines a paradoxical literary-historical configuration: the past before the past as it becomes manifest in English literature in the concept of the dark ages. Our main thesis is that the meta-poetic reflection of the patchiness and contradictions of the “historical” knowledge transported in myths of origin leads to the development of implicit or performative concepts of literariness. The limitations of the texts’ knowledge of the past is thus used creatively to generate a concept of literature that endorses fiction as a means of making possible new discourses. Hence, aetiology would not primarily serve to establish coherence or offer historical explanations but to utilize the obscurity and alterity of the pre-past on a meta-literary level and thereby to enhance its aesthetic value. We will focus on exemplary texts from four historical constellations, 1000, 1400, 1600 and 2000 CE. Comparison between these constellations is made possible by the similarity between the motifs and traditions emerging in the literature of these times as well as by concurrent re-negotiations of English identity in the context of its relationship to other nations in the British Isles, which is reflected, amongst other things, in an engagement with a pre-past during which the relations between different ethnic groups in Britain had been fluid.