Table of Contents:
Introductory Essay
Division I: William Blake
Division II: William Blake’s Circle
Barton, Bernard
Basire, James
Boehme, Jacob
Cosway, Maria
Darwin, Erasmus
Flaxman, John
French Prophets
Fuseli, Henry
Hayley, William
Johnson, Joseph
Kauffman, Angelica
Morganwg, Iolo
Murray, John
Nollekens, Joseph
Opie, Amelia
Palmer, Samuel
Robinson, Henry Crabb
Romney, George
Royal Academy of Arts
Sibly, Ebenezer, and Manoah Sibly
Smith, John Thomas
Stedman, John Gabriel
Stothard, Thomas
Swedenborg, Emanuel
Taylor, Thomas
Trusler, John
Varley, Delvalle Lowry
West, Benjamin
Wollstonecraft, Mary
Introductory Essay
This year, Vera Serdechnaia, who has collected and compiled sources in Russian and other Cyrillic languages, has kindly agreed to join the checklist team. As is evident below, there is much work being done on Blake in languages other than English, so I thank all my collaborators in helping make the annual checklist as comprehensive as possible. As always, the annotations to entries from their respective areas are theirs. If any reader is interested in covering scholarship in languages not detailed above, please contact me.
While it may be a lagging indicator, Blake scholarship continued at a steady clip in 2020, despite the global pandemic. Exhibitions were, of course, the major exception, as discussed in this issue by Luisa Calè.The release of Jason Whittaker’s Divine Images: The Life and Works of William Blake (Reaktion, 2021) was also delayed. William Blake at Tate Britain had the good fortune to wrap up just under the wire in February 2020, and I have recorded a substantial number of new reviews and notices to complement the hundred that appeared in 2019. (As was my practice last year, I have cross-listed only those reviews by established Blake scholars.)
Blake Discoveries
Major Blake discoveries in 2020 include a new colored copy of Night Thoughts (designated copy BB) and a previously unrecorded copy of Maria: A Novel, both described by Robert N. Essick; new references to Blake by Amelia Opie and her circle, recorded by Shelley King and John B. Pierce; and what appears to be the Freedom of the City of London admission paper for Blake’s father, identifying his own father as a timber merchant, which was found by Wayne C. Ripley.
Editions, Translations, and Catalogues
In addition to copies C and F of Europe, the Blake Archive has now published the typeset proof copy of The French Revolution and the 1793 prospectus, To the Public, which advertised the illuminated books and other works. The French Revolution exists only in one copy and To the Public only in the transcription of the illuminated original (now lost) in Alexander Gilchrist’s 1863 biography.
The archive also published two groups of watercolor drawings. The first set dates from 1775 to 1790 and comprises apprenticeship sketches of Westminster Abbey, works from the Joseph series and the history of England series, two versions of Pestilence, and other watercolors, like An Allegory of the Bible, whose content and context remain murky. The second set is the Shakespeare watercolor illustrations, which were executed at various points throughout Blake’s career, from his early Mortimeresque illustrations to the late version of The Vision of Queen Katharine. The Shakespeare illustrations constitute what the editors of the archive describe as a “virtual group,” based on their shared subject and medium, even if Blake never collected them together as such. (I would remind readers interested in Shakespeare illustrations of Shakespeariana, a meta-archive that was described in last year’s checklist.) In terms of print reproductions, the Folio Society has added to its long list of Blake publications with an edition of his illustrations to The Pilgrim’s Progress that is based on new photography.
Outside of the archive, the only new and solely English “edition” of Blake’s poetry is Alexander S. Gourlay’s “An Overannotated ‘Auguries of Innocence,’” published in Blake 54.2. (Gourlay also reviews the most recent letterpress editions, Peter Otto’s William Blake: Selected Works and Nicholas Shrimpton’s William Blake: Selected Poems, in Blake 54.1.)
