Literary Crisis: Romanticism Before and After
Section 1
Romanticism Before and After
Jonathan, TD, Chang (PhD. Student, Loyola University Chicago)
The “Great Broken Rings” of 1916: Tripartite Crises in Yeats’s War Years
During the years of 1914 to 1919, Yeats was met with crises composed of three aspects: the personal, the national, and the international. The major personal crises are addressed in The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), with poems eulogizing or commemorating the death of Robert Gregory and others bespeaking the ensuing distress of Yeats’s patroness, Lady Gregory. While poems in The Wild Swans at Coole reflect Yeats’s personal crisis, they also allude to the larger international crisis of the Great War by aestheticizing Robert Gregory’s death in Italy where he fought against those he “[did] not hate” and guarded those he “[did] not love.” Also central to Yeats’s personal crisis was the national crisis of Ireland which culminated in the Rising on Easter Monday, 1916, against which Yeats and his contemporaries reacted with varying attitudes. The national crisis resulting in the Rising can be understood more thoroughly when contextualized within the international crisis that loomed over Europe at the time. In fact, the war between England and Germany was so crucial to the relentlessness of the British suppression of the rebels involved in the Rising that its significance is hard to neglect. This paper will examine the tripartite relationship of the personal, national, and international crises of Yeats during the years he composes The Wild Swans at Coole and Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) by tracing how the poet transforms his early, romantic language into the ambivalent voices spoken behind layered masks. The paper will also look at Yeats’s theoretical writings in A Vision (1937) to explore how the idea of reincarnation and the act of automatic writing affect his works and thoughts during this period. With Yeats’s transformation of poetic language and esotericism in mind, this paper argues that these evolvements in Yeats’s poetry and philosophy helped the poet to reconcile with the “terrible
beauty” during the war years which Yeats himself seems unable wholeheartedly to either praise or condemn.
Keywords: W. B. Yeats, A Vision, Lady Gregory, Easter Rising 1916, Irish Modernism
Brief Biography: Jonathan, TD, Chang is a PhD. Student at Loyola University Chicago. His past presented papers include “Foes in a Feud: The Way to Establish Justice in Euripides’ Medea” at Greek Drama V, held in UBC at 2016 and “‘White Tease’”: Irony as Multicultural Urban Practices in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth” at the annual conference of the Literary London Society, 2018. Jonathan has twice received scholarship from MOST to present a paper abroad and also received the full bursary from The International T. S. Eliot Summer School in 2017 and 2018. His research interests include Modernist poetics, Narratology, aesthetics and politics, and memory studies. Jonathan is currently writing his doctoral thesis on T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and its relation to the Emily Hale letters.
Angela, Hao-Ling Chen (Graduate Student, Department of English, NCCU)
Self-Reflexivity and Spirituality in Emersonian Studies
2020 is the year that we have been experiencing a serious pandemic which caused many people to seek new ways of understanding the world and reaching forms of spiritual sustenance. Before accepting any one of these understandings, we must understand our individual differences and uniquenesses first. Consciousness is what underlies ourselves individually, so from the past till now, many literary writers and works aim to deal with the existence of consciousness and how it affects an individual or even a community. Ralph Waldo Emerson is a prominent American philosopher who wrote about immanent faith and individuals’ transcendence, and his works not only excelled in nineteenth-century New England society, but still resonate with readers today. Especially during this critical time , Emerson’s works can emancipate readers to pursue the betterment of a spiritual life.
In his works, he suggests that every individual should find ways to realize our immanent talents through embracing a variety of living experiences. So this essay explores the relation between interior self and exterior experience in Emerson’s essays, including Nature, History, Circles and Experience. He famously depicts in “Nature” that how the individual becomes a “transparent eyeball” which is capable of seeing through everything. Only when we empty ourselves, then we have a true ability to see. This core value has rhetorically interpreted in other essays. And the most significant one is History, Emerson suggests everyone should undergo as many circumstances as we can, because “[w]hat [the mind] does not see, what it does not live, it will not know.” Similarly in Circles, he suggests that everyone is a “self-evolving circle,” and thus we should always “burst our boundar[ies]” by absorbing “new idea[s].” Also in Experience, Emerson reveals how his experience of loss taught him to identify the “reality” of life. These four main articles of Emerson all motivate the readers to find our self-reflexivities in the relation between the self and exterior experience by any means, so that we can find the tranquil belief to endure the crisis or whether any calamity it will come.
