이 연구는 18세기 영문학사에 있어서 매우 중요한 위치를 차지하는 토마스 퍼시(Thomas Percy)의 역할을 재조명하는 데 있다. 퍼시가 1765년에 펴낸 <고대영국시의 유흔>(Reliques of Ancient English Poetry)는 영문학사에서 큰 획을 그은 작품으로 평가받고 있다. 이 저 ...

이 연구는 18세기 영문학사에 있어서 매우 중요한 위치를 차지하는 토마스 퍼시(Thomas Percy)의 역할을 재조명하는 데 있다. 퍼시가 1765년에 펴낸 <고대영국시의 유흔>(Reliques of Ancient English Poetry)는 영문학사에서 큰 획을 그은 작품으로 평가받고 있다. 이 저서를 통해 퍼시는 오랫동안 천한 장르로 이해되었던 발라드(ballad)를 영국의 가장 전통적인 장르로 재해석하였고 영국문학 전통을 고딕(Gothic)문화에 입각하여 다시 서술하였다. 이 저서가 영국의 낭만주의 전통을 가능케하였다고 말할 수 있는 근거가 여기에 있다. 발라드 연구자로 널리 알려진 퍼시가 유럽에서 최초로 중국고대소설을 소개한 사람이기도 하며 중국과 관련된 책자들을 펴낸 편집자이기도 하였다는 사실은 그러나 잘 알려져있지 않다. 퍼시는 왜 중국에 관심을 가졌으며 중국어와 중국문화에 관해서는 문외한이었던 그가 어떤 자격으로 이 중국서적들을 펴낼 수 있었을까 이 책자들이 <고대영국시의 유흔>과 어떤 연관성을 가지는가 이러한 궁금증에 대한 관심에서 시작된 이 연구는, 퍼시의 영국 발라드에 대한 이해가 이 중국책자들과 결코 무관하지 않다는 것을 밝히고 있다. 영국의 구비문화를 영국문학의 전통 한 가운데 세우기 위해서, 그리고 발라드에 새로운 문화적 가치를 부여하기 위해서 퍼시는 발라드에 대한 정교한 이론을 필요로 하였다. 이 이론은 역설적으로 중국문학과 문화, 특히 한문문화에 대한 비판에서 싹텄다는 것이 이 연구의 주요논지이다. 이렇게 보았을 때 18세기에 들어서서 퍼시의 <고대영국시의 유흔>과 같은 작품을 통해 처음으로 본격적으로 씌어지기 시작하는 영문학사는 중국이라는 또 하나의 '비판적 거울'을 통해 가능해졌다고 말할 수 있을 것이다.

The aim of this study is to re-examine Thomas Percy's landmark collection of English ballads, _Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_ (1765), in light of his work as an amateur reader, editor, and anthologist of writings about China in the eighteenth cen ...

The aim of this study is to re-examine Thomas Percy's landmark collection of English ballads, _Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_ (1765), in light of his work as an amateur reader, editor, and anthologist of writings about China in the eighteenth century. Without any knowledge of the Chinese language, and armed only with a deeply ambivalent fascination with China, Percy prepared _Hau Kiou Choaan_ (1761) and _Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese_ (1762) for a popular readership. This study argues that Percy's career as a popularizer and anthologizer of Chinese texts is central to understanding the editorializing strategies he used in compiling the _Reliques_. The ballad, long associated with political sedition and the gutter, was transformed by Percy into both a historical "relique" of English oral culture and a new aesthetic standard signifying both nativity and naivete, art and artlessness. Percy's interest in English ballads was influenced by the rise of English antiquarianism (characterized by its fascination with indigenous prehistory), the revival of medieval literature (represented by Richard Hurd and Thomas Hurd), and the cult of Celtic poetry (represented by the Ossian poems of James Macpherson). But what marks Percy's career so interesting is that he shows that these cultural developments were also vitally connected to European transactions with China in this period--trade transactions as well as cultural transactions--that challenged European identities in very fundamental ways. By understanding _Hau Kiou Choaan_ and _Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese_ as important predecessors of the _Reliques_, we can see how the idea of China structured modern aesthetic experience in England in ways we are only beginning to fully uncover.

Thomas Percy's collection _Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_ (1765) is widely recognized as one of the most important antiquarian publications of the mid-eighteenth century. It is deemed a central text in the ballad revival and the recovery of Old ...

Thomas Percy's collection _Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_ (1765) is widely recognized as one of the most important antiquarian publications of the mid-eighteenth century. It is deemed a central text in the ballad revival and the recovery of Old English poetry. Percy's pivotal role in revising the way the British conceived of their national literary past, however, has never been critically linked to his contributions to popularizing Chinese literature in England. This study argues that Percy's _Hau Kiou Chooan_ (1761) and _Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese_ (1762) need to be examined together with his other translations and compilations of northern European literature, including _Five Pieces of Runic Poetry Translated from the Islandic Language_ (1763) and _Northern Antiquities_ (1770). In other words, Percy's landmark collection of English ballads which paved the way for the Romantic aesthetics of Wordsworth and Coleridge's _Lyrical Ballads_ cannot be fully understood without examining Percy's work as an amateur reader, editor, and anthologist of writings about China in the eighteenth century.

Percy's China books, in which he displays an increasingly skeptical attitude toward the cultural claims of China, show how his aesthetic and national revaluation of English oral literature germinated in a complex reading of Chinese literature that ser ...

Percy's China books, in which he displays an increasingly skeptical attitude toward the cultural claims of China, show how his aesthetic and national revaluation of English oral literature germinated in a complex reading of Chinese literature that served as both model and foil. This study argues that Percy's notion of English orality, and his argument that English orality can have textual remains, were based on a contrastive understanding of Chinese characters as having no affinity with Chinese orality. In contrast, Percy understood English as a language in which the vital connection between orality and textuality had been preserved. Percy's complex argument was that in the English case (unlike the Chinese case), oral tradition had been preserved through the ages, albeit in the fragile form of textual fragments and remains. Percy interpreted these remains primarily as cultural artifacts, but in effect introduced a powerful new aesthetic of the artless, even "barbarous," native, oral, "antique" English past. This paper argues that this new aesthetic grew out of a contrastive understanding of Chinese culture as artificial, overly cultivated, primarily textual, disconnected with the langauge of the people, and inimical to literature. Without any knowledge of the Chinese language, and armed only with a deeply ambivalent fascination with China, Percy prepared _Hau Kiou Chooan_ and _Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese_ for a popular English readership, justifying the Chinese novel, for instance, precisely "not as a piece to be admired for the beauties of its composition, but as a curious specimen of Chinese literature" and as "a faithful picture of Chinese manners." This editorializing strategy is one that he replicates in his claim that the _Reliques_ collects English ballads "not as labours of art, but as effusions of nature" and as "the barbarous productions of unpolished ages" that "display the peculiar manners and customs of former ages". By estranging the native past as barbarous and foreign, Percy in effect introduces a new aesthetic of the rustic and the popular, now made an antique, historical, native "relic" of the nation. The valorization of the ballad, which is continuous with the rise of Romanticism, needs to be understood in this larger cultural context in which the English struggled to valorize their cultural past in the face of the grand claims made for Chinese culture.