Ve-Yin Tee | Nanzan University (original) (raw)

Papers by Ve-Yin Tee

Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire, 2022

While there are a number of competing accounts dealing with the Romantic period and the rise of g... more While there are a number of competing accounts dealing with the Romantic period and the rise of green consciousness, whether it is the evolution of a poetic ‘green language’ or a scientific language of conservation that is being attended to, what is almost invariably communicated is an elite perspective. This is unfair and unhelpful to the diversity of the modern environmental movement. Referring to the essays in the collection, the introductory chapter argues for the necessity of a class-based approach to the development of a more politically relevant and inclusive ecocriticism.

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Mar 8, 2022

NUCB journal of language culture and communication, 2006

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Dec 8, 2021

While there are a number of competing accounts dealing with the Romantic period and the rise of g... more While there are a number of competing accounts dealing with the Romantic period and the rise of green consciousness, whether it is the evolution of a poetic ‘green language’ or a scientific language of conservation that is being attended to, what is almost invariably communicated is an elite perspective. This is unfair and unhelpful to the diversity of the modern environmental movement. Referring to the essays in the collection, the introductory chapter argues for the necessity of a class-based approach to the development of a more politically relevant and inclusive ecocriticism.

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Dec 8, 2021

This chapter takes a close look at William Shenstone’s management of The Leasowes, which – togeth... more This chapter takes a close look at William Shenstone’s management of The Leasowes, which – together with Enville and Hagley – exerted a programmatic influence on landscape thinking in the eighteenth century. Proceeding on to the poems of James Woodhouse, a labouring-class poet against emparkment, it reveals the oppressive nature of this landscape thinking on humans and nonhumans. Partly to outline the impact of Shenstone’s landscape thinking on the Romantic period, and partly to indicate the particularly pernicious permutation that arose among urban middle-class people, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s prose and poetical writings on landscape are referred throughout. The land was never made quite as useless as it is now in the name of the public good and conservation, and the blame lies squarely at the door of people like Coleridge and their domination by a form of landscape thinking identified here as an aesthetics of enclosure. Through Shenstone, Woodhouse, and Coleridge, the chapter communicates the tragic consequences of this environmental aesthetics not only for the eighteenth century, but also for the relationship most English people have now with the land they live, play and work on.

Routledge eBooks, Mar 2, 2017

Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2021

... (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Watchman, ed. Lewi... more ... (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Watchman, ed. Lewis Patton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970) Letters of ... I would go so far as to question the sincerity of Mays's evaluation of his editorship for the Bollingen Coleridge. ...

AGON: Rivista Internazionale di Studi Culturali, Linguistici e Letterari, 2021

The story of how the Rosetta Stone was found by the French at the mouth of the River Nile in 1799... more The story of how the Rosetta Stone was found by the French at the mouth of the River Nile in 1799, the machinations that engineered its delivery to the British Museum in 1802, and its role in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics, continues to hold the public imagination. Less well-known is the story of how the British discovered a three-metre boulder at the mouth of Singapore River in 1819, which had been split in half to carry fifty lines of yet another ancient language. Unlike ancient Egyptian, it will never be deciphered, for despite the interest it evoked in Sir Stamford Raffles and the linguists of the East India Company, it was simply blown up by British engineers in 1843.

The Rosetta Stone is still in British Museum against the wishes of the Egyptian people. While the Singapore Stone – the largest surviving fragment of the boulder – is on display at the National Museum of Singapore, it belongs to the Indian Museum. Museums are, of course, institutions heavily implicated in the process of colonisation and the damage it wrought over vast lands, as well as the plants, animals and people who lived on those lands. Lord Byron himself famously criticised the theft of the Parthenon Marbles in the second canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1816). The Parthenon Marbles, the Rosetta Stone, and many other museum artefacts are embroiled in the storm brewing over the issue of cultural repatriation. When France was defeated, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, returned the artworks of the Louvre that had been taken from Italy in what was perhaps the first act of cultural repatriation in modern history. While I do engage in a critique here of the legacy of colonisation, my focus is on restoration, specifically, the possibility of accepting a mission of repatriation as an integral part of conservation ethics. Raffles was instrumental in the founding in London of the world’s first zoological gardens, and even though it is still rarely carried out in practice, re-wilding – the return of animals to the habitats from which they originated – is an integral part of the conservation ideology of zoos. Museums and zoos have been the beneficiaries of colonisation, and perhaps the time has come to consider how what they have contained might be returned as part of a rehabilitation process for damaged human and nonhuman environments, a glimpse of which we were given in the Romantic era.

