pISSN: 1598-3293
영어영문학연구, Vol.62 no.3 (2020)
pp.23~45
『성 아그네스 축일 전야』에 구현된 키츠의 시공간 전략
This essay aims to analyze the time-space strategies in The Eve of St Agnes, Keats’s narrative poem and fantasy romance, focusing on the variation of verb tense in it. The irregular variations in verb tense can be often regarded as a shortcoming of skill necessary for storytelling. These variations, however, are only featured in a way that changes the narrator’s past tense reporting into the present tense. Moreover this phenomenon is mostly found in the situations that involve the characters’s movement. Present tense narration combined with movement affects the reader’s perception of time-space. Present tense gives immediacy to the narrated scene and the character’s tri-dimentional movements indicate special displacement. When this movement continues as in the case of Beadman, the reader’s imagination widens spatially. Through this expansion of space and motion, we were able to perceive the passage of time. However when Madline stops all movement and dreams in fancy in her room, the present tense used in the scene stops the normal flow of time and change an instance into eternity. The confused verb tenses are the strategies to construct time-space appropriate for the fantasy world in the narrative mode.
존 키츠,『성 아그네스 축일 전야』,서술시,시공간,상상력