英语论文哪里有？本文以亨利·列斐伏尔（Henri Lefebvre）和米歇尔·德·塞尓托（Michel de Certeau）的空间理论为基础，结合旅行主题的相关研究，以时间线性角度出发，深入剖析麦克尼斯在20世纪30年代对空间性与旅行主题的探索。
Introduction
1.Literature Review
Historically, “the Irish poet has seemed inescapably trapped in the dilemma of Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, fretting out, in the shadow of a usurper’s language, the contradictions of an unresolved cultural and political identity” (Smith 62). The Irish writer in general and the poet in specific, thus, came to be identified as a displaced individual that “intercalated territory famously identified by Louis MacNeice as a condition of spiritual hyphenation” (Smith 62). This study of poems by contemporary Northern Ireland poet involves reading the author to be studied as one of “identifying poets” (to quote Robert Crawford’s phrase), “construct[ing] for themselves an identity which allows them to identify with or to be identified with a particular territory” (1-2).
The question of MacNeice’s Irishness or what Smith called “a condition of spiritual hyphenation” points to one of the two “perennial difficulties” in MacNeice’s poetic career, as Peter McDonald notes, that of time and identity (Louis MacNeice 134). Northern Irish poet Derek Mahon claims MacNeice “had no place in the intellectual history of modern Ireland” for his English upbringing and contents (113-4). Tom Paulin describes MacNeice as “The man from No Part”, and MacNeice’s poetry is marked by a sense of “unease and displacement” for the poet’s frequent travels across the Irish sea, which further adds to the fluidity to his poems (75-6). Similarly, Elmer Kennedy-Andrew’s study of Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Irish Poetry 1968-2008 (2008) describes MacNeice as a “nomad” later adopted by Northern Irish poets, especially Mahon.
Chapter 1 Spaces for Creation: Birmingham, Iceland, Hebrides and London
1.1 Urbanized Spaces: Early Negotiation of Birmingham as a City Space
In his essay “Experiences with Images” (1949), MacNeice reflects that his time in Birmingham marked the very first moment he was “in any proper sense, grown up” (Literary Criticism of MacNeice 161). He echoes this sentiment in Modern Poetry: “I had to earn my own living and this is antipathetic to a purely aesthetic view of life” (74). Indeed, the relocation to Birmingham following his graduation from Oxford in 1930 brought realistic yet harsh challenges to MacNeice, in terms of both material living and poetic creation. He moved to Birmingham with his newlywed wife Mary Ezra after securing a position as an assistant lecturer in Classics at Birmingham University, a post offered by his fellow Ulsterman Professor E. R. Dodds. Dodds later recalled the difficulties of MacNeice’s transition: “Birmingham was his first introduction to the ordinary world; it humanized his aestheticism and set free his natural love of life, but the process took some time. He was faced simultaneously with two new experiences – marriage and earning his living” (36). If anything further complicated MacNeice’s adjustment to the city, it was his struggle with spaces.
Chapter 2 “Running away from the War”: A Retreating Tripper in Ireland
2.1 “Like any Trippers”: MacNeice and Dublin City Space
A few weeks preceding the breakout of war in 1939, MacNeice’s was involved in a project on Yeats (Stallworthy 253-54).1 A strong call for a visit to the West of Ireland prompted him to set off for Ireland with his friend Ernst Stahl, as he was increasingly preoccupied with an inauspicious fatalist worry: “‘War or nor war, you have got back to the West. If only for a week. Because you may never again’” (SAF 210). Previous trips to Hebrides and to Iceland were mostly commissioned for professional purposes, while this journey to Ireland was carried out for MacNeice’s critical need for an escape from abiding fears of the seemingly unavoidable apocalypse. The journey started in Dublin, a city where MacNeice had spent much of the previous year, seeking an academic job at Trinity College Dublin and engaging with the local literary scene.2 The trip around Dublin was made into the beginning of his long poem “The Coming of War”, a travel poem recounting MacNeice’s movement through various places in Ireland. Initially, the poem was included in The Last Ditch (1940), written for Cuala Press run by Yeats’s sisters. Later, the sequence was condensed and cut into 7 sections out of 10 in Plant and Phantom (1944) published by Faber & Faber under the revised title “The Closing Album”. Two more were omitted from the sequence in Collected Poems: 1925-1948 (1949). A notable exclusion from the subsequent collections is the controversial section V, which starts with “Running away from the War” (TLD 7), a sequence that explicitly reveals MacNeice’s intent during his trip to Ireland and his ambiguity towards the war. This omission may be seen as an expression of MacNeice’s regret and guilt over his earlier ambivalent attitude and action.
2.2 The Arcadian West and the Impending Reality
As the only modern city in Ireland, Dublin stands out on the map, sharply contrasting with the vast rural landscapes surrounding it, particularly in the western regions. As previously mentioned, Dublin historically served as the colonial hub for successive occupiers and invaders, especially the British Empire. It was both as a primary seat of power for the British colonizers in Ireland and also as a crucial center of resistance for Irish nationalists. During de Valera’s era, Dublin was transformed into a political center of decolonization following the victory of nationalism, symbolizing a predominantly patriarchal, Catholic, and Celtic independent nation. Geographically, the West of Ireland is distant from both Britain and Dublin, meaning it was less influenced by centuries of colonial rule, modernization, urbanization and industrialization. This geographical distance from the centers of power made the West an idealized utopia for many Irish writers. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, led by figures such as Yeats, George Synge, and Lady Gregory, spearheaded the Irish Literary Revival through Celticism, seeking to rediscover the Celtic heritage of the West, unspoiled, imaginative land rich with Celtic myths, legends, and national heroic figures, as the foundation for reimagining Irish national identity. While what Joyce constructed is a center of spiritual paralysis out of the “urban tumult of Dublin”, those Revivalists have created “an imagined place that gave eternal life to Gaelic country people of the west and their Anglo-Irish lords and ladies” (Heaney 195). However contrasting their political stances may be, both Revivalists’ cultural nationalism and Joycean cosmopolitanism represent a joint effort of envisaging suitable cultural paths for this highly-divided island, an attempt to address cultural imperialism.
Conclusion
Through a close examination of MacNeice’s depictions of spaces in his travelogues, poems and prose of 1930s, the thesis presents a comprehensive picture of the poet’s evolving poetics of spaces and identity. His initial settlement in Birmingham city points to the internal nostalgia for his vision of the unaltered West open spaces, where artistic expression can flourish in doubt, melancholy and freedom. The inaccessibility of the West prompts him to explore Birmingham city space as an alternative, which, in turn, seems to embody what Henri Lefebvre termed as “social space”. The poet vividly exposes that the spatial organization of the city is shaped by the city’s drive for development, which is fundamentally tied to modernity. Within the city space, the interplay of commercial forces, social stratification and the paradox of movement within rigid structures creates a confined and enclosed space where inhabitants are unconsciously trapped in a repeated cycle of industrial labor.
Increasingly, the poet’s sentimental nostalgia is intensified while being disillusioned and dissatisfied by the deadening effect of the modernity and its impact on urban condition, which coincides with chances to travel to Iceland and later to the Hebrides for book projects. For the poet, travel serves as both a creative impulse, a means of self-actualization and a way of escape into the open pastoral spaces. However, his fantasied vision of the islands is soon dispelled, as the creeping tide of modernity is eroding even the most remote islands. In the sense, his travel narratives are used to illustrate the erosion of traditional culture, the inability to form a unified sense of self and the failure to find any sense of communion with the Gaelic islanders, which also points to his enduring problematic relationship with his native Ireland.
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