Transcultural Ecocritcism, 2021

British people love trees. Historically portrayed as more interested in establishing trade than i... more British people love trees. Historically portrayed as more interested in establishing trade than in building churches, many seem willing enough however to display religiosity for an old tree. The environmentalist, C. W. Nicol, relates his encounter as a young man with the Jomon Sugi of Yakushima forest in these terms: ‘I imagined that I could see an ancient face in the trunk, and my reaction ... was to feel that this was no mere tree, but a deity’ (The Japan Times). ‘From mighty oaks to humble hazels, our sylvan treasures have never been more highly valued’, runs the byline of The Independent’s ‘Green Giants: Our Love Affair with Trees’, an article attributing the end of the ‘chainsaw massacre’ of urban trees to the adoption in 2007 of CAVAT, the system of assigning Capital Asset Value for Amenity Trees. Indeed, with record numbers of Britons planting saplings, the total area of land under forest is now supposedly approaching the 15% level that was reached back in 1086 (The Guardian).

But why do British people love trees? Though there are many reasons why all of us might love trees, one reason more applicable to British people than to the rest of us is because they have so few. Even at 15% forest cover, the country would still be far below the European average of 40%. Referring to the dendrophilic representations of two familiar and two not-so-familiar writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century (William Blake and Gilbert White, Francis Mundy and Sarah Williams, respectively), this essay will highlight the extent to which this contemporary love of trees is the legacy of a Romantic dendrophilia that reinforces rather than resists ecological degradation.

Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire, 2022

This chapter takes a close look at William Shenstone’s management of The Leasowes, which – togeth... more This chapter takes a close look at William Shenstone’s management of The Leasowes, which – together with Enville and Hagley – exerted a programmatic influence on landscape thinking in the eighteenth century. Proceeding on to the poems of James Woodhouse, a labouring-class poet against emparkment, it reveals the oppressive nature of this landscape thinking on humans and nonhumans. Partly to outline the impact of Shenstone’s landscape thinking on the Romantic period, and partly to indicate the particularly pernicious permutation that arose among urban middle-class people, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s prose and poetical writings on landscape are referred throughout. The land was never made quite as useless as it is now in the name of the public good and conservation, and the blame lies squarely at the door of people like Coleridge and their domination by a form of landscape thinking identified here as an aesthetics of enclosure. Through Shenstone, Woodhouse, and Coleridge, the chapter communicates the tragic consequences of this environmental aesthetics not only for the eighteenth century, but also for the relationship most English people have now with the land they live, play and work on.

Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire, 2022

While there are a number of competing accounts dealing with the Romantic period and the rise of g... more While there are a number of competing accounts dealing with the Romantic period and the rise of green consciousness, whether it is the evolution of a poetic ‘green language’ or a scientific language of conservation that is being attended to, what is almost invariably communicated is an elite perspective. This is unfair and unhelpful to the diversity of the modern environmental movement. Referring to the essays in the collection, the introductory chapter argues for the necessity of a class-based approach to the development of a more politically relevant and inclusive ecocriticism.

The Romantic phenomenon of multiple texts has been shaped by the link between revision and author... more The Romantic phenomenon of multiple texts has been shaped by the link between revision and authorial intent. However, what has been overlooked are the profound implications of multiple and contradictory versions of the same text for a materialist approach; using the works of Coleridge as a case study and the afterlife of the French Revolution as the main theme, this monograph lays out the methodology for a more detailed multi-layered analysis. Scrutinising four works of Coleridge (two poems, a newspaper article and a play), where every major variant is read as a separate work with its own distinct socio-historical context, Ve-Yin Tee challenges the notion that any one text is representative of its totality. By re-reading Coleridge in the light of alternative textual materials within that time, he opens a wider scope for meaning and the understanding of Coleridge's oeuvre.

*****

Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The Catholicity of 'Frost at Midnight'
2. The Submerged History of 'The Ancient Mariner'
3. Ungodly Visions
4. A Tale of Remorse
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era, 2008

