Poetic Microcosmos of Flower Fairies花仙子诗域开题报告

1. 研究目的与意义（文献综述）

cicely mary barker was an english illustrator, best known for the fantastic fairy world she created with her painting brush. as a talented painter bestowed with inexhaustible imagination and curiosity to inspect into pure nature, barker firmly believed in recreating the beauty of nature in drawing form daily life and that there were always invisible fairies living around humans. influenced by the pre-raphaelites, she also pursued the “truth to nature” and made delicate choices on subject matters she wanted to depict. of course, those things, animated or unanimated, seen or unseen, turned out to be the most beautiful and magical fantasy in her illustrations and poems.

the complete book of flower fairies is a collection of barker’s fairy illustrations and poems. actually, since the first fairy book flower fairies of the spring was published, barker’s flower fairies had been adored by the war-weary crowds. not only were they fascinated by the imaginative flower fairies, but also they admired the purest beauty of nature and the vision of innocence that could be disclosed in her art. that is barker’s magic. by visual illustrations and verbal language, she created a ravishing poetic wonderland where natural beauty and supernatural fantasy were perfectly blended. and the magic was called “ekphrastic enchantment”.

as an english literature mode, ekphrasis may be encountered as early as the days of homer whose iliad (book 18) describes the shield of achilles, with how hephaestus made it as well as its completed shape. in other words, it refers to “a graphic description of visual art”. however, critics endeavored to study on this theory since 1960s. and since 1990s, ekphrasis has gradually developed into a term dealing with the internal relevance between words and images. the studies on ekphrasis usually center on whether and how visual and verbal art could mix in a united art form to get across a united idea. but those studies never come to agreement. for instance, gotthold ephraim lessing stated in his laocoon: an essay on the limits of painting and poetry that paintings were only able to depict “body” while poetry were only able to describe “action”, which emphasized the uniqueness of individual art forms. while zhu guangqian had opposite opinion in his poetics and insisted that art could transcend the limitation of mediums. but both of them agreed that there were certain forms of relevance as well as differences between visual and verbal art, which is also the theoretical foundation on which this thesis based.

2. 研究的基本内容与方案

this thesis is supposed to inspect the fairy world created by barker in the complete book of the flower fairies, disclosing the fairy-themed ekphrastic enchantment by poetic language and visual illustrations, as well as the purest beauty of nature.

this thesis centers on two matters: the creation of fairy image and the creation of fairy microcosm. both are analyzed and discussed in terms of the ekphrastic applications in barker’s fairy poetry and other literary techniques.

in this part, the process of creating a fairy image is illustrated, including different functions of illustrations and poems in creating and shaping fairy figures. two main stages of creating fairies are analyzed, including the transformation from supernatural fantasy to visual image and from inanimate painting to animated creature.

3. 研究计划与安排

4. 参考文献（12篇以上）

[2]barker, c m. the complete book of the flower fairies[m].london: warne, 2002.

[3]bradfordr. poetry and painting: an essay on visual form in modern verse[j]. writing ulster, 1990(1):48-66.

[4]cixous h, segarra m, masó j. poetry in painting : writings on contemporary arts and aesthetics[m].edinburgh university press, 2012.

[5]clough w o. poetry and painting: a study of parallels between the two arts[j]. college art journal, 2015, 1(2):144-165.