ABSTRACT

The following essay turns to Britain’s imperial past to unravel a knotty link between celebrations of Britain’s civil infrastructure and Romantic authors’ accounts of poetic prowess. Although the relationship between poetics, landscape, and architecture remains a core concern within Romantic literary criticism, little work studies the widely celebrated innovations of this period’s civil engineers. But when we recognize how bridges, roadways, and canals from this era were rendered sublime both by influential poets such as Robert Southey and Britain’s popular presses, we discover a troubling link between British infrastructural aesthetics, poetics, and empire. Studies on Romantic literature and architectural form tend to foreground ruins, and they typically theorize the decay of structures both actual and figurative. Left virtually unconsidered in these accounts is the technology of the bridge, not to mention grand undertakings like Thomas Telford’s work on the expansive Holyhead Road project, its relation to colonial ideology, or to Southey, Telford’s close acquaintance and Britain’s Poet Laureate. Yet to bring these massive and widely celebrated infrastructural developments into conversation with historical and literary inquiry compels us to reconsider key intersections between national politics, sublime aesthetics, and architectural and poetic art born of the British Romantic movement.

摘要

接下来的文章转向英国的帝国历史，以揭示英国的民用基础设施的庆祝活动与浪漫主义作家对诗歌的高超表现之间的棘手联系。尽管诗学，风景和建筑之间的关系仍然是浪漫主义文学批评中的核心问题，但是很少有人研究这一时期土木工程师广受赞誉的创新。但是，当我们认识到罗伯特·索西（Robert Southey）和英国的流行媒体等有影响力的诗人如何将这个时代的桥梁，道路和运河升华时，我们发现英国基础设施美学，诗学和帝国之间令人不安的联系。对浪漫主义文学和建筑形式的研究趋向于成为前景的废墟，并且它们通常从理论上对真实和具象结构的衰变进行理论化。这些说明中几乎没有考虑过桥梁的技术，更不用说像托马斯·特尔福德（Thomas Telford）在广阔的霍利黑德路（Holyhead Road）项目上的工作，与殖民意识形态的关系或与索斯（Southey），特尔福德的熟人和英国诗人桂冠之类的伟大事业。然而，为了将这些大规模的，广受赞誉的基础设施发展与历史和文学探究进行对话，我们不得不重新考虑国家政治，崇高美学与英国浪漫主义运动所产生的建筑和诗意艺术之间的重要交集。