期刊名称：E-rea : Revue Électronique d’Études sur le Monde Anglophone
电子版ISSN：1638-1718
出版年度：2006
卷号：4
期号：1
页码：1
出版社：Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA)
摘要：William Hazlitt’s intensely ambivalent Liber Amoris functions on a number of different narrative levels. These narrative levels, however, seemingly lie outside much expressible literary value for many Hazlitt critics, both contemporaneous with Hazlitt and more contemporary with current readership (Jack 274-275; Albrecht 161, 163). As Jonathan Gross analogously notes in his fairly recent recuperation of Hazlitt, “Hazlitt’s Worshipping Practice in Liber Amoris,” Hazlitt’s novel “has caused almost as much pain to his recent literary commentators as it did to him” (Gross 707). For reasons that are beyond the scope of this essay — but which are not too difficult to intimate — Liber Amoris has incited far more negative than positive responses, causing, as Gross explains, outright pain to many readers of the novel. For instance, Henry Crabb Robinson referred to it as “disgusting,” exclaiming how “it ought to exclude the author from all decent society”; La Gallienne called it “silly”; and Frank Swinterton termed it a “tragic piece of futility” (quoted in Morgan 10, 17). There are, in turn, very few reviewers who have treated Hazlitt and Liber Amoris as De Quincey did, applauding it for the novel’s confidence and sheer human frenzy (De Quincey 233-4). My aim is therefore to revisit the novel in a recuperative manner, such as the work of Gross and Stanley Jones suggests (Jones 318), however, focusing instead on Hazlitt’s problems of subjectivity and of man in love, locating us in a novel of incomplete melancholia par excellence.