On the other hand, many bilingual editions and translations appeared. Fernando Castanedo’s bilingual edition of the Pickering Manuscript is the first full edition of the manuscript in Spanish. It reproduces new images of the manuscript now available at the Morgan Library & Museum’s website, and has appendices that give other editorial arrangements. Castanedo’s editions of An Island in the Moon (revised) and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell have both been republished, and there is a new edition of El libro de Urizen, originally published in 1947. In other Romance languages, Castanedo records the publication of a 2010 Portuguese translation of The Ghost of Abel by Juliana Steil. (In Blake 54.2, Steil and Lawrence Flores Pereira reflect on translating Milton into Portuguese.) In his description of an Italian edition of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Castanedo distinguishes two different imprints (SE and Feltrinelli) that have been conflated in previous checklists. The new Italian “edition” of Blake, Poesie scelte, is actually a comic that illustrates nine of Blake’s poems.
Vera Serdechnaia describes Dmitrii Smirnov’s translation into Russian of Blake’s shorter poems, published in 2020; the republication of Sergei Stepanov’s translation of selected Blake works; and a Ukrainian edition of selected works. Hüseyin Alhas records a new Turkish translation of Blake’s shorter poems, and an edition in English of Songs that he notes is simply a reprint of the 1901 R. Brimley Johnson edition.
Exhibition Catalogues
Noteworthy among new responses to the 2019–20 Tate Britain exhibition is Karen Mulhallen’s correction of the catalogue’s claim that Richard Edwards, the publisher of Night Thoughts, went mad. Sunil Bhanot, who highlights how the Tate was “built partly on the profits of slavery,” sees the exhibition as “a form of atonement,” but Stephen F. Eisenman, the curator of William Blake and the Age of Aquarius at Northwestern University’s Block Museum in 2017–18, critiques the Tate’s “liberal Blake,” and, in similar terms, Alan Jacobs suggests that the Blake presented reflected corporate sensibilities. Blake scholars Luisa Calè, Susan Matthews, and Hélène Ibata largely celebrate the exhibition, while some reactionary writers continue to make hay of its content warning (Simon) or read its acknowledgment of Catherine Blake’s status as an artist and printmaker as part of a supposed conspiracy that aims at the “Wimminisation of Art” (Jane Kelly). Such arguments should not detract from the simple delight of one writer: “His famous illustration of his poem ‘The Tyger’ is smaller than a postcard!” (WoaWomen Urra).
Another exhibition to escape COVID was The Bard at Flat Time House in Peckham. It was curated by Chris McCabe and ran from 30 January to 8 March 2020. The exhibition paired pages from the Trianon Press facsimile edition of Blake’s illustrations of Thomas Gray with work by contemporary poets responding to Blake and his relevance.My thanks to Luisa Calè for providing the bibliographical information for the catalogue. The Flat Time House website has posted a review by Henry Whaley, without specifying where (or if) it was published elsewhere.
The J. Paul Getty Museum’s exhibition William Blake: Visionary was originally slated to run from 21 July to 11 October 2020, and even though the exhibition was postponed, the catalogue was published. It is dedicated to Robert N. Essick and praises how he “made the navigation of the deep, dark, and often mysterious waters of William Blake study not just feasible but a great joy and a source of boundless, ongoing fascination” (9). Essick also serves as the end point of Matthew Hargraves’s essay in the catalogue surveying major American Blake collectors.
Digital Resources
As mentioned above, the Morgan Library & Museum has posted new photography of the Pickering Manuscript, which is available at the digital edition of its 2009–10 exhibition William Blake’s World: “A New Heaven Is Begun.” Petworth House and the Firestone Library at Princeton have blog posts on the Fairie Queene painting and the “May Day” engraving respectively, with good digital images of the works.
The Allen Ginsberg Project continues to post transcriptions and recordings of his Blake course at Naropa. Keri Davies has a selection of new posts on his blog, Index Rerum, concerning Geoffrey Keynes’s papers and correspondence, Blake and Hampstead, Blake and the Moravians, the story of the Blakes’ nudity in their garden, and a remembrance of William Goldman, who died in 2020. Jason Whittaker’s Zoamorphosis features a review of Phaze Theory’s concert album, a remembrance of Dmitrii Smirnov, and two pieces of scholarship by Katharina Hagen, who writes on the elements of Le Petit Prince and on the relationship of Bruce Dickinson’s song “If Eternity Should Fail” to Milton. (Hagen’s article on Dickinson’s album The Chemical Wedding appears in Blake 54.3.)
