Nostalgia or das Heimweh: Homesickness and the Press-ganged Soldier in Sylvia’s Lovers (1863)

This article argues that Elizabeth Gaskell’s historical novel Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) uses nostalgia as a literary aesthetic and historical context to articulate a narrative of disorientating epochal change. Gaskell’s novel draws on nostalgia’s roots as a psychosomatic disease afflicting soldiers displaced by international conflicts to reassert the traumatic roots of a familiar feeling often understood as superficial and insignificant. Nostalgia began as a disease brought on by migration and only later came to be thought of as a type of sentimental memory; first home was far away and then it was long ago. Gaskell’s novel incorporates both, mingling longing for a place with longing for a past. This double distancing articulates an experience of transition within her historical novel. She draws on an eighteenth-century trope used by figures such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Wordsworth, repurposed for the demands of prose fiction. The homesick soldier who was the first sufferer with pathological nostalgia is cast as the central protagonist of historical transformation and an emblem of uneasy transitions. Sylvia’s Lovers has received scant critical notice to date and, perhaps for this reason, its explicit allusions to nostalgia, and the role they play in Gaskell’s historical imagination, have been left entirely unremarked.     

女性心理——西尔维亚·普拉斯及其诗歌(英文)

作为美国历史上最著名的女诗人之一,西尔维亚·普拉斯以其独特的创作视角和她对女性生命中的各种情感体验大胆而细腻的书写被世人所铭记。本论文以普拉斯及其诗歌为研究对象,探索、揭示二战后女性心理。在研究方法上,本论文立足于文本分析,同时结合诗人的体验及经历,深入挖掘普拉斯的诗歌主题及其对女性世界的影响。