"Taking The Bathers (a painting by lesser known Victorian artist, Henry Scott Tuke) as his starti... more "Taking The Bathers (a painting by lesser known Victorian artist, Henry Scott Tuke) as his starting point, Ve-Yin Tee reconsiders, in 'Liberating Boyhood', the value and meaning of boyhood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. First exhibited in 1889, Tuke's depiction of young male nudes signpost the historically and culturally contingent conceptions of boyhood with its (socially and sexually) ambiguous status which, Ve-Yin Tee claims, was further exacerbated by reliance on child labour in the early half of the nineteenth century. Even Wordsworth the great poetic advocate of the importance of boyhood, in his 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality' and The Prelude, was divided on the issue of the increasing number of children that comprised the labour force. Wordsworth, Ve-Yin Tee demonstrates, objected to children being set to toil in the factories and mills, but saw nothing wrong with child labour in the agricultural industries and open fields of rural communities. These ambivalences surrounding Wordsworth's and Coleridge's valorisation of the Romantic child were subsequently re-invented as the figure of the Victorian boy in Tuke's painting which can be, simultaneously, scrutinised as a condemnation of nineteenth-century child labour and an exemplar of a healthy and well-exercised boy--from his exertions in the mill or factory--for his social peers to emulate. The Romantic child's sexual androgyny was equally open to exploitation by some Victorian artists and writers that found in the reinvented figure of the Victorian boy a laudable means to bespeak their own unspoken homoerotic desires."

AGON: Rivista Internazionale di Studi Culturali, Linguistici e Letterari, 2014

When the Japanese took Singapore from the British in 1942, they built a shrine in the middle of t... more When the Japanese took Singapore from the British in 1942, they built a shrine in the middle of the island. It was called Syonan Jinja, which now lies in ruins. The cause of its destruction at the end of the Second World War remains in dispute. Some say that the Japanese burnt it down because they feared it would desecrated by the British; others say the British destroyed it as a mark of humiliation. While the site is officially recognized as being of historical importance by the National Heritage Board, it has been left completely unmarked, undeveloped and unprotected. It is now visited by almost no one, owing to the dense, tropical rainforest around it and the reputation of the area as the haunt of ghosts and vampires. This paper is an examination of the afterlife of Syonan Jinja, or Singapore Shrine, and the place it occupies physically and culturally at edge of a highly developed city and the authorized historical record.

Romanticism, 2015

This essay considers Romantic ideas of nature through a leading work of aesthetics (i.e. Wordswor... more This essay considers Romantic ideas of nature through a leading work of aesthetics (i.e. Wordsworth's Excursion (1814)) and a leading work of science (i.e. Whewell's Astronomy and General Physics (1833)). It then proceeds to trouble these concepts by juxtaposition with the labouring-class poetry of Clare and Bloomfield. The ultimate objective is to reveal the legacy of Christianity on today's intrinsically middle-class ecological consciousness.

Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire, 2022

While there are a number of competing accounts dealing with the Romantic period and the rise of g... more While there are a number of competing accounts dealing with the Romantic period and the rise of green consciousness, whether it is the evolution of a poetic ‘green language’ or a scientific language of conservation that is being attended to, what is almost invariably communicated is an elite perspective. This is unfair and unhelpful to the diversity of the modern environmental movement. Referring to the essays in the collection, the introductory chapter argues for the necessity of a class-based approach to the development of a more politically relevant and inclusive ecocriticism.

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Mar 8, 2022

NUCB journal of language culture and communication, 2006

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Dec 8, 2021

While there are a number of competing accounts dealing with the Romantic period and the rise of g... more While there are a number of competing accounts dealing with the Romantic period and the rise of green consciousness, whether it is the evolution of a poetic ‘green language’ or a scientific language of conservation that is being attended to, what is almost invariably communicated is an elite perspective. This is unfair and unhelpful to the diversity of the modern environmental movement. Referring to the essays in the collection, the introductory chapter argues for the necessity of a class-based approach to the development of a more politically relevant and inclusive ecocriticism.

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Dec 8, 2021

This chapter takes a close look at William Shenstone’s management of The Leasowes, which – togeth... more This chapter takes a close look at William Shenstone’s management of The Leasowes, which – together with Enville and Hagley – exerted a programmatic influence on landscape thinking in the eighteenth century. Proceeding on to the poems of James Woodhouse, a labouring-class poet against emparkment, it reveals the oppressive nature of this landscape thinking on humans and nonhumans. Partly to outline the impact of Shenstone’s landscape thinking on the Romantic period, and partly to indicate the particularly pernicious permutation that arose among urban middle-class people, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s prose and poetical writings on landscape are referred throughout. The land was never made quite as useless as it is now in the name of the public good and conservation, and the blame lies squarely at the door of people like Coleridge and their domination by a form of landscape thinking identified here as an aesthetics of enclosure. Through Shenstone, Woodhouse, and Coleridge, the chapter communicates the tragic consequences of this environmental aesthetics not only for the eighteenth century, but also for the relationship most English people have now with the land they live, play and work on.

