18世纪的情感、美学与印刷文化——埃德蒙·伯克关于感官经济的美学理论

Sentiments,Aesthetics and Printing Culture of 18^(th) Century: On Edmund Burke's Aesthetic Theory of Sensorial Economy

历史学家和文学史家普遍认为,18世纪中期,无论对于西方近代印刷文化,还是以此为物质基础的近代文学的形成,都是一个重要的时期。从更长的历史时段来看,在17世纪末到19世纪初的"长18世纪"中,关于情感的讨论明显增多,文学史家们又普遍认为这是一个"情感的世纪"。因此,我们有理由将18世纪的美学、情感和印刷文化并置在一起进行讨论。埃德蒙·伯克的《论崇高与美丽概念起源的哲学探究》发表于1757年,对这个文本的历史语境化分析,有助于我们理解18世纪西方关于情感的话语与近代文本文化形成之间的历史关系,并且可以从感官和知觉角度考察近代美学的兴起与"交流"和"可交换性"之间的关联。

The mid-18thcentury has long been regarded as a turning point in the history of modern printing culture with modern western literature coming just into being. The prolonged 18thcentury from the end of 17thcentury to the beginning of 19thcentury was found to be a period with proliferation of discourses on sentiments,thus being called the'Age of Sensibility'by historians of culture and literature. Would it be intellectually legitimate when we juxtapose modern aesthetics,sentiments along with the saturation of printing and textual culture in the study of everyday life? In 1757,Edmund Burke published his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. A historical analysis of the context of this important aesthetic work is significantly helpful in an understanding of the relationships between the study of sentiments and the emergence of modern textual media. This is part of a long investigation upon the historical rise of modern aesthetics and its relation to what is termed as communication and exchangeability,which has been more salient since 19thcentury.