At Hell’s Printing Press, Sarah Jones has an interview with Mike Goode on his book Romantic Capabilities: Blake, Scott, Austen, and the New Messages of Old Media, and one with Kathy Maniura about the advertising campaign for the 2019–20 Tate Britain exhibition. (On the Tate’s use of animation to advertise Blake, see Ayun Halliday’s comparison of the animation made by Sam Gainsborough for the 2019–20 exhibition with that made by Sheila Graber for the 1978 exhibition.) Robert Rich discusses the editorial problems of representing non-English languages in the Blake Archive, and Natasha Bharucha analyzes “The Sick Rose.” Six new tutorials on features of the Blake Archive were posted on YouTube.
As Vera Serdechnaia records, there is much on Blake in Russian on digital platforms: lectures on YouTube (including two of her own); a musical album by Leonid Fedorov, also on YouTube, that contains Blake’s lyrics as translated by Andrei Smurov and Alexander Delphinov; an interview with Fedorov by Dmitrii Lisin; an online article on Blake’s influence on Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk; and a posthumously published article by Dmitrii Smirnov on writing music for Blake’s poems.
The Blake Society has updated its website, which offers a list of recent events held via Zoom. Some remain available on YouTube or Twitter, including Marina White Raven’s “The Sick Rose (Encountering Blake),” a performance piece; a book club meeting via Twitter on The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; a Blake quiz bowl, entitled “Blakety Blake 2020”; “Blake in Tuebingen,” a presentation by the artist Dieter Loechle and the academic Christoph Reinfandt; and a performance by the musician Harriet Stubbs, whose debut album is titled Heaven and Hell: The Doors of Perception.
One of the most engaging uses of digital resources during the pandemic has been Roger Whitson’s “William Blake Live,” a series of eight Zoom discussions with Blake scholars and participants. The sessions were sponsored by Romantic Circles, where they can still be viewed in the section Pedagogies Hangouts. Moderated by Whitson, each discussion focuses on a scholar’s interest in and work on Blake. As was true of much of the working and learning over the past year, the sessions are particularly interesting for how they bring together the professional and personal sides of the scholars. It should also be noted that in 2017 Whitson organized a video discussion on Donald Ault’s work and his impact with Ron Broglio, Tof Eklund, Laurie Taylor, and Zach Whalen; it too is available at Romantic Circles.
In the same spirit, the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) has held Zoom events that discuss major Romantic figures, teaching, and other topics. As of March 2021, Blake has been mentioned only sporadically. Readers may also be interested in the two-part roundtable discussion “Toward an Anti-Racist, ‘Undisciplined’ Romanticism” and related material, available at the blog of the Keats-Shelley Association of America.
Blake Scholarship
Tilottama Rajan and Joel Faflak’s collection, William Blake: Modernity and Disaster, is certainly the most appropriately named work of the year. Their claim that “disaster leaves us on the verge of a prodigious retribution for being human, as if to live with disaster’s affect, the sense of being caught in and by its ineluctable sway, not knowing what history’s next step might be” (3) was sadly prophetic for the pandemic and its long list of political, environmental, and social justice crises. In the view of the editors, Blake’s “modernity consists in writing from within disaster” (5), which made him attuned to the always incipient disasters in and of modernity. Adopting this general framework, the essays in the collection are consistently perceptive, with a plurality focused on Blake’s later poetry, Jerusalem in particular. Christopher Bundock considers Jerusalem’s depiction of Judaism and anti-Semitism, Lily Gurton-Wachter examines shame and war in “London” and Jerusalem, and David Collings sees Blake laboring against disaster in Jerusalem. In chapters on other works, Rajan suggests that Blake’s conception of the body in The [First] Book of Urizen parallels that of his Lambeth corpus, and this focus on bodies is found in many essays, from Noah Heringman’s and Elizabeth Effinger’s respective highlighting of “bodies of knowledge” to Peter Otto’s reading of Vala, or The Four Zoas in the context of gothic fiction by positioning it alongside Catherine’s painting of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk. Faflak reads Milton as an “identity crisis,” and Jacques Khalip uses Derrida to interrogate Blake’s sense of the boundary between humans and animals. (On this topic, see Robert Hudson’s The Poet and the Fly.) David L . Clark highlights Blake’s destabilizing practices as an illustrator in his reading of Pity, while Steven Goldsmith examines Blake in the context of the new materialism. (For other new work on Blake and materialism, see Jonah Siegel’s Material Inspirations and George Ewane Ngide’s article that reads the Songs through the notion of Romantic “Thingliness.”)