Key words: Ralph Waldo Emerson, transcendentalism, spirituality, consciousness, individuality
Hank, Cheng-Han Wu (PhD Student, Department of English, NCCU)
Further Beyond the Threshold: the Desublimation in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man
From Longinus onwards, the Sublime seems fixated upon human transcendence that greatly focuses on moral values. The Longinian sublime accentuates the moral sphere in order to take humans to the exaltedness of God’s presence. Nicolas Boileau’s French translation of Longinus’ Peri Hypsous thus re-stresses its moral functions in interpersonal relations to facilitate society’s harmony and stability. In the Eighteenth-Century England, Addison, Baillie, Gerard, and Blair, albeit the different terms they coined, they seem to agree that the Sublime’s greatest power lies in self-aggrandizement, which can enrich man’s confidence and glorify his ambition. Further, in both Burke and Kant, they equally provide us with plausible remedies to humans’ despair and limited Imagination. Hence, Kant points out that Reason shall be the supreme guiding principle throughout the lifetime. Nevertheless, this is simply not the moral lesson that Mary Shelley’s The Last Man wishes to rely on. Facing the current Covid-19, perhaps there is no better time than this to reflect upon how the unknown shall have an ominous impact on human beings. Confronting the unknown and evil Other, the Plague, M. Shelley’s prophetic narrative incorporates the Sublime discourses by upsetting these serious attitudes with affirmative presuppositions. This essay will first tease out the cult of the Sublime treatises that popularized in the Romantic Era and interpret why and how Mary Shelley dejects such moral lessons embedded to the sublimity. In Mary Shelley’s eschatological narrative, The Last Man, she takes the ideas of the sublime to extremes, suggesting that the greatest power of the sublime lies not in its human transcendence but in its completely dark void. Mary Shelley’s use of the counter-sublime writing against the positive sublime discourses proposed by her male colleagues Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, even her husband P. B. Shelley shall be viewed as the very end of the other side of the spectrum that her male Romantic male contemporaries worshipped at heart.
Keywords: Mary Shelley, The Last Man, the Sublime, desublimation, bathos
Brief bio: Cheng-Han Wu, who received both his Bachelor and Master degrees in Spanish and Latin American Culture and Literature from Tamkang University, Taiwan (TKU), is currently a PhD student in the Department of English Literature at National ChengChi University, Taiwan (NCCU). His research interest covers the literary genres such as the Gothic, the Fantastic, and the Grotesque, particularly from the Romantic Era to the present. He is currently doing his research on comparative literature in which he wishes to shed light on how the Sublime treatises serve as an opposite trope in depicting the Gothic Fiction. The paper he is going to present today represents part of his current research as such. Email: 107551503@nccu.edu.tw
Section 2
Gender and Identity
Sabrina, Ting-Hsuan Hu (Graduate Student, Department of English, NCCU)
Seeing Masculine Love from A Romantic Perspective in Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II
During 2020, people in the whole world have experienced COVID-19. Owing to the deliberate social distance, there follows more and more issues concerning humans’ relationships, especially affections between people. In the 21st century, the issue of homosexuality is more common around the world than it had ever been, especially in Taiwan which passed the law of same-sex marriage recently. However, same-sex love was unacceptable and guilty in the Renaissance. This paper is going to approach the masculine love in Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II retrospectively, from a romantic perspective, discussing what same-sex love might look like in a self-isolated society.
In the 16th century, people in England couldn't accept same-gender love. Besides, they believed that consummation is not for the pleasure, but for reproduction, so the choice of the partner was not merely concerning personal feelings, which should be considered to the social stratum. The church, which was influential in England, sated the point that the same-gender love was guilty, which would get a heavy sentence for the death penalty. Besides, marriages should be limited to the hetero-gender as well. The deep-rooted the "moral" notion, through the church courts, into people's minds. In addition to the rules of tradition, the literature had a few changes into the motives of same-gender love in the Renaissance. The kind of topics seems to be a new invention, especially the male same-sex love called “masculine love”.
Key words: Renaissance, masculine love, Christopher Marlowe, Edward II
Brief Biography:
Sabrina Hu Email: 107551010@nccu.edu.tw
Sabrina, Ting-Hsuan Hu is a third-year postgraduate at Department of English, National Chengchi University and a member of the Graduate Student Conference of the Enlightenment and Romanticism Network, featuring “Literary Crisis: Romanticism Before and After” held at National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan, on December 19, 2020.
