早期现代英国文学中的地理边缘焦虑与中心构建

文学地理学的兴起提供了文学批评的新视角。中国文学地理学批评注重作家体验或听闻过的地理景观叙事,较少从全球化和地缘政治角度关注地理叙事。“以诗证地”“以地证诗”之“地”应该涵纳家国情怀、政治经济等关涉“地”之维度的传统。以早期现代英国文学的地理叙事为研究对象,可从微观层面为文学地理学研究提供具有启发意义的批评范式。由海岛位置所决定,英国文化背负明显的地理边缘焦虑情结,地理大发现的历史机遇使得英国人对所处的地理位置重新定位,马洛、斯宾塞、莎士比亚、弥尔顿等英国作家通过重写历史,叙述海外贸易探险及与此相关的劳动力输出、海上军事力量的培育、意识形态的输出等,彰显英吉利民族从边缘走向世界政治和经济中心的国家行为,这种位移实际上是资本主义去边界和解除领土设定的权力和文化生产,对辨别当下全球化过程中的各种碰撞和冲突仍有认知上的启示意义。

The Geo-Marginal Anxiety and the Central Construction in Early Modern English Literature

The rise of literary geography has supplied a new approach to literary criticism. Chinese literary geo-criticism pays enough attention to the landscape which the writer experienced or heard about, less caring about geo-narratives from the perspective of globalization and geo-politics. The discussion of the land as expressed in "poetry demonstrating the land" and "the land verifying poetry" should contain national feelings, politics and economy. This study of geo-narratives in early modern English literature, based on a close reading, hopes to offer a critical model for literary geography. Located as an isolated island, Britain had the geo-marginal anxiety, but the Great Discovery made the British relocate their geographical position. By rewriting history and narrating the expansions which involve cultivating the marine force and exporting labor and ideology, Marlowe, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton demonstrate Britain''s geographical shift from the marginal to the central. All these are in effect the cultural production of the capitalist power to erase demarcation and territory, and could still shed light on the conflicts in the present globalization.