| Research Abstract |
The purpose of the present study is to see how, in travel writings in the 18^<th>- and 19^<th>- century English literature, the traveller views nature, externalises his inner self, and transforms the outer world in his description. The study began with the most popular work of the genre, that is, Lord Byron' s Childe Harold' s Pilgrimage. The tentative result obtained at the end of the first two years was that digressions in Byron' s works originate from the expansion of narrator' s (that in turn is Byron' s) self-consciousness stimulated first by viewing sublimity in nature, secondly by giving the sublimity verbal descriptions, and finally by the act of speaking of himself.
In 2000-02, the main focus has gradually shifted from travel writings to topographical or physico-theological poetry of the period. Of all the works studied, James Thomson' s Seasons is the center of the present study.
In such physico-theological poetry as James Thomson' s Seasons, the process of praising the Creator by means of minute description of physical nature merges with the process of praising the harmonised-order of the moral world, or man' s inner or spiritual world, which was considered to be in correspondence with the material or outer world. Thus viewing sublimity in nature readily merges with viewing sublimity in man' s inner world, thus being the cause of expansion of narrator' s self-awareness, which in turn may, in the latter half of the 18c poetry, become the cause of the physical appearance of the narrator in the poem, or further occasion the narrator speaking of himself in the poem.
|
