• 영어영문학
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• 제56권5호
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• pp.973-998
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• 2010

This paper aims at assessing the significance of Lyrical Ballads of 1798, the agreed inaugurator of English Romanticism, in terms of such key concepts as poetic "experiments," "conversation," and the authorial function. The 1798 volume marks an interesting incidence in which an author with no tangible substantiality can wield his authorial function over his works. The volume is signed without the named proper noun-its author is neither William Wordsworth nor Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The figure of the author in this case is realized by the poems he writes; he produces, and is produced by, his works-a fact that constitutes part of the poetic experiments manifested in the Advertisement. Working under this reciprocal production, the Author of the 1798 volume and his poems are collectively aiming at establishing a new class of poetry and an interpretive community. The notion of "conversation" is a key element in the thematic, stylistic ties among individual poems. Poems of the 1798 volume effect multi-layered, "blended" voices. Readers are expected to draw out the topological interweaving among poems through the practices of dialogic reading. In this light, the sequential necessity of "The Rime" and "Tintern Abbey" should be emphasized. They are stitched together in a logic of textual placement and the transition from one to the other is never arbitrary. Most of all, they are working under the same authorial function, complementing each other, and addressing the same poetic project in different textual locations. As an inaugural work of English Romanticism, Lyrical Ballads of 1798 in fact makes so many things happen and yet again anticipates something yet to come with elusiveness. The value of this poetic experiments should be judged not only by what is claimed in it, but what it sets out to do and "how far" it will be performed, as implied in the Advertisement. The efficacy of the volume, more than anything else, is dependent upon the performative power of words.

• 영어영문학
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• 제57권5호
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• pp.701-725
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• 2011

This paper attempts to read "The Nightingale" as an experimental proponent of Lyrical Ballads of 1798, one that inaugurated British Romanticism. It is never accidental for this poem to come to replace "Lewti" at the last moment of publication and to be tied to the poetic principles manifested in the "Advertisement" of the 1798 volume. The speaker of this poem, for example, is an ordinary man, who presents himself as a friend and a loving father. Opting for conversational styles rather than blindly copying literary conceits, he even incorporates an evening episode he happens to recall into a legitimate subject matter. The notion of "conversation," which appears in the subtitle, offers a key to figuring out the ideal of poetic language, the figure of the poet, and compositional procedures Coleridge and Wordsworth proposed in their collaborative project. "The Nightingale" can be a dubious, if not totally failed, poetical journey to subverting an incidence of misnaming acts. He finally reaches the limits of poetic figuration in a process of textualizing nature. The leitmotif of "In nature there is nothing melancholy" testifies to the fact that the bird nightingale, which the narrator is hard at work to rename as a joyous bird, is nothing but a poetic metaphor. "The Nightingale" is more likely to be a revisional, regenerative performance based on the strategy of conversation than an embodiment of a daring novelty.