Easily the major work of 2020 is Sheila A. Spector’s The Evolution of Blake’s Myth, which builds on her sizeable scholarship on Blake, Kabbalah, and the esoteric tradition. Spector provocatively challenges many key elements of the Frygian consensus regarding the relationship of Blake’s art and mysticism. Employing the type of formulations Frye rejected, she characterizes Blake’s works “as the artistic canvas on which to implement the [esoteric] theory” (86). For Spector, Jerusalem is the most complete expression of this theory, and she suggests that “it took roughly three decades for Blake to develop the vehicle through which he was able to convey the plenitude of his vision” (75). The majority of the book, then, is an analysis of many of Blake’s early visual and poetic works that illustrates how the realization of his theory changed as he struggled “to implement that truth in the World of Fact” (129). Particularly interestingly for the dialogue with Frye is Spector’s use of myth, symbol, and narrative as structuring frames that will remind readers at once of Frye’s The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), and she offers a synthetic vision of Blake that is very similar to what Frye proposed for the Christian Bible.
Many articles and standalone chapters published in English focus on religion. Peter Otto positions Blake within Napoleonic-era engagements with the Holy Land. Naomi Billingsley, whose The Visionary Art of William Blake received a new review, continues her examination of Blake and Jesus in her essay “‘As the Eye Is Formed’: Seeing as Christ in Blake’s Bartimaeus,” which was published in the collection The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century. This collection also contains an interesting chapter by Christopher Rowland, “Blake, Enoch and the Emergence of the Apocalyptic Christ.” (For its use of so many Blake scholars who are interested in the book of Enoch, I have also listed an article by Colby Townsend that argues for Joseph Smith’s knowledge of the book.) G. A. Rosso’s article on The Magdalene at the Sepulchre explores “Blake’s Christology and aesthetics” (par. 5), focusing on Blake’s depictions of Jesus’s relationship to Mary Magdalene. Blake’s use of Lowth’s biblical poetics and analysis of Isaiah is considered by Yosefa Raz, while Cameron B. R. Howard sees “Jerusalem” as engaging with “the Zion tradition within biblical poetry” (110).
On topics other than religion, Sharon Choe’s article examines the body in The Book of Urizen through the lens of Norse mythology, while Kang-Po Chen discusses self-annihilation and eroticism in Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Lily Gurton-Wachter has a fascinating and original reading of “The Chimney Sweeper” of Experience, which considers “the politics of joy.” Michelle Levy uses Blake as a coda to Literary Manuscript Culture in Romantic Britain, and M. Cecilia Marchetto Santorun has an article detailing Blake’s influence on Alan Moore’s conception of monstrosity.
In addition to updating its website, the Blake Society has launched a new journal, Vala: The Journal of the Blake Society. Aimed at a more popular audience than its predecessor, the Blake Journal, the publication contains reflections on Blake’s influence by scholars and artists; short academic, pedagogic, and fiction pieces; and reviews.
