摘 要

作为浪漫主义时期六大主要诗人之一，济慈以其独特的审美追求、深邃的诗评思想与别具一格的诗歌书写在英国浪漫主义文学传统中留下了浓墨重彩的一笔，他的诗歌作品也一直是浪漫主义研究的中心。对于济慈诗歌中出现的东方元素，大多数学者倾向于从后殖民批评理论角度出发，将其东方书写完全视为西方权力话语的产物，而鲜有人从东西文化交融与互视的视角对其进行研究。本论文以巴赫金外位性思想作为理论基础，以《恩底弥翁》和《圣尼亚节前夕》两首叙事长诗为主要文本依据，对济慈诗歌中的东方书写进行了细致解读。

论文由五部分组成，包括引论、三个主要章节和结论部分。在引论部分，笔者梳理了国内外对济慈东方书写的研究历史和现状，在此基础上提出了本论文的研究问题，阐明了研究方法，指出了研究意义。第一章阐述了巴赫金外位性思想的起源及基本涵义，并着重介绍了这一思想在文化领域的运用，从而为下文进一步分析济慈的东方书写对于促进东方文化交流与对话的作用奠定了理论基础。第二章考察了济慈东方书写的背景。具体的背景包括18世纪末中国热式微，东方主义者集体转向印度，期望印度为迷失中的西方带来全新的活力，拯救西方文明于衰落之中，由此引发新一轮“东方文艺复兴”。除此之外，笔者还讨论了在浪漫主义时期前和这一时期中其他浪漫主义诗人的东方书写，并指出这些对于济慈本人东方书写可能产生的影响。第三章对济慈诗歌《恩底弥翁》和《圣尼亚节前夕》中所体现出的外位性意识和倾向进行了具体分析。

第五章是结论部分。笔者认为，济慈的东方书写体现了一种较为明显的外位性倾向与意识。他借东方之外位视域返视西方之神性、基督之悲苦，由此彰显了东方之于西方超知超视的优势。其诗歌呈现出的“杂糅性”与“混合性”特征正是外位性理论中“自我”与“他者”视域相结合之具化。此外，受消极诗学理论影响，济慈极力追求对东方元素原初意义的挖掘与自我表达，从而保持对异质文化理解上的外位，实现了对东方“他性”之尊重。

关键词：济慈；东方书写；巴赫金；外位性

Abstract

Ranking among the major poets in the Romantic Age, John Keats has enriched English Romanticism and British poetic tradition as a whole through forging unique aesthetic pursuits, forming in-depth poetic criticism and creating a special poetic style. His poetry works are at the center of Romantic study for decades.

As for the Oriental elements appearing in Keats’ poems, many scholars tend to resort to the approach of post-colonial criticism, regarding them as the product of Western power discourse. Nevertheless, few of them look from the perspective of East-West cultural integration. Adopting Bakhtin’s Outsideness theory as the theoretical foundation, this essay meticulously interprets Keats’ Oriental writing based on the texts of his two narrative poems, Endymion and The Eve of St.Agnes.

The essay is composed of five parts, including introduction, three main chapters and conclusion. In the introduction part, the author summaries the past and the present of Keats’ Oriental writing and further expounds the purpose, methodology and significance of this study. The first chapter is chiefly concerned with the introduction of Bakhtin’s Outsideness theory. The author clarifies the origin and basic meaning of Outsideness theory, and emphatically introduces the application of the theory in the cultural field, so as to lay the theoretical foundation for further analysis of the role of Keats’ Oriental writing in promoting the cultural exchange and dialogue between the East and West. Chapter Two relates the background of Keats’ Oriental writing. At the end of the eighteenth century, as the sinophilia declined, Orientalists collectively turned to India with the anticipation of saving western civilization from decline and increasing the vitality of western culture. Thus a new round of “Oriental Renaissance” emerges. Additionally, the features and tendencies of Oriental writings before and during the Romantic period are also discussed, along with their influence upon Keats’ personal Oriental writing. Chapter three is the elaborated analysis of the Outsideness tendency and consciousness embodied in Keats’ Oriental writing.

The last part of this essay, presumably, is the conclusion. It’s concluded that Keats’ Oriental writing has reflected a tendency and consciousness of Bakhtin’s Outsideness. The poet intends to reflect upon the divinity of the West, and the bitterness of Christianity in virtue of the “outsideness” perspective of the East, thus manifesting the visual advantage of the East over the West. The “hybridity” or “intermixture” characteristic that his works present is exactly the embodiment of the combination of the perspectives of Self and Other in Outsideness theory. Besides, guided by his Negative Capability theory, Keats show great respect towards the self-expression of oriental elements and strives to maintain the original meaning of them, thus maintaining the temporal, spatial and cultural “outsideness” position in the comprehension of a foreign culture and achieving the respect for “Otherness”.

