远东梦的失落与重建--评罗伯特·马克利《追慕与忧惧:英国的远东想象(1600—1730)》

Far East Fantasies Broken and Rebuilt:A Review of Robert Markley’s The Far East and the English Imagination,1600-1730

罗伯特·马克利在专著《追慕与忧惧:英国的远东想象(1600—1730)》中,批判、解构了长期渗透于东西方关系研究中的欧洲中心主义思想,并以跨区域史学视野重构了东方主导的早期现代世界格局。该书作者将笛福等经典作家的文学文本置于历史语境中,与非虚构文本史料并置,从而揭示了文学想象与现实间的裂隙,还原出一幅包括不列颠在内的欧洲帝国民族身份认同的建构与重构历程。该书于2023年译介入国内,对中国学者而言,它不仅提供了跨学科的研究范例,也为西方话语中的中国形象研究打开了新的思路。

Robert Markley’s monograph The Far East and the English Imagination,1600-1730 criticizes and deconstructs the Eurocentrism long incorporated into western studies on relationships between the East and the West.From a historical view of interregional interactions,this book demonstrates a world structure dominated by the East in the early modern period.By restoring literary works of classical writers like Defoe to historical contexts,and paralleling them with non-fictional historical texts,Markley exposes the fractures between ideological imagination and historical reality,thus exhibiting an internal process of constructing and reconstructing the national identity of Britain and other European empires.Translated into Chinese in 2023,this book is expected to benefit Chinses scholars not only as a good example of interdisciplinary study,but also with new ideas on China image studies in Western discourse.