As noted above, scholarship on Blake outside the Anglophone world has been particularly productive, and 2019’s The Reception of William Blake in Europe and British Romanticism in Asia helped to illustrate the critical contexts in which these scholars are working. The journal Dante e l’arte, published by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, has a special issue devoted to Dante and Blake, containing six essays (four in Italian and two in English), with the introduction available in both languages. Denis Bonnecase has edited a collection of essays in French, Hobbes, Blair, Blake: Hommage à François Piquet, reviewed in French by Hélène Ibata. (Ibata’s own The Challenge of the Sublime was reviewed in 2020 in European Romantic Review.) Hobbes, Blair, Blake includes Caroline Dauphin’s essay on tigers in natural history in relation to “The Tyger” and Camille Adnot’s examination of images of biblical creation. Apart from this collection, Adnot has published a piece on Tharmas in The Four Zoas and another on The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Catherine Bois’s book on the lyric and rhetoric in eighteenth-century Britain contains several sections on Blake. In three essays in Portuguese, Enéias Farias Tavares uses the Blake Archive to reconsider physical and digital archives; examines Blake’s Last Judgment; and analyzes A Descriptive Catalogue within the context of 1809. The last of these appears in a 2014 special issue of the journal fragmentum, which is devoted to a Portuguese translation of A Descriptive Catalogue by Tavares, Ana Paula Cabrera, Daniela do Canto, Andrio Santos, and Leandro Oliveira. Alcides Cardoso dos Santos writes the introduction to the volume and offers an article in Portuguese on “Blake and the Problem of Method.”
Vera Serdechnaia has published several pieces in Russian, including an article claiming that Blake used “the Russian Empress Catherine II” as “the embodiment of the sinister Female Will”; an article on Boris Anrep’s efforts to “embody in Russian the principles of English Romantic poetry”; an article examining writers who have compared Blake and Dostoevsky; and, appropriately on this topic, a review of Alexander Belousov’s opera The Book of Seraphim that considers the self-conscious influence of Blake’s The Book of Thel and Dostoevsky’s Demons. (See the description of the opera at the website of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre.) Polish and Russian articles consider Blake in Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. Ariyuki Kondo analyzes Illustrations of the Book of Job in Japanese, and a Korean article discusses The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Writing in English, the Iranian scholar Roohollah Datli Beigi compares Visions to Thomas Hardy’s Tess.
In terms of Blake’s reception, Philipp Hunnekuhl’s Henry Crabb Robinson: Romantic Comparatist, 1790–1811 has a short but thoughtful section on Robinson’s experiences with and reflections on Blake. Joselyn M. Almeida and Sara Medina Calzada examine Blake’s place in José Joaquín de Mora’s Meditaciones Poéticas (1826) and his early American reception. Alexander Torres considers Blake’s circulation among American Swedenborgians. Jade Hagan highlights his influence on “the Hippie and New Age’s mode of critique” and offers two bibliographical lists documenting “New Age and Psychedelic Media That Cite ‘Doors of Perception’ Blake Meme” between 1954 and 2001 and “New Age Physics Popularizations That Cite ‘Auguries of Innocence’ Blake Meme.” Interestingly, as Serdechnaia explains, Blake was being reconsidered on the other side of the Iron Curtain at the same time, when the official celebration of his bicentennial in the Soviet Union in 1957 led to new ways of justifying his work. German Filippovskii compares images of childhood in Blake and Wordsworth with those of the Russian poets Gavrila Derzhavin (1743–1816) and Nikolay Nekrasov (1821–78). Dušan Živković traces the influence of Blake on Gregor Strniša (1930–87), a Slovenian poet.
In an article in Japanese, Hikari Sato documents the reprinting of some Songs in Workers Dreadnought, a socialist London publication, in a wider article on Saneatsu Mushakoji, a Japanese novelist and reformer, and Sylvia Pankhurst, a British suffragette. Sato’s annotation usefully provides the titles of the Songs and the dates they were published. Finally, also in Japanese, Takashi Kikui examines the influence of Blake on the Japanese poet and critic Takahiko Okada (1939–97).
Passings
In a year of loss, Harold Bloom’s posthumously published Take Arms against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader’s Mind over a Universe of Death is an aptly titled affirmation