Journal of Economic Studies in Literature
JESL, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2026, pp.140-150.
Print ISSN: 3107-3492; Online ISSN: 3107-3506
Journal homepage: https://www.jesljournal.com
DOI: https://doi.org/10.64058/jesl260110cncfp
龙瑞翠（Long Ruicui）
摘要：19世纪初，工业化与城市化急剧改变威尔士地理景观，大量承载民族认同的历史遗迹随之湮没。长达两百余年的被殖民史使威尔士在政治与经济上长期依附英格兰。曾经植根于独特地方特性的本土经济文化想象，不断被英格兰主导的资本秩序所压制，威尔士的文化话语权日益边缘化。于是，威尔士精英转而诉诸文化实践，发掘传统记忆中的“地理基因”，构建虚拟的“古威尔士”世界，以期在象征层面重塑民族经济文化想象，应对威尔士文化长期被英格兰主流叙事遮蔽的困境。赫曼斯正是这一文化抵抗的重要实践者。本文以其诗集《威尔士歌谣》为研究对象，探讨诗人如何通过书写具有威尔士地理基因特质的景观，编织以虚拟地方为载体的危机叙事，参与威尔士文化圈培育虚拟古威尔士世界的集体实践。研究发现，在持续重构的不列颠政治经济秩序之下，诗人借诗意书写重建民族经济文化想象，为威尔士塑造独具特色的文化标识，助力其争取文化独特性与发展话语权。
关键词：费利西亚·赫曼斯；《威尔士歌谣》；危机叙事；虚拟地方
作者介绍：龙瑞翠，教授，博士，广西师范大学外国语学院，研究方向为英国文学，电子邮箱：445824077@qq.com
Title: On Crisis Narrative and the Construction of Fictitious Place in Welsh Melodies
Abstract: At the beginning of the 19th century, rapid industrialization and urbanization drastically transformed Wales’s geographical landscape, resulting in the loss of numerous historical relics that underpinned its ethnical identity. Subject to over two centuries of colonial domination, Wales had been subordinating to England politically and economically. The indigenous economic-cultural imaginaries, once deeply rooted in Wales’s distinctive regional traits, were increasingly suppressed by the English-led capital order, marginalizing Welsh cultural discourse as a consequence. Confronted with this crisis, Welsh intellectual elites resorted to cultural revival practices. Namely, by excavating geographical genes embedded in traditional cultural memory and constructing a fictitious world of “ancient Wales”, they endeavored to reshape, at a symbolic level, the national economic and cultural imagination, to counter the persistent erasure of Welsh culture within England’s dominant meta-narrative. Felicia Hemans stands as a pivotal practitioner of such cultural resistance. Taking her poetry collection Welsh Melodies as the research focus, this paper explores how the poet portrays landscapes imbued with authentic Welsh geographical essences, and weaves crisis narratives embodied by fictitious places, to engage in the collective cultural endeavor of cultivating a fictitious ancient Welsh world. The study indicates that, amid the continuously reconfigured politico-economic order of Britain, Hemans reinvents Wales’s national economic-cultural imaginaries via poetic writing, carves out a unique cultural identity for the Welsh, and facilitates its strive for cultural distinctiveness and discursive autonomy.
Keywords: Felicia Hemans; The Welsh Melodies; crisis narrative; fictitious place
Author Biography: Long Ruicui, PhD, Professor of The School of Foreign Studies, Guangxi Normal University; her research interest is British literature; her e-mail address is 445824077@qq.com.
Received: 05 May 2026 / Revised: 21 May 2026 / Accepted: 01 Jun. 2026 / Published online: 15 Jun. 2026 / Print published: 25 Jun. 2026.
