Knowing Edward Lear

拟议的研究将导致一本书题为 * 了解爱德华·李尔 * 牛津大学出版社，以及一系列的合作与英国广播公司，哈佛大学，阿什莫林博物馆，自然历史博物馆，文学的皇家社会，丁尼生协会/林肯郡遗产服务，和其他机构。我将提供第一个全面的李尔王的批判性研究，检查他的废话诗歌一起，他的自然历史画，风景画，游记，信件，和日记。自始至终，我的目标是研究李尔王的成就与广泛的科学，宗教，社会政治和文化背景-背景出现，但也远远超出了，十九世纪。我这本书的研究主线是关于李尔王与不同形式的知识之间的冲突关系，以及他对知识本身如何被构思和估价的迷恋。虽然他有时会哀叹自己处于一种“对自己将要做的事情一无所知”的状态，但这种困境也成为一种伦理立场;在其他地方，他写道，“我们应该不断地知道和感受生活的不确定性”。因此，当李尔王经常寻求确认、清晰、理解时，他的另一部分想要逃避知识，或者感觉到，知识可能是对生活所提供的一系列经验的回避。对他来说，生活在艺术中并通过艺术生活，往往是这两种冲动之间的谈判，也是调和它们的尝试。绘画、音乐和文字创作的行为不再是人工制品，而是一种活动形式，一种培养不同知识意识的空间--一种被艾丽丝·默多克描述为“对偶然事件的细心、真诚的耐心”的知识。这项研究的一个关键特征是将近距离阅读与更广泛的文化探究相结合。对李尔的风格和他的手稿，草稿图片，未发表的信件和日记的档案研究的持续分析将通过深入的历史研究来补充。我的目的是显示，例如，如何李尔家庭的不同意见的背景通知诗人的反应，当代辩论原罪，秋天，和性;如何他早期的开拓性工作，作为一个鸟类绘图员，使他提出搜索问题的新形式的科学和社会分类法;他与癫痫和抑郁症的长期斗争如何使他对新兴的关于身心关系的医学辩论产生兴趣;以及他穿越欧洲、巴尔干半岛和中东的旅行如何帮助他塑造了对帝国政治的探究。这项研究的一个特别原创的方面是我揭示了李尔王作品的巨大范围之间的联系。他的《胡说八道之书》自1846年首次出版以来从未绝版，但那一年对李尔来说在其他方面也很重要：他出版了一本创新的旅行书，他还被维多利亚女王选为她的个人绘画大师。李尔王与那个时代的许多名人都有联系--从查尔斯达尔文到印度总督，从丁尼生到罗斯金以及拉斐尔前派的成员。我的研究通过展示这些关系对他的作品的影响而开辟了新的天地。我的书的最后一部分描绘了李尔王的遗产，在很大程度上是以前的学术界所没有的，从现代主义实验的开始到现在--大致上，从T。S.艾略特告诉斯特拉文斯基，《李尔王》应该和马拉美一起读，约翰·阿什伯里最近声称李尔王是他“一直最喜欢的诗人”。李尔王的成就和影响，我认为，是一个更大的故事的一部分，现代作家如何越来越多地被吸引到严肃喜剧的色调和形式，作为一种反映艺术在现代世界中的地位的方式。

The proposed research will lead to a book entitled *Knowing Edward Lear* for Oxford University Press, as well as to a range of collaborations with the BBC, Harvard University, the Ashmolean Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Royal Society of Literature, The Tennyson Society/Lincolnshire County Heritage Service, and other institutions. I will offer the first comprehensive critical study of Lear, examining his nonsense poetry alongside his natural-history drawings, landscape paintings, travel writings, correspondence, and diaries. Throughout, I aim to study Lear's achievement in relation to a broad range of scientific, religious, socio-political and cultural contexts -- contexts which emerge from within, but which also extend well beyond, the nineteenth century. My book's governing line of enquiry concerns Lear's conflicted relationships with different forms of knowledge, and his fascination with how knowledge itself might be conceived and valued. Although he sometimes laments his being in a state of 'knowingnothingatallaboutwhatoneisgoingtodo-ness', this predicament also becomes an ethical stance; elsewhere he writes that 'we ought to know and feel the uncertainty of life continually'. So while Lear often seeks confirmation, clarity, understanding, another part of him wants to escape from knowledge, or senses that knowingness might be an avoidance of the range of experiences that life has to offer. A life lived in and through art is often, for him, a negotiation between these two impulses, and also an attempt to reconcile them. Acts of pictorial, musical, and verbal composition become not so much artifacts, but rather forms of activity, spaces in which to nurture a different sense of knowledge -- a knowledge Iris Murdoch described as 'an attentive truthful patience with the contingent'.A key feature of the research will be its combination of close reading with broader cultural enquiry. Sustained analysis of Lear's style and archival study of his manuscripts, draft pictures, unpublished letters, and diaries will be complemented by intensive historical research. I aim to show, for example, how the Lear family's dissenting background informed the poet's responses to contemporary debates about Original Sin, the Fall, and sexuality; how his early pioneering work as an ornithological draughtsman led him to ask searching questions about new forms of scientific and social taxonomy; how his chronic struggle with epilepsy and depression informed his interest in emerging medical debates about relations between mind and body; and how his travels across Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East helped to shape his enquiries into the politics of empire. One particularly original aspect of the research is my revealing of connections across the tremendous range of Lear's work. His 'Book of Nonsense' has never been out of print since it was first published in 1846, but that year was significant for Lear in other ways too: he published an innovative travel book, and he was also chosen by Queen Victoria to be her personal drawing master. Lear was in touch with many luminaries of the age -- from Charles Darwin to the Viceroy of India, from Tennyson to Ruskin and the members of Pre-Raphaelite circle. My research breaks new ground by showing the effect these relationships had on his work.My book's final section maps Lear's legacy, largely uncharted in previous scholarship, from the beginnings of the modernist experiment to the present moment -- roughly, from T. S. Eliot's telling Stravinsky that Lear should be read alongside Mallarmé, to John Ashbery's recent claim that Lear is his 'all-time favourite poet'. Lear's achievement and influence, I argue, is part of a larger story about how modern writers have been increasingly drawn to serio-comic tones and forms as a way of reflecting upon the place of art in the modern world.