Representations of Self-Love in Blake's Composite Art

我花了两年的时间来研究威廉·布莱克在他的诗歌和视觉艺术中表现自爱的方式。布莱克的视觉艺术通常是独立于他的语言文本进行研究的，尽管这两种艺术媒介在布莱克的艺术执行中是不可分割地结合在一起的。布莱克的诗实际上是穿插插图的，我把这两种艺术媒介看作是一种复合艺术。在我对布莱克的合成艺术的分析中，我把重点放在了“自爱”这个关键思想上。在澄清了他对这个观点的意思和18世纪对它的理解之后，我研究了这个观点是如何在布莱克的作品中被形象化的，尤其是在他后来的照明作品中。在他的作品中不时出现的畸形的人体代表着虚假的自我，正如我所澄清的那样，它被拟人化为布莱克式的角色，被称为“幽灵”或自爱的执行者。我使用了我用电脑程序制作的数字化图片，这些图片来自布莱克的照明作品的复制品。这种数字化图片的使用对我分析Blake精美版画的细节有很大的帮助。

Two years have been spent in examining the ways in which William Blake represented the idea of self-love in his poetry as well as in his visual art. Blake's visual art is conventionally examined independently of his verbal text, despite that the two mediums of art are inseparably combined in Blake's execution of art. Blake's poems that are actually interlined with illustrations, and I regard the two mediums of art as a form of composite art.In my analysis of Blake's composite art, I focus upon the key idea "self-love." Having clarified what he meant by that idea against the eighteenth-century understanding of it, I examined how the idea was visualized in Blake's works, especially in his later illuminated works. Deformed human bodies that appear in his works from time to time represent, as I have clarified, the false self, which is personified as a Blakean character called "specter" or an executor of self-love.I made use of digitized pictures that I made, with a computer program, from the facsimiles of Blake's illuminated works. The use of such digitized pictures was of great help for me to analyze details of fine prints by Blake.