Cosmopolitan Spiritualities: Decadence and the Varieties of Spiritual Form, 1876-1900

这篇论文第一次持续地探讨了堕落派作家对东西方跨国精神交流所欠下的深刻而基本上未被承认的债务。我的研究主要集中在奥斯卡·王尔德的作品上，他对从道教到神智学和天主教的各种精神传统的不偏不倚的参与尚未得到充分的探索。我认为王尔德对这些不同传统的仪式实践的浓厚兴趣对他同样不拘一格地使用文学形式产生了重大影响，从格言到小说再到散文诗。我没有像以前的学者那样强调王尔德作品的精神传统的中心地位，而是提出了“精神世界主义”模型，作为理解19世纪后期出现的跨国交流的更广泛背景的关键。我的研究通过关注非西方精神传统对王尔德思想和艺术实践的深刻影响，使颓废主义作为一个以古典为中心的运动的传统观念复杂化。根据情感理论的最新发展，本文还提出了仪式和文学形式之间的新的相似之处。就像精神仪式一样，不同的文学形式在帮助培养读者、观众和参与者的道德上有用的情感状态方面可能发挥什么作用？

This thesis offers the first sustained exploration of the profound, and largely unacknowledged, debt which Decadent writers owed to transnational spiritual exchanges between East and West. My research focuses most closely on the work of Oscar Wilde, whose eclectic engagement with spiritual traditions ranging from Taoism to Theosophy and Catholicism has yet to be adequately explored. I argue that Wilde's deep interest in ritual practices across these varied traditions exerted a major influence on his equally eclectic use of literary forms, from aphorism to novel to prose poem.Rather than emphasising the centrality of one spiritual tradition to Wilde's work, as previous scholars have done, I propose the model of 'spiritual cosmopolitanism' as key to understanding a broader context of transnational exchange which emerged in the late nineteenth century. My research complicates traditional notions of Decadence as a Classically-focused movement by drawing attention to the profound influence of non-Western spiritual traditions on Wilde's thought and artistic practice. Drawing on recent developments in affect theory, this thesis also proposes new parallels between ritual and literary forms. Much like spiritual rituals, what role might different literary forms serve in helping to cultivate ethically useful affective states in their readers, viewers, and participants?