Lived space and performativity in British Romantic poetry
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Date
25/11/2014Author
Ng, Chak Kwan
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Abstract
In Romantic studies, Romanticism is regarded as a reaction against modernity, or
more accurately, a self-critique of modernity. There have been critical debates over
the nature of the preoccupation of the Romantics with the past and the natural world,
whether such concern is an illustration of the reactionary tendency of Romanticism,
or an aesthetic innovation of the Romantics. This study tries to approach this
problem from the perspective of space. It draws from the spatial theory of Henri
Lefebvre, discussed in the Production of Space, in which Lefebvre conceives a
spatial history of modernity, and sees Romanticism as the cultural movement that
took place at the threshold of the formation of abstract space.
The poetry of three British Romantic writers, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge
and Joanna Baillie, is examined. This study analyses how the writers’ thinking and
poetry writing are interactive with the formation of social space during the Romantic
period. Their poetry embodies the lived experience of the time. The writers show an
awareness of the performative aspect of poetry, that poetry is a kind of linguistic
creation instead of mere representation, which can be used to appropriate the lived
space of reality. This awareness is particular to these Romantic writers because their
poetic tactics are socially contextualized. Poetry is their method, as well as manner of
life, for confronting the unprecedented social changes brought by modernity. By
using Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, an examination of the significance of the
body and perception in Romantic poetry is also employed to show how, through the
use of performative poetic language, the writers re-create their lived space so as to
counter the dominance of abstract space.