'Accidents of Size': The Scalar Poetics of Coleridge, Blake, and Clare

我的研究将阐明尺度的概念在柯勒律治、布莱克和克莱尔的诗学中是如何运作的。具体地说，我将试图准确地阐明浪漫时代的科学、技术和自然历史的发展是如何为诗人提供美学策略和感知模式的基础的，这些审美策略和感知模式在欧洲启蒙思想的工具理性主义流派中移动，但却深深抵制。我认为，每个诗人都以相对独立的方式发展了一种独特的形象和一种使用尺度的方式，这种方式打破了单一视角的概念，而是推进了多种有利位置，从而创造了一种超越那些分隔他们文学实践的相同鸿沟的手段。强调想象力在历史上是偶然的，论文将绘制诗人沉浸的历史条件与他们写作的生产实践之间的关系。特别是，我将强调他们对尺度的思考是如何通过特定的物体和视角成为可能的，比如柯勒律治的《为我的生命辩护》（1800）中的微观镜头，或者克莱尔的《昆虫世界》（1827-35）中的昆虫学视野。我相信，以这种方式探索浪漫的标量话语将有助于历史地定位我们当前关于人类尺度问题的紧迫性。

My research will elucidate how the notion of scale operates in the poetics of Coleridge, Blake, and Clare. Specifically, Iwill seek to articulate precisely how Romantic-era developments in science, technology, and natural history provided thepoets in question with the basis of an aesthetic strategy and a perceptual mode which moved within, yet was deeplyresistant to, instrumental-rationalist strains of European Enlightenment thought. Working across class and geographicaldivisions, I argue that each poet developed, with relative independence, a peculiar figuration and a way of using scalethat destabilises the notion of singular perspective, advancing instead a multiplicity of vantage points, and therebycreating a means of transcending those same divides which separated their literary practices. Emphasising the way inwhich the imagination is historically contingent, the dissertation will chart the relationship between the historicalconditions in which the poets were immersed, and the productive practices by which they wrote. In particular, I will stressthe ways in which their thinking-through of scale was made possible by particular objects and perspectives, such as themicroscopic lens in Coleridge's 'Apologia Pro Vita Sua' (1800), or the entomological field of vision in Clare's 'The InsectWorld' (1827-35). Exploring Romantic scalar discourse in this way will help, I believe, to historically situate our currentexigencies concerning the question of human scale.