Re- Claiming Welsh Decadence: Performing Identity, Nation and Class through fetishised crossings

我的论文将通过调查在威尔士出现的物质文化与表演身份之间的关系，为颓废提供一种新的解读。它关注威尔士颓废的独特性，将颓废的表现置于威尔士父权工业（南部）和贵族（北部）的景观中。与大多数对颓废主义的批判性解读所暗示的将颓废主义者视为专门的大都市“表演者”不同，本文将论证威尔士花花公子和新女性的个性挑战并改变了威尔士既存在的“自我”和“自我”的概念。身份表现的一个核心要素是使用实物，这为威尔士颓废者提供了一种谈判和重新谈判他们的自我和国家意识的手段。概念化威尔士的颓废，我的论文将提供一个历史化的批判视角来探索过去和现在形式的颓废认同之间的联系。使用新维多利亚研究领域的理论和方法，但扩展它们以阐明特定的“新威尔士颓废”，我的论文将探讨核心问题：21世纪如何培养与维多利亚晚期威尔士颓废概念的接触和影响？关键是恋物的作用。正如伊莱恩·肖沃尔特（Elaine Showalter）在上世纪90年代所指出的那样，“拜物教幻想在文化危机时期激增，因为它们在一定程度上是对疲惫和匮乏叙事的产物和回应。”正是通过这种探究模式及其作为后现代批判形式的新维多利亚研究中未解决的紧张关系的地位，我的目标是探索和挑战威尔士颓废和表演的最终表现方式，以对抗父权和工业资本主义的背景。

My thesis shall offer a new reading of decadence by investigating the relationship that emerged in Wales between material culture and performance identities at the fin de siècle. Its focus on the distinctiveness of Welsh decadence places decadent performance within the patriarchal industrial (South) and aristocratic (North) landscapes of Wales. Rather than treating the decadents as exclusively metropolitan 'performers' as most critical readings of decadence suggest, the thesis will argue that the individuality of the Welsh Dandy and New Woman challenged and altered pre-existing notions of what constituted 'self' and 'selfhood' in Wales. A central element of the performance of identity was the use of material objects that provided Welsh decadents with a means of negotiating and re-negotiating their sense of self and nationhood. To conceptualise Welsh decadence, my thesis shall provide an historicised critical perspective to explore the connections between past and present forms of decadent identification. Using theories and methodologies grounded in the field of neo-Victorian studies but expanding upon them to articulate a specific 'neo-Welsh decadence', my thesis will explore the central question: how does the 21st century cultivate an engagement with and influence from late-Victorian concepts of Welsh decadence? Key to this will be the role of the fetish. As Elaine Showalter suggested in the 1990s, 'fetishistic fantasies proliferate at times of cultural crisis because they are in part a product of and response to narratives of exhaustion and lack.' It is through this mode of inquiry and its place as an unresolved tension in neo-Victorian studies as a form of postmodern critique, that I aim to explore and challenge the ways in which fin de siécle representations of Welsh decadence and performance reacted against the backdrop of patriarchal and industrial capitalism.