都市背景下的他者想象——伍尔夫《岁月》中的“英格兰性”建构

Imagining the Other in the Background of a Metropolis:The Construction of "Englishness" in The Years of Woolf

伍尔夫是继承了英国文学现实主义传统的经典现代主义作家,创作出不少优秀的现实主义文学作品。小说《岁月》以写实笔触描绘了英格兰半个世纪的世事变迁,具有丰富的政治和文化内涵,其中重要方面就是对英格兰民族身份的再现。《岁月》一方面聚焦“这里”,通过雕琢伦敦景物凸显英格兰特质,同时把视角延伸至“那里”,利用爱尔兰和犹太人等他者反衬英格兰身份。《岁月》构建的“英格兰性”渗透着明显的殖民心态和种族主义思想,揭示出伍尔夫现代派作家和女权主义者身份的复杂性,也为重审其经典性提供了视角。

Virginia Woolf is a canonical modernist writer, who inherits the realistic tradition of English literature and has produced many brilliant realistic literary works. The fiction The Years offers realistically an authentic portrayal of England's social evolution across half a century, bearing rich political and social meanings, an essential aspect of which is its representation of the English national identity. The novel, on the one hand, focuses on “here”, highlighting the Englishness by means of an exquisite delineation of London;and on the other hand, extends its visual angle to “there”, setting off the English national identity by contrast with a deliberate marginalization of the other like Ireland and the Jewish. The “Englishness” The Years conceives is permeated with colonialist and racist mentalities, which reveals the complexity of Woolf as a modernist and feminist writer and provides a perspective for retrieving her canonicity as well.