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

这项研究计划将出版一本名为《陌生人的爱：英语“Fin de si<e:1>”中的文学世界主义》的书，并将举办两个研讨会和一次国际会议，旨在探讨19世纪90年代特定历史背景下的世界主义。在整个过程中，我的目的是表明，了解19世纪90年代世界主义是如何被理解的，可以增强我们对当今围绕国家认同和全球化的辩论的理解和参与。世界主义源于古希腊的“世界公民”，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成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公开辩论：在英国和整个欧洲，这一时期见证了跨国合作和普遍主义的意识形态之间的冲突，现代交通和通信技术在一定程度上推动了这一意识形态，而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，迄今为止在很大程度上是未知的，对这十年的文学文化产生了重大影响，而这十年一直被认为是文学史上的一个关键转折点。文学世界主义的推动者质疑文学、民族认同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来的东西，以创造新的阅读和写作方式，跨越语言和文学类型之间的界限，以及不同国家之间的界限。世界主义的批评者谴责这些做法在政治上和道德上都是可疑的，他们强调文学对当地社区和国家的责任。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，改变了我们对最后的文学文化的理解，使我们超越了主导批评传统的颓废主义、印象派和象征主义的范畴。为了做到这一点，我把注意力集中在那些拥抱世界主义理想，但也小心地定义围绕它的争议中的利害关系的作者身上。因此，我的专著将分为五个章节，分别考察：奥斯卡·王尔德；乔治·埃格顿（玛丽·邓恩·布赖特饰）；乌伊达（玛丽亚·路易斯·拉姆瑟）；约翰·艾丁顿·西蒙兹和哈夫洛克·埃利斯；还有亨利·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”一词的含义和联系，梳理出它的文学含义；而结论将把19世纪90年代关于世界主义的辩论与我们当前关于全球/地方身份的讨论联系起来。选择我的案例研究是为了打破权威作家和边缘作家、“高级”文学和通俗文学、男性和女性作者之间的现有区别。我将表明，关于世界主义的辩论涉及具有非常不同的审美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，以便拼凑文学网络，将这一时期的英语作品与一系列法语、斯堪的纳维亚语、意大利语和德语来源联系起来。我的方法的一个特别新颖的方面是对性别的强调：我认为，政治和社会边缘化群体，如女性和同性恋男性，被世界主义理想所吸引，作为通往艺术和个人自由的乌托邦之路；相反，世界主义对传统的国家认同模式的攻击，产生了理解身体、性别和性认同的新方式。

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.