18、19世紀文學的商業化在使寫作成為職業的同時,也給了讀者評判作者的權利和地位,促使作者更加需要考慮作品的市場接受。活躍在這一時期的詩人華茲華斯具有清晰的讀者意識,并下意識地在創作與評論中進行著"詩學身份"和"詩人公共形象"的雙重自我形塑。本文主要采用自我形塑以及作者功能的評論方法,解讀華茲華斯在詩歌創作之外、非虛構文本中體現出的針對大眾讀者和評論家進行"詩人公共形象"的自我形塑,凸顯為《抒情歌謠集》的命名波折、《序》中營造的作者與讀者的對立關系,《序補》中對文學批評的矛盾心態,以及《芬尼克筆記》中的后世讀者意識和選擇性自我呈現。解讀的意義在于通過華茲華斯的個案重新審視18、19世紀寫作的職業化和作者功能等問題。

The rise of a literary market in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made writing a profession, and with its profit-driven nature, enabled the reader to assume an authoritative role. This in turn put a constraint on the author, who in order to survive, had to be on alert to the criticism on their works. Wordsworth was one such writer. Throughout his career, he was creating both a poetic identity in the poems and a poet persona in public, targeting at his reading audience, and more often, against hostile criticism. The measures he took to do so are reflected in the anonymity followed by the signing of Lyrical Ballads, the critical approach on contemporary readers’ taste in its preface, on literary critics in "Essay, Supplementary to the Preface," and a sense of posterity and selective self-representation in The Fenwick Notes. This paper explores Wordsworth’s self-fashioning in the these works, drawing from Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of self-fashioning and Michel Foucault’s thoughts on the author function. It aims to contribute, in a broad sense, to the re-examination of writing as a profession in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the complex use of the author function.