 |
[email protected] |
 |
3275638434 |
 |
 |
| Paper Publishing WeChat |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
On the Sea Image in Dover Beach
HE Tang, CHEN Xi (Corresponding author)
Full-Text PDF
XML 381 Views
DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2022.08.002
School of Foreign Languages, Hunan University, Changsha, China
Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach skillfully uses the sea image to reveal the social condition of the Victorian people on the verge of spiritual collapse. The two opposing sea images at the beginning of the poem are a contrast between illusion and reality, thus triggering the contradiction between the Imaginary and the Real, which becomes an aesthetic symbol throughout the interpretation of the sea image and the writing of human spiritual world. From the time of Sophocles in ancient Greece to the Victorian period, the sea, as a mirror of the Imaginary, became a way for people to reflect on their suffering fate and harsh reality. Meanwhile, the powerful force of the sea drawing back pebbles contains the philosophical meaning of the Real world, which has the mysterious power to swallow everything and is difficult to be captured by the symbol language of the Symbolic society. The impact of the sea on the pebbles shows the contradiction between the Real and the Symbolic. The reinterpretation of the sea image in Dover Beach provides insight into reconciling the spirituality of people in the transition period to highly developed industrialization and modernization.
Dover Beach, sea image, psychoanalysis, the Real-Imaginary-Symbolic
Journal of Literature and Art Studies, August 2022, Vol. 12, No. 8, 794-802
Andrews, M. C. (1970). “Dover Beach”: “Bright Girdle” and “Naked Shingles”. CEA Critic, 32(6), 15-15.
Arnold, M. (1863). Hermine Herine. Essays in criticism. London: Macmillan.
Arnold, M. (1895). Letters of Matthew Arnold (Vol. 1). London: Macmillan.
Arnold, M. (2006). Culture and Anarchy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Creevy, P. J. (1978). Arnold’s Dover Beach. The Explicator, 36(3), 13-14.
Holland, N. N. (1965). Psychological depths and “Dover Beach”. Victorian Studies, 9, 5-28.
Homer, S. (2004). Jacques lacan. London: Routledge.
Houston, P. H. (1927). The Modernism of Arnold. The Sewanee Review, 35(2), 187-197.
Krieger, M. (1956). “Dover Beach” and the tragic sense of eternal recurrence. Critics on Matthew Arnold, 40-47.
Leader, D., Groves, J., & Appignanesi, R. (2000). Introducing Lacan. New York: Icon Books Ltd.
Pitman, R. (1973). On Dover Beach. Essays in Criticism, 23(2), 109-136.
Racin, J. (1970). “ Dover Beach” and the structure of meditation. Victorian Poetry, 8(1), 49-54.
Sampson, G., & Churchill, R. C. (1970). The concise Cambridge history of English literature (3 ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Segal, C. (2003). Introduction (C. S. Reginald gibbons, Trans.). In Antigone (Greek Tragedy in New Translations) (1 ed., pp. 27). Oxford University Press.
Sneyd, R. (2018). Matthew Arnold and Giacomo Leopardi: Modernist lyric poetics and Stoic pessimism in” Dover Beach”. Victorian Poetry, 56(4), 455-475.
Sophocles. (2003). Antigone (Greek Tragedy in New Translations) (C. S. Reginald gibbons, Trans. 1 ed.): Oxford University Press.
Toole, W. B. (1968). Arnold’s “Dover Beach”. CEA Critic, 30(9), 8-9.
Weber, M. (1978). Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology (Vol. 2): University of California press.
Wu, Q. (2011). Jacques Lacan Rread your symptoms. Beijing: China Renmin University Press.
Yiqing, L. (2003). The Hermeneutics of The Bible and Hebrew tradition. Foreign Literature Review, (1), 26-33. doi:10.3969/j.issn.1001-6368.2003.01.004
Zhenming, C. (1996). Critique of instrumental rationality—From Weber and Lukács to the Frankfurt School. Seeking Truth, (4), 4-9.
Žižek, S. (2007). Psychoanalysis and the Lacanian Real: “Strange shapes of the unwarped primal world”. In M. Beaumont (Ed.), Adventures in realism (1 ed., pp. 207-223). Oxford: Wiley -Blackwell.