Provincialism: Literature and the Cultural Politics of Middleness in Nineteenth Century Britain

这个项目将新的注意力引向一个地方和社会身份的标志，从定义上讲，它总是过时的：地方主义。地方主义是指远离强大的大都市，但仍在其统治之下的一种地方、风格和存在方式。在十九世纪的英国，由于历史原因，这个词获得了一系列新的贬义联想。从表示与其他三个国家或移民文化有关的口音或风格，它越来越多地与内向、自满、平庸的英国人状态联系在一起。该项目将这些地方主义的负面联想与同时兴起的一种非常受欢迎的小说类型进行了对比：英国地方生活的小说，如盖斯凯尔的《克兰福德》、安东尼·特罗洛普的《巴切斯特》和乔治·艾略特的《米德尔马契》。我的目标是探索这种经久不衰的流行类型——乡土小说——作为一种思考乡土主义的方式，作为一种地方感、一种风格和一种世界观。该项目建立在强调维多利亚省小说的全球网络性质的重要学术基础上，认为这些作品的形式方面构建了一种偏离中心的“中等”观念。我认为，现实主义乡土小说中的这种中等审美，为中产阶级的新社会身份创造了一种朴实、虚构的基础，而中产阶级在当时的19世纪文化和政治中仍未得到充分体现。重新审视乡土小说及其与英语乡土主义思想的纠缠是及时的，原因有以下几点。首先，这种体裁在20世纪初英国文学研究作为一门学科的出现中发挥了重要作用，该项目将告诉我们更多关于英国化思想与英语批评史之间的关系。在一个关于正典，多样性和阶级的新辩论的时代。乡土小说的审美价值，如艾略特的作品，是世界主义批评家、布卢姆斯伯里现代主义者和受F.R.里维斯启发的人之间争论的一个闪点。正如后殖民时期学者的重要工作所表明的那样，英国文学学科是在边缘形成的，而不是在大英帝国的大都市中心形成的。该项目将强调“大地方主义”的帝国维度，以及大都市以外地方小说的接受和流通。其次，19世纪英国文化批评中同时兴起的地方小说和对地方主义的贬低代表了将当前的反大都会影响和批评历史化的被忽视的来源，这通常伴随着关于消失或“被挤压”的中产阶级的讨论。一系列的项目活动致力于探索地方主义的意义，为作家和读者基于不同地区的西米德兰兹郡现在。这些项目活动将与2019年乔治·艾略特诞辰200周年相吻合，艾略特在纽尼顿和考文垂居住了30年，但她在伦敦自我流放期间创作了她的小说。PI将与驻场作家和写作西米德兰兹作家发展机构合作，在围绕写作、地方和非都市身份的创造性批判性对话中汲取项目材料。

This project directs fresh attention to a marker of place and of social identity that is always, by definition, out of fashion: provincialism. Provincialism denotes a place, style, and mode of existence that is away from, but still under the dominion of, a powerful metropolis. Over the course of the nineteenth century in England, for historical reasons this study will examine, the term gained a fresh host of depreciative associations. From indicating an accent or style associated with one of the other three nations of the Union or settler cultures, it became increasingly associated with an inward-looking, complacent, mediocre state of Englishness. The project contrasts these negative associations of provincialism with the simultaneous rise of an enormously popular type of novel: fictions of English provincial life such as Gaskell's Cranford, Anthony Trollope's Barchester novels and George Eliot's Middlemarch. I aim to explore what this enduringly popular genre - provincial fiction - has to offer as a means of thinking about provincialism as a sense of place, a style, and a world-view. Building on important recent scholarship that emphasizes the global networked nature of Victorian provincial fiction, the project contends that the formal aspects of those works construct an idea of off-centre 'middleness'. This aesthetic of middleness in realist provincial fiction, I suggest, invents a homely, fictive grounding for the new social identity of the middle class, still under-represented in nineteenth-century culture and politics at the time.Reconsidering provincial fiction and its intertwining with the idea of English provincialism is timely for several reasons. First, the genre played an important role in the emergence of the study of English literature as a discipline from the early twentieth century and the project will tell us more about the relation between ideas of Englishness and the critical history of Eng. Lit. at a time of fresh debates about canonicity, diversity, and class. The aesthetic value of provincial fiction, such as work by Eliot, was a flash point in debates between cosmopolitan critics, Bloomsbury modernists, and those inspired by F.R. Leavis. As significant work by post-colonial scholars has suggested, the discipline of English literature was one made at the margins, rather than the metropolitan centre of Imperial Britain. The project will emphasis the imperial dimension of 'Provincialism at Large' and the reception and circulation of provincial fiction outside the metropolis.Second, the simultaneous rise of provincial fiction and disparagement of provincialism in English cultural criticism during the nineteenth century represents neglected source for historicising present anti-metropolitan affect and critique, which is often accompanied by talk of vanishing or 'squeezed' middles. A strand of project activity is devoted to exploring the meanings of provincialism for writers and readers based across the diverse region of the West Midlands now. These project activities will coincide with the 2019 bicentenary of George Eliot, resident of Nuneaton and Coventry for her first 30 years, but who wrote her fiction in self-imposed exile in London. The PI will work with a Writer in Residence and the Writing West Midlands writer development agency to draw on project materials in a creative-critical dialogue around writing, locality, and non-metropolitan identities now.