워즈워스의 국가관과 풍경의 정치학

Abstract

This paper aims to draw out Wordsworth’s ideal of nation, one that is mostly depicted in his writings about English landscape. Landscape here is never a neutral depiction of land; rather, it is an ideologically contested field, deeply embedded in the process of political legitimization. It is also a historical archive that records the memories of how individual and national identities are formed and how they are related to each other. Wordsworth thinks of the Lake District as “a sort of national property.” Responding to this thinking, this paper first discusses how the national property is created and developed by relocating it under the cultural circumstances of England in the nineteenth century. It is also dedicated to demonstrating how Wordsworth succeeds in bolstering his ideal of English landscape, which he thinks is a container of English national identity, by transforming it into something like a national museum, while at the same time disguising its reality as an outside viewer. Lastly, it is concerned with answering the question of who should be a legitimate owner of this property; this is a key to a bigger question of who should constitute England which Wordsworth strives to invent as an aesthetic artifact.