Feeling forgotten charts a shift in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English literature that is structured on a crisis of memory. This shift consists in a movement towards a literary construction of aesthetic and moral self-forgetfulness that draws its intense power from an anxiety about human mortality and historical forgetting. Through analyses of texts that depict the need to overcome individual and cultural loss through a desire for oblivion, Feeling forgotten contends that the Romantic period gave birth to anti-mnemonic aesthetic in which the displacement of a perceived loss of the feeling of lived memories into various literary fictions preserves the past in such a way as to answer an unavoidable loss of feeling by asserting that the past, one's own and others, can be felt (again) in the complex affective experience found in reading about the past. In a more ambitious sense, Feeling forgotten attempts to point the way towards an understanding of Romantic and post-Romantic nostalgia as a strong rejection of its melancholic forbearers and as a response to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century self-forgetting. Indeed, the rejection of this more complex Romantic form of nostalgia, one in which the always frustrated attempt to inscribe forgetfulness itself into the text of memory is productive of the ongoing act of writing, would become the founding principle for later forms of nostalgia that seek to render forgetting as an act that resides outside the written text. Based on a reorientation of Charlotte Smith's poetic archive of feelings, which defines feeling as the failure of poetry to contain and defuse feelings themselves, and the passionate rationalism of William Godwin's early nineteenth century texts, in which self-analysis serves as both the generator and corruptor of the sympathetic feelings found in sentimental literature, Walter Scott's passive, amnesiac romances stage the fantasy of an evasion from the political and material significance of history. / text

This study, conducted through an ¡¥aesthetics of reception¡¦ approach, analyzes the reception and transformation of Zhuangzi¡¦s philosophy in Taiwan¡¦s modern poetry, during the 1949 to 2008 period, with the focus on its development and accumulated value under Zhuangzi¡¦s influence. The value lies in the efforts of Taiwan¡¦s poets who inherited classical cultures from which they created a new spirit. This new spirit constructed the new aesthetics that paved the way for Taiwan¡¦s modern poetry (present and future), and even for Chinese poetry overall, in modern times. Chapters 2 and 3 respectively discuss how Taiwan¡¦s modern poetry received and transformed the fish and butterfly images in The Book of Zhuangzi. In Chapter 2, the metaphorical images in Taiwan¡¦s modern poetry, like the legendary Big Fish, the stranded fish trapped in a dry rut, spit on one another to stay wet, and small fish are also discussed with the conclusion reached that the images are actually projections, the poets¡¦ self-images. The fish images embody some significant archetypes and represent the aesthetics of self-forgetfulness. Chapter 3 discusses the butterfly images with metaphors of formless life, joys of rebirth, understanding of true self and the pursuit of reincarnation. The butterfly images also reflect significant archetypes and represent the concepts of metamorphosis and the anthropomorphic aesthetics of endowing objects with the philosophies of human beings. The archetypes and aesthetics of fish and butterfly images are also the key to evaluating the aesthetics in The Book of Zhuangzi. This key value has been influential in the reception and transformation of Zhuangzi¡¦s philosophy in Taiwan¡¦s modern poetry. Chapter 4 further explains that self-forgetfulness and the aesthetics of endowing objects with the philosophies of human beings can define the location of ¡¥I¡¦ in Zhuangzi¡¦s ¡§observing things by other things¡¨, the conceptual basis of Zhuangzi¡¦s insistence upon viewing all the natural beings from the same reflective perspective. These ideas not only served as spiritual nourishment for Taiwan¡¦s poets in hard times but also helped them to realize the unifying aesthetics: that all beings exist as a whole; this explains why Taiwan¡¦s modern poetry has a ¡¥self-forgetful¡¦ aesthetics in viewing things. It signifies a new stage of poetry and poetics in Taiwan. This study also labors on the interpretation of individual modern poems. Many excellent poems involving Zhuangzi¡¦s philosophy are considered difficult to interpret, which is mainly due to people¡¦s unfamiliarity with the allusions, images and thoughts in The Book of Zhuangzi. This study provides the methodology for interpreting poems involving Zhuangzi and provides approaches of such reading. In regard to modern poetry, it provides a basic and practical contribution. The Book of Zhuangzi has proven influential both to poets and modern poetry in general, in Taiwan, not only for the past 60 years but as the inspiration of a new spirit by enhancing the spiritual life of the whole of humanity.