The other mimesis: Romanticism, Orientalism, and the real.

摘要

This dissertation argues that from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century the Orient is invoked each time mimesis is redefined. Scholars of British literature have long understood this period through the categories of Romanticism and realism, epistemologies fundamentally defined by how each structures the mimetic relation. They have failed to see, however, how inevitably oriental tropes articulate the representational crises these categories name. In the Romantic rhetoric of spontaneity, imagination, and originality; and subsequently in realism's efforts to reground aesthetic value in mimetic fidelity and truthfulness, the oriental consistently figures as either more or less---or simply differently---imitative than the European. I show how texts across this period, by writers such as William Jones, Lord Byron, Thomas De Quincey, Charlotte Bronte, and William Makepeace Thackeray, use figures of the Orient to rethink the role of representation in language, aesthetics, and education, repeatedly defining oriental difference in terms of an unfamiliar practice of mimesis. I argue that the Orient is neither a real place nor a fantastic projection; it functions, rather, as a figure for mimesis itself. Tracing this figure from the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth reveals how the discourses of aesthetics and orientalism use each other to determine what and under what conditions language can represent.