A Study On Gypsy Landscape In John Clare's Pre-asylum Poems

John Clare is a distinguished English poet for his writing of place.His depiction of the Gypsies,pastoral tradition and poetic aesthetics in his landscape writing and the poet's class and place identity in his poems,attract critics' enormous attention for his presenting the dramatically changing rural landscape in the East Midlands during the early nineteenth century,and his deep concern with rural villagers' and the Gypsies' dilemmas of cultural identity through his poetic writing of the deteriorated landscape in his hometown.However,Clare's attitude towards the Gypsy culture is rarely explored.Based on this status quo,this thesis analyzes the Gypsy elements embedded in his localized landscape writing,especially the Gypsies' upholding their cultural identity and the poet's gaze at it in Clare's pre-asylum poems,to explore Clare's anxiety of and quest for his own cultural identity within the new cultural context,by taking Cosgrove's “landscape as a way of seeing” as literary criticism strategy and adopting the research methods of qualitative analysis and close reading.Specifically,this thesis explores Clare's quest for his cultural identity and the attribute of this quest,through analyzing the poet's Gypsy and non-Gypsy landscape writing.Firstly,by focusing on the representations and causes of a “dark” and “bounded”non-Gypsy world which is deteriorating into a fallen paradise,this thesis discloses Clare's anxiety of the deteriorating non-Gypsy landscape and rural villagers' worsening living situations.Then,through extending the historical lens to the Enclosure Movement and the Industrial Revolution,the thesis analyzes Clare's confusion and anxiety of his cultural identity,induced by the declining of the folk culture,the uprooting of traditional lifestyles in the countryside,and the poet's value conflicts with the mainstream society in ethics,religion and aesthetics.Afterwards,the thesis interprets Clare's culturally cosmopolitan disposition,by analyzing his constructed quasi-pastoral Gypsy world featured with“exoticism” and “wildness”;and Clare's construction of a virtual cultural identity to enter his dreamland — “Gypsy world”,through beautifying the Gypsy landscape,admiring theGypsy lifestyle and idealizing the Gypsy spirit.Based on that,the thesis aims to explore the attribute of Clare's “Gypsy world” and of the cultural identity he was longing for in the Gypsy landscape.In brief,taking Clare's pre-asylum poems as the target,this thesis attempts to interpret the representation of the Gypsy landscape in his localized landscape writing with Cosgrove's landscape theory,to uncover Clare's anxiety of gaining a proper cultural identity in reality and his counteraction against the anxiety by constructing an idealized Gypsy-style pastoral world.Accordingly,the thesis hopes to open up a new way to Clare research and Gypsy writing study,provide a new perspective for Romantic poetry study,and set an effective case for Identity Study and “The Other” Study in the globalized context.