Key Words: Keats ; Oriental writing; Bakhtin ; Outsideness

Contents

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Research Background 1

1.2 Existing research analysis 3

1.3 Purpose, Method and Significance of the Research 4

2 Theoretical Foundation 6

2.1 The Origin and Basic Meaning of Outsideness 6

2.2 The Concept of Cultural Outsideness 8

3 The Background of Keats’ Oriental Writing 11

3.1 Oriental Renaissance 11

3.2 Features of Oriental Writings before the Romantic Period 12

3.3 Tendencies of Contemporary Oriental Writings 15

4 Text Analysis 20

4.1 Endymion 20

4.2 The Eve of St.Agnes 39

5 Conclusion and Implication 48

5.1 Conclusion 48

5.2 Implication: from Outsideness to Dialogism 49

References 51

Acknowledgements 53

A Study on Keats’ Writing of the East from the Perspective of Bakhtin’ s Outsideness Theory

1 Introduction

1.1 Research Background

The concept of “the Orient” has been firstly introduced in The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination in 1927, which was written by English scholar John Livingston Lowes. The book initiated the study of Romantic Orientalism. Since then, for a long time, the academic circle had not paid much attention to the “Oriental writing” in romantic poetry. After half a century, scholar Edward Said published his book, Orientalism, leading to the prevailing of post-colonial criticism. Scholars began to re-examine the relationship between British Romantic Literature and the East from this new perspective. They refocused on those once-neglected Oriental writings in romantic literature, as well as the political and cultural content hidden behind them. Said’s Orientalism theory mainly focuses on how the western colonists distinguish, describe and reproduce the foreign culture for their own interests. In its perspective, the East is not so much a regional space as a topos being discussed. What Said really concerned with was not the real East, but with the western discourse of the East, that is, how the West describes, imagines and comments on the East. He alleged that in all kinds of western theories about the East, only one essence existed, that is, to portray an object which is weaker in economy, politics and military as a cultural and aesthetic weirdo (Zou, 2011). According to Said, things of the East have become commonplaces and firmly control the discourse system of Europe. Behind those commonplace lie a set of theory about the East, which was formed by the experiences of numerous Europeans. They all focused their attention on so-called Oriental essence, such as the Oriental character, the Oriental despotism and the Oriental indulgence. Therefore, it is reasonable to suppose that each European, no matter what comments he is about to make on the East, will eventually speak as a racist, an imperialist, an outright nationalist (Luo, 1999).

“Oriental writing” is the key word in this essay, so it is of great importance to give a brief definition of it. Raymond Schwab has made a detailed study of the word—“Orient” in his classic book the Oriental Renaissance. He supposes that the word originally appeared in ancient Greek period and existed as the opposite of the West. Ancient Greeks believed that the whole world should be divided into two opposing levels, that is, their own world and the other Asian countries in confrontation to them. According to Norton Anthology of English Literature, “Romantic” refers to the writers of Romantic Age, and Orientalism refers to the geography and culture of large parts of Asia, North Africa and even Eastern Europe. Under such an analysis, we can give a definition to “Oriental writing” as the repetitive mentions of evident elements of the East, such as places, names, historical and legendary people, religions, philosophies, art, architecture, interior decoration, custome, and so on. “In literary history, scholars tended to view the oriental places, characters, and events pending the late eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century as the stimuli for excitement and thrills in British literature” (Wang, 2013: 13).

With the development of globalization, cultural exchange and conflicts have gradually become the focus of literature research. Samuel Huntington points out that in the future world, the most important divergences between people will not be ideological, political or economic, but cultural instead. He quotes Lester Pearson’s saying that humankind is entering an era in which different civilizations must learn to co-exist in peaceful exchanges. Heterogeneous cultures must learn from each other, study adverse history, ideals, art and culture, and get mutual enriched as well. Otherwise, there will be misunderstandings, tensions, conflicts and disasters in this crowded and narrow world. Under this kind of background, post-colonial cultural criticism, guided by Said’s claims, is not enough to address all the cultural issues, which principally focuses on and attempts to subvert the hierarchical relationship between the colonists and the colonized. As Elleke Boehmer puts it, such kind of emerging cross-cultural dialogue (post-colonial literature and criticism) is neither a cognitive shift of Europe, nor a shared relationship for equal exchange (Boehmer, 1998).