Routledge eBooks, Mar 2, 2017

Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2021

... (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Watchman, ed. Lewi... more ... (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Watchman, ed. Lewis Patton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970) Letters of ... I would go so far as to question the sincerity of Mays's evaluation of his editorship for the Bollingen Coleridge. ...

AGON: Rivista Internazionale di Studi Culturali, Linguistici e Letterari, 2021

The story of how the Rosetta Stone was found by the French at the mouth of the River Nile in 1799... more The story of how the Rosetta Stone was found by the French at the mouth of the River Nile in 1799, the machinations that engineered its delivery to the British Museum in 1802, and its role in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics, continues to hold the public imagination. Less well-known is the story of how the British discovered a three-metre boulder at the mouth of Singapore River in 1819, which had been split in half to carry fifty lines of yet another ancient language. Unlike ancient Egyptian, it will never be deciphered, for despite the interest it evoked in Sir Stamford Raffles and the linguists of the East India Company, it was simply blown up by British engineers in 1843.

The Rosetta Stone is still in British Museum against the wishes of the Egyptian people. While the Singapore Stone – the largest surviving fragment of the boulder – is on display at the National Museum of Singapore, it belongs to the Indian Museum. Museums are, of course, institutions heavily implicated in the process of colonisation and the damage it wrought over vast lands, as well as the plants, animals and people who lived on those lands. Lord Byron himself famously criticised the theft of the Parthenon Marbles in the second canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1816). The Parthenon Marbles, the Rosetta Stone, and many other museum artefacts are embroiled in the storm brewing over the issue of cultural repatriation. When France was defeated, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, returned the artworks of the Louvre that had been taken from Italy in what was perhaps the first act of cultural repatriation in modern history. While I do engage in a critique here of the legacy of colonisation, my focus is on restoration, specifically, the possibility of accepting a mission of repatriation as an integral part of conservation ethics. Raffles was instrumental in the founding in London of the world’s first zoological gardens, and even though it is still rarely carried out in practice, re-wilding – the return of animals to the habitats from which they originated – is an integral part of the conservation ideology of zoos. Museums and zoos have been the beneficiaries of colonisation, and perhaps the time has come to consider how what they have contained might be returned as part of a rehabilitation process for damaged human and nonhuman environments, a glimpse of which we were given in the Romantic era.

Transcultural Ecocritcism, 2021

British people love trees. Historically portrayed as more interested in establishing trade than i... more British people love trees. Historically portrayed as more interested in establishing trade than in building churches, many seem willing enough however to display religiosity for an old tree. The environmentalist, C. W. Nicol, relates his encounter as a young man with the Jomon Sugi of Yakushima forest in these terms: ‘I imagined that I could see an ancient face in the trunk, and my reaction ... was to feel that this was no mere tree, but a deity’ (The Japan Times). ‘From mighty oaks to humble hazels, our sylvan treasures have never been more highly valued’, runs the byline of The Independent’s ‘Green Giants: Our Love Affair with Trees’, an article attributing the end of the ‘chainsaw massacre’ of urban trees to the adoption in 2007 of CAVAT, the system of assigning Capital Asset Value for Amenity Trees. Indeed, with record numbers of Britons planting saplings, the total area of land under forest is now supposedly approaching the 15% level that was reached back in 1086 (The Guardian).

But why do British people love trees? Though there are many reasons why all of us might love trees, one reason more applicable to British people than to the rest of us is because they have so few. Even at 15% forest cover, the country would still be far below the European average of 40%. Referring to the dendrophilic representations of two familiar and two not-so-familiar writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century (William Blake and Gilbert White, Francis Mundy and Sarah Williams, respectively), this essay will highlight the extent to which this contemporary love of trees is the legacy of a Romantic dendrophilia that reinforces rather than resists ecological degradation.

Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire, 2022

This chapter takes a close look at William Shenstone’s management of The Leasowes, which – togeth... more This chapter takes a close look at William Shenstone’s management of The Leasowes, which – together with Enville and Hagley – exerted a programmatic influence on landscape thinking in the eighteenth century. Proceeding on to the poems of James Woodhouse, a labouring-class poet against emparkment, it reveals the oppressive nature of this landscape thinking on humans and nonhumans. Partly to outline the impact of Shenstone’s landscape thinking on the Romantic period, and partly to indicate the particularly pernicious permutation that arose among urban middle-class people, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s prose and poetical writings on landscape are referred throughout. The land was never made quite as useless as it is now in the name of the public good and conservation, and the blame lies squarely at the door of people like Coleridge and their domination by a form of landscape thinking identified here as an aesthetics of enclosure. Through Shenstone, Woodhouse, and Coleridge, the chapter communicates the tragic consequences of this environmental aesthetics not only for the eighteenth century, but also for the relationship most English people have now with the land they live, play and work on.

Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire, 2022

While there are a number of competing accounts dealing with the Romantic period and the rise of g... more While there are a number of competing accounts dealing with the Romantic period and the rise of green consciousness, whether it is the evolution of a poetic ‘green language’ or a scientific language of conservation that is being attended to, what is almost invariably communicated is an elite perspective. This is unfair and unhelpful to the diversity of the modern environmental movement. Referring to the essays in the collection, the introductory chapter argues for the necessity of a class-based approach to the development of a more politically relevant and inclusive ecocriticism.

The Romantic phenomenon of multiple texts has been shaped by the link between revision and author... more The Romantic phenomenon of multiple texts has been shaped by the link between revision and authorial intent. However, what has been overlooked are the profound implications of multiple and contradictory versions of the same text for a materialist approach; using the works of Coleridge as a case study and the afterlife of the French Revolution as the main theme, this monograph lays out the methodology for a more detailed multi-layered analysis. Scrutinising four works of Coleridge (two poems, a newspaper article and a play), where every major variant is read as a separate work with its own distinct socio-historical context, Ve-Yin Tee challenges the notion that any one text is representative of its totality. By re-reading Coleridge in the light of alternative textual materials within that time, he opens a wider scope for meaning and the understanding of Coleridge's oeuvre.

*****

Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The Catholicity of 'Frost at Midnight'
2. The Submerged History of 'The Ancient Mariner'
3. Ungodly Visions
4. A Tale of Remorse
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era, 2008

"Taking The Bathers (a painting by lesser known Victorian artist, Henry Scott Tuke) as his starti... more "Taking The Bathers (a painting by lesser known Victorian artist, Henry Scott Tuke) as his starting point, Ve-Yin Tee reconsiders, in 'Liberating Boyhood', the value and meaning of boyhood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. First exhibited in 1889, Tuke's depiction of young male nudes signpost the historically and culturally contingent conceptions of boyhood with its (socially and sexually) ambiguous status which, Ve-Yin Tee claims, was further exacerbated by reliance on child labour in the early half of the nineteenth century. Even Wordsworth the great poetic advocate of the importance of boyhood, in his 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality' and The Prelude, was divided on the issue of the increasing number of children that comprised the labour force. Wordsworth, Ve-Yin Tee demonstrates, objected to children being set to toil in the factories and mills, but saw nothing wrong with child labour in the agricultural industries and open fields of rural communities. These ambivalences surrounding Wordsworth's and Coleridge's valorisation of the Romantic child were subsequently re-invented as the figure of the Victorian boy in Tuke's painting which can be, simultaneously, scrutinised as a condemnation of nineteenth-century child labour and an exemplar of a healthy and well-exercised boy--from his exertions in the mill or factory--for his social peers to emulate. The Romantic child's sexual androgyny was equally open to exploitation by some Victorian artists and writers that found in the reinvented figure of the Victorian boy a laudable means to bespeak their own unspoken homoerotic desires."

AGON: Rivista Internazionale di Studi Culturali, Linguistici e Letterari, 2014

When the Japanese took Singapore from the British in 1942, they built a shrine in the middle of t... more When the Japanese took Singapore from the British in 1942, they built a shrine in the middle of the island. It was called Syonan Jinja, which now lies in ruins. The cause of its destruction at the end of the Second World War remains in dispute. Some say that the Japanese burnt it down because they feared it would desecrated by the British; others say the British destroyed it as a mark of humiliation. While the site is officially recognized as being of historical importance by the National Heritage Board, it has been left completely unmarked, undeveloped and unprotected. It is now visited by almost no one, owing to the dense, tropical rainforest around it and the reputation of the area as the haunt of ghosts and vampires. This paper is an examination of the afterlife of Syonan Jinja, or Singapore Shrine, and the place it occupies physically and culturally at edge of a highly developed city and the authorized historical record.

Romanticism, 2015

This essay considers Romantic ideas of nature through a leading work of aesthetics (i.e. Wordswor... more This essay considers Romantic ideas of nature through a leading work of aesthetics (i.e. Wordsworth's Excursion (1814)) and a leading work of science (i.e. Whewell's Astronomy and General Physics (1833)). It then proceeds to trouble these concepts by juxtaposition with the labouring-class poetry of Clare and Bloomfield. The ultimate objective is to reveal the legacy of Christianity on today's intrinsically middle-class ecological consciousness.