Michelle, Yu-Rong Cheng (Graduate Student, Department of English, NCCU)
Gender Subversion: The New Value of Man in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
In the Romantic Period, gender issues are always showing that women are the oppressed roles in society, and men are the powerful figures. When it moves to the Victorian era, women become stronger to fight against men. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is one of the famous Gothic novels. A number of literary critics draw on feminism or patriarchal oppression in their reading of her Jane Eyre. For instance, in their influential The Mad Woman in the Attic (1990), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar mainly deal with the oppressed women and patriarchal system upon women, in which women seem to be everlastingly shackled in such a socio-ideological chain. However, in this essay, as aforementioned, I argue that critics overemphasize the absolute male oppression on women. I think we can’t only focus on the powerful and strong figures of the male characters. I wish to revise this reading by suggesting the value of man in Jane Eyre. Instead of being endowed with absolute power and male chauvinism, men in the novel likewise have fragility and vulnerability. Man needs to follow the rules of masculinity to be a wonderful man, and gentleman also have their gentlemanly quality to obey. Men, likewise, have a great sense of stress by what the society wishes them to be. They are forced to behave as a wonderful gentleman with masculinity to fit the social expectations. The family restriction on Mr. Rochester, which started from his childhood, caused his suffering today. This essay argues that Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre redefines the meaning masculinity, represents the necessity of men’s weakness and effeminacy, and uncovers the pressure beneath in men. This paper examines the socio-ideological oppression on men, and offers a new value of masculinity in the Victorian era through Jane Eyre. Last but not least, it scrutinizes how Brontë’s characterized her ideal(ized) man in the Victorian era, which is the breakthrough of masculinity in the Victorian Period.
Keywords: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Masculinity, Repression, Gender Conflict
Brief Bio: Michelle Cheng is a third-year MA student of English Department, National Chengchi University. Also, she is Assistant of the Romanticism and Its Legacies Project and the current Conference held by the English Department at NCCU. Email: 02121126@gm.scu.edu.tw
Jamie, Tzu-Yi Chen (Graduate Student, Department of English, NCCU)
The Liminality in Jane Eyre: Women's Crisis and Opportunity
The outbreak of crises shall not only cause serious impacts on the whole world, but also make people fall into self-repression. However, crises can epitomize an opportunity for transformation that will encourage us to reflect on potential remedies and consolations. I suggest that Romanticism emphasizes vehement emotions and pious respect towards Nature, for which I believe the Romantic doctrines resemble the 21st century. I particularly juxtapose Romanticism with this year, 2020 to aim that self-repression is seemingly a Pandora’s Box, which is full of negative elements; yet, in depth it exits a miracle. By exampling Jane Eyre as an instance of Victorian literature, this paper argues that it inherits the elements of Romanticism. This article will respond to these crises that shall be endowed with hope throughout Jane Eyre.
Critics suggest that Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) is a novel about a woman’s repression in the Victorian Era. This repression shapes the so-called self-repression and thus becomes a crisis at that time. Women were dominated by men, and such a situation gives rise to women’s feeling of passivity and self-denying. They even had the women suffer from self-repression. Women’s malady and/or hysteria, for this reason, become the source of her self-repression and hence serious crises. Yet, there is a strand of sunshine behind the shadow. In this paper, I draw on Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical reading to the understanding of repression and his interpretation of dreams to form a dialectic expression by Jane’s utterance, interaction, and the transformation process through her unconscious thoughts. This present paper will cast light on how the transformation of self-repression and self-expression characterizes Jane’s role. It shall finally aid our reading of the Pandora’s Box is not ostensibly negative at all.
Keywords: Jane Eyre, Self-repression, Self-expression, Individual Unconsciousness, Female Crisis in Their Identity, Psychoanalysis
Brief Bio: Tzu-Yi Chen (Jamie Chen) is currently a third-year MA student in the English Department at NCCU, and also an Assistant of the current NCCU Graduate Student Conference. Email: fly75391@gmail.com
Section 3
Existence and Otherness
Stephanie Studzinski (PhD candidate, the Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Sheri S. Tepper & Imagining Otherwise: A Crisis of Narrative and a Narrative of Crisis
Now is a time to begin imagining otherwise—not only to avoid the kinds of crises we are currently experiencing and where they lead, but to imagine and enact a more equitable future for all. Coinciding with Romantic ideals, Sheri S. Tepper, a contemporary science fantasy author, utilizes the power of imagination and draws inspiration from nature to question the dominant cultural stories that lead to crisis. For Tepper, what contemporary crises have in common other than that they are the result of our activities as a species, is that they are also the result of a deadly understanding and enactment of the narrative of what it means to be human. For Tepper, who is concerned with social and environmental justice sans frontières, the question of how value is ascribed or denied to gendered, racial, environmental or alien others is primarily determined by the ways in which we define and value ourselves as a species. Tepper persistently identifies and critiques one deadly iteration of the story of what it means to be human throughout her texts. It is a story that often leads to femicide, genocide, ecocide, apocalypse, and ultimately, the death of the narrator: homo singularis. It is the story of a kind of humanity that only values a narrow subset of the species homo sapiens, considering only them to be fully human which in turn, enables them to destroy all other life forms with impunity since those lives are deemed less than human, i.e. less valuable.
This is a story with real world parallels as evidenced by ongoing contemporary social and environmental crises. I will examine Tepper’s thinking and revision as related to crisis, imagination and nature through her critique and revision of the story of what it means to be human in selected texts.
Keywords: Sheri S. Tepper, nonhuman, ecofiction, ecofeminism, socio-narratology
Brief Bio: Stephanie Studzinski is currently a PhD candidate at the Chinese University of Hong Kong researching the works of Sheri S. Tepper. Stephanie earned an MSc from the University of Edinburgh and a BA from Youngstown State University.
Cora, Lurong Liu (PhD student, English literary studies, the Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Realism Mediated by Crisis: Reading Food Circulation and Eating Disorder in Tara June Winch’s The Yield
Apocalypticism has become new normality of Australian life with the climate change-induced disasters like bushfires and droughts getting rampant across the country, which consequently brings Australia to the frontier of ecological humanities. To explore how the crisis is framed by Australian writing is to unravel the inextricability of its unique and delicate ecology, the national space as an island continent, the cultural legacy of the Aboriginal people, and the history of settler colonialism in the observation of Australian environmental historian Tom Griffiths. The Yield by Aboriginal Australian writer Tara June Winch is the winner of Miles Franklin Award 2020 and it features a perilous occasion where the female protagonist August endeavours to save the Gondiwindi people from extinction against the land dispossession by the mining company, which is also a quest for aboriginal identity from her grandfather Albert’s dictionary, the past and the country. This paper takes The Yield as an example to explore why the crisis in literature is not so much about the outbreak of the catastrophic event in the future as about the darkness of the past that is yet to be unfolded at the present through a material-ecocriticism’s reading of the food circulation among manifold entities and the eating disorder of human and non-human bodies across time and space. This test of the realist novel’s capability to convey the sense of quotidian crisis resonates with the idea of “planetary realism” advanced by Debjani Ganguly, which stresses how crisis trope in everyday reality is mediated via the entanglement of planetary forces and human agencies straddling multiple temporal and spatial scales. Besides, it attempts to foster a deeper understanding of the ontological ambiguity of food in the risk society (Ulrich Beck ) today and the transgressive nature of collective eating disorder as a resistance to the excessive exploitation of the earth for the sake of forming the ethics of planetary sustainability.
Keywords: Indigenous Australian writing; material ecocriticism; planetary realism; crisis; food and eating disorder
Bio:
LIU Lurong | Cora Liu Email：coraliu@link.cuhk.edu.hk
Cora Liu is a second-year Ph.D. student in English literary studies at Chinese University of Hong Kong, HK. Her research interests include Australian literature, postcolonialism and environmental humanities. She has published a Chinese article “Transgressive and Creative Liminal Smellscape in Brian Castro’s Transnational Writing” in the journal Contemporary Foreign Literature, 2020.
Peter, CY Kao
The Pandemics in Mary Shelley's The Last Man
What's the connection between the Romantic literary representation through epidemic disease and the crisis of human faith and existence through Enlightenment? Does the fictional plague in The Last Man represent God's will that devastates human's ambition construed to Enlightenment at Romantic period? Or does it reflect human's collective fear to God's punishment because Enlightenment advocated human's capacity to transcend God's power? This paper mainly scrutinizes Lionel Verney's meditation to the plague in Mary Shelley's 1826 The Last Man. The author argues that a post-secularization reading to Shelley's work can serve as an alternative to how Shelley through Verney envisioned fictional plague's devastating consequences and its correlation to human crisis of faith and existence. To extend a certain previous discussions viewing The Last Man as apocalyptic text, a post-secularization reading, in this paper, moves beyond that focus and scope, not only helping the contemporary readers understand the fictional epidemic disease itself as collective representation of human fear, but also and more importantly bridging the racial injustice and cultural discrepancies between the East and West, the Male and Female, and the Self and Other through the plague because above all the humankind, in the text, succumbed to the fictional plague. Shelley had already provided the humankind of the current time a probable angle of viewing epidemic disease to the level of the fictional to the real and from the local to the global. The author of this paper, thus, first draws post-secularization theory in response to Verney's political position. Then, Lionel Verney will be analyzed as a victim survivor to be tested to see if he triumphed over the plague because of God's mercy given to humankind or because he is susceptible and therefore adaptable to the change of the fictional plague in the air. Finally, the author hopes that this paper can help shed a new light on how Shelley's work can be analyzed by post-secular reading methodology.
Key Words: Mary Shelley, The Last Man, Post-secularization Reading, Fictional Plague, Epidemic Disease, Crisis of Human Faith and Existence
Academic Writing & Publishing Workshop
(The Wenshan Review)
Moderator & Discussant: Ming-Fang Cheng (Production Editor of The Wenshan Review)
Discussant: Ting-Fu Chen (PhD Student at Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, NTU & Editor assistant of The Wenshan Review)
Academic Writing & Publishing Workshop (The Wenshan Review)
This workshop aims to explore the process of academic writing/publishing with a focus on a Taiwanese context, and hopefully provide postgraduate students in the field of literary studies with some useful guidelines and practical examples. It will use The Wenshan Review as an example to explore publishing-related issues, such as choosing suitable journals and article submission, the process of reviewing and revision, proofreading and copyediting, and cross-cultural/interdisciplinary collaboration, providing some troubleshooting advice and reflecting upon the challenges and advantages that literary students in Taiwan might have in the world of academic writing/publishing.
Section 4
Transcendentalism and Reflection
Stefano Rozzoni (PhD Candidate, “Transcultural Studies in Humanities”, the University of Bergamo, Italy)
Being (late-)Romantic as a Stigma: Reevaluating English Georgian Poetry (1911-1922) During the Time of the Environmental Cris(e)s
While current and ongoing studies on British Romanticism offer ever-renewing parallels between the works published in the period and the urgencies of the present-day world – particularly through an ecological perspective (Bate 1991; Hall, 2017) – there remain negative implications regarding the term ‘Romantic,’ which appears to connect to dualistic and anthropocentric understandings of the
natural environment. On the one hand, it is now well-established how Romantic poetry presents multiple cases that foster a sense of human-nonhuman connectedness prompted by ecocriticism; on the other hand, the idea of being (late-)Romantic as being primarily involved in celebratory intents of the natural world survives both in literary theory and in other fields of study, including ecocriticism, as a devaluing, critical label.
In response to this issue, my paper discusses how, in the light of the postanthropocentric and postdualistic paradigm shift advocated by the Environmental Humanities and in dialogue with Critical Posthumanism (Ferrando, 2019; Braidotti, 2019), attention should be placed on reevaluating those literary phenomena which have been discredited by dismissive approaches to Romanticism and its legacy. Specifically, with the awareness that “crises also suggest a transformative moment for us to rethink their perceptions of this globe,” I argue that, in the time of the current ecological emergency, what has so far appeared as a critical literary stigma can now be regarded as a useful baseline from which to reconsider marginalized literary phenomena, particularly when adopting an ecocritical lens.
Attention will be dedicated to the English Georgian poets anthologized in Edward Marsh’s Georgian poetry, 1911-1912. Vol I (1912) by focusing on the overlooked ecocritical trajectories emerging from this collection, which also obtained negative evaluation by the Modernist criticism with the accusation of prolonging late-Romantic tendencies. Specifically, I discuss that a renewed (eco)critical perspective on Georgian poets can a) contribute to revitalizing disregarded late-Romantic
literary trends at the beginning of the Twentieth Century; b) disclose new narratives for better reflecting on how the Romantic heritage may favor a response to the ethical challenges posed by the Anthropocene.
Keywords: Georgian poetry; Environmental Humanities; Posthuman Studies, late-Romanticism; critical reevaluation; critical stigma.
Bio
Stefano Rozzoni is a PhD Candidate in “Transcultural Studies in Humanities” at the University of Bergamo, in cotutelle with Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Germany, where he is a member of the
International PhD Programme “Literary and Cultural Studies”, and an affiliate member of the European doctoral program PhdNet. He is also a member of the Research Group “Oikos. Ecology and the Study of Culture” at the Graduate Center for the Study of Culture (GCSC) in Gießen. His research interests focus on Ecocriticism, Posthuman Studies, English Modernism and pastoral poetry. His dissertation project [submission Oct 2021] proposes an ecocritical reading of English Georgian pastoral poetry (1911-1926) for a critical revaluation of this trend.
Teodora Nikolova (PhD student, Durham University)
‘Former troubles, present woes:’ Armenians as a Romantic Reflection on Tragedy and Suffering
Despite being among the foremost voices of Bulgarian symbolism, Peyo Yavorov is often described by critics as ‘a late Romantic’ (Radev, 1965). His rich oeuvre is defined by its ‘close affinity with the aesthetics of romanticism and symbolism’ (Stoicheva, 2017). “Armenians”/”Арменци“ (pub. 1896), written in honour of the Armenian Genocide, is one of Yavorov’s most influential works, with the text being credited as earning him a place in the European Literary canon alongside other writers, who specialise in the exploration of discontent and tragedy. This paper argues that the success of‘Armenians’ as a hymn of suffering is largely due to Yavorov’s utilization of Romantic approaches to war and crisis poetry. Indeed, a comparison can be made with Byron’s The Isles of Greece and Shelley’s writings on war. The themes of nostalgia and an impossible return to a lost homestead – prevalent elements in Romantic writings – are amplified by Yavorov’s impassioned description of the plight of the displaced Armenians. The distinctly Romantic approach to grief, which belies a deep-seated malcontent with the state of a world that has allowed injustice to thrive, is a strong note within the poem. Subsequently, Yavorov’s approach to tragedy is coloured by late/post-Romantic notes, thereby placing this poet as one of the primary Bulgarian inheritors of the Romantic writers which preceded him (Benin, 2015). By contextualizing Yavorov’s writing, and particularly ‘Armenians’, through the lens of Romanticism, this paper traces the legacies of Romantic tradition in Eastern-European crisis and war poetry. In doing so, it further illuminates the connections between the Western Literary canon’s conceptions of Second-Wave Romanticism and the lesser studied Eastern European canon’s defamiliarization of Western Romanticism.
Key Words: Symbolism, Romanticism, Shelley, War Poetry, Romantic Tradition
Bio: Teodora Nikolova is a first year PhD student at Durham University, where she also completed an MA in English Literary Studies. Her works centers on Romantic legacies in Eastern European writing at the start of the twentieth century. Teodora’s academic research has been presented at various conferences.
Jo Chen (Graduate Student, Department of English, NCCU)
“Society and Solitude:” Solitude Being a Process in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Eyes
The COVID-19 strikes the whole world in many different respects, affecting the economy, politics, and our normal daily life. People are especially forced to stay at home and keep social distance from others. Gradually, the continual quarantine becomes a psychological hardship for the sense of being lonely. However, even though isolation seems so hard to carry out, we still romanticize solitude, upholding the Romantic sense of connecting solitude to nature and to our own inner self, places, both external and internal, where we believe we can find our own revelation. Thus, I aim to explore the relationship between our current hardship and the solitude of the Romantics.
In this essay, I provide two perspectives of solitude which will be helpful to people struggling with pandemic loneliness: first, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s view, which acknowledges the importance of solitude, but suggests that the relationship of society and individual is always mutual; more importantly, society is the bedrock for solitude; second, Emily Dickinson’s view, which sees solitude as a means of building her version of society, through the way she keeps writing letters to construct her intimacy with her loved ones; it’s solitude that enables her to think, write, and fully express herself. To compare these two writers, I focus on Emerson‘s essay “Society and Solitude” and Yoshiaki Furui’s chapter “Dickinson’s Invention of Modern Solitude” from Modern Solitude. Emerson’s and Dickinson’s ways of treating isolation offer us good perspectives to ponder upon our modern solitude and the difficulty of being isolated. If we see our own solitude as they did, we can find that solitude can be a process, not just a state that makes people feel lonely.
Key words: solitude; society; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Emily Dickinson; modern; hardship
Bio: Hi, my name is Jo Chen. I’m currently a first-year postgraduate student at Department of English, NCCU.