Creative responses to pre-historic monuments in early twentieth century literature:1900-1950

这个项目将探索对二十世纪早期文学中史前纪念碑的创造性回应。选择五个英国和爱尔兰的纪念碑，我将采取“自下而上”的研究方法，优先检查遗址本身。就像David Gange对沿海社区的研究（Gange, 2019）一样，这个项目将向外工作，记录每个纪念碑的当地历史，并构建当地人在20世纪初如何理解它们的感觉。该项目将深入了解亚历山德拉·哈里斯（Alexandra Harris）所描述的学术界需要获得“了解居住在其中的不同类型的人的地方”和“了解景观与地方之间的历史关系”（Harris, 2018）。通过优先考虑当地历史，该项目将确定为什么这些“神秘的”（Walsham, 2011）遗址成为创意灵感的来源，并研究在20世纪的决定性时刻，学术和艺术的反应如何影响今天公众对这些遗址的参与。通过专注于五个精心挑选的史前和宗教遗址，包括：格拉斯顿伯里的圣杯井，赫里福德郡的亚瑟石，克莱尔郡的圣布里吉德井，埃夫伯里和朗康普顿的滚石，该项目将优先考虑区域资源，包括教区记录和数据库，如英国历史在线的“历史古迹清单”（1913）。这将揭示这些纪念碑对当地社区的意义，并为考虑20世纪文学对史前的迷恋提供一个新的方向点（Radford, 2014）。研究古迹的当地历史将使我能够通过对语气和内容的分析来评估书面创造性反应的地区差异，并确定创造性许可将纪念碑与客观观察和接受的学术概念的距离有多远。通过研究民间传说手册、考古报告、历史和二十世纪早期的小说，这个项目将考虑小说和非小说作家之间的联系——在作家之间建立新的复杂的联系，这些作家包括：神秘主义者韦尔斯利·都铎·波尔和伊迪丝·奥利维尔，现代主义作家和哲学家约翰·考伯·波伊斯，以及创造性的考古学思想家阿尔弗雷德·沃特金斯和埃米尔·埃文斯。像奥利维尔和波伊斯这样的作家在当地社区和现代主义先锋艺术圈之间游走，他们的反应被严重低估，难以捉摸，尤其值得学术界关注。通过研究作为高度现代主义和农村社区之间桥梁的人物，该项目将促进关于作家的新讨论，这些作家在20世纪文学中对乡村主义和史前研究的价值被忽视了。现代主义文学对史前和宗教的关注（Lewis, 2010）近年来获得了评论界的关注。然而，通过优先研究特定的纪念碑，该项目将首次将该遗址与艺术观察隔离开来，并建立一项调查，为人类与古代纪念碑的关系提供见解。这个项目将当地社区的声音与艺术家和学者的声音结合在一起，将这些难以捉摸的地点投射的不同含义进行比较，这些地点一直回避人类的理解，并提供一个新的起点，以理解为什么它们吸引了20世纪的作家。

This project will explore creative responses to pre-historic monuments in early twentieth century literature. Selecting five British and Irish monuments, I will take a 'ground-up' research approach which prioritises examination of the site itself. Like David Gange's study of coastal communities (Gange, 2019), this project will work outwards to record each monument's local history and construct a sense of how they were understood by local people during the early twentieth century. This project will provide insight into what Alexandra Harris describes as academia's need to gain 'an understanding of what places have looked like to different kinds of people living in them' and 'fathom the historical relationships between landscape and place' (Harris, 2018). By prioritising local history, this project will identify why these 'numinous' (Walsham, 2011) sites became a source of creative inspiration and examine how academic and artistic responses, at a defining moment of the twentieth century, impact public engagement with the sites today.By focusing on five carefully selected pre-historic and religious sites, including: Glastonbury's chalice well, Arthur's Stone in Herefordshire, St Brigid's well in County Clare, Avebury, and Long Compton's Rollright Stones, this project will prioritise regional sources including parish records and databases such as British History Online's 'Inventory of Historic Monuments' (1913). This will reveal what these monuments meant to local communities and provide a new orientation point from which to consider twentieth century literature's fascination with pre-history (Radford, 2014). Studying the local history of the monuments will allow me to assess regional differences in written creative responses through the analysis of tone and content and identify how far creative licence sees the monument distanced from objective observation and accepted academic conceptions of the site. By examining folklore manuals, archaeological reports, histories, and early twentieth century fiction, this project will consider fiction andnon-fiction writers alongside one another - drawing new and complex connections between writers including: mystics Wellesley Tudor Pole and Edith Olivier, modernist writer and philosopher John Cowper Powys, and creative archaeological thinkers Alfred Watkins and Emyr Evans. The critically underestimated and elusive responses of writers like Olivier and Powys are particularly worthy of academic attention as they moved between local communities and modernist avant-garde artistic circles. By researching figures who act as a bridge between high modernism and rural communities, this project will prompt new discussions about writers whose value to the study of ruralism and pre-history in twentieth century literature has been overlooked.Modernist literature's preoccupation with pre-history and religion (Lewis, 2010) has gained critical attention in recent years. By prioritising a study of specific monuments, however, this project will be the first to isolate the site from artistic observations and build a survey of responses providing insight to human relationships with ancient monuments. Arranging the voices of local communities alongside those of artists and academics, this project will compare the diverse meanings projected onto these elusive sites which have continuously evaded human understanding and offer a new starting point from which to understand why they appeal to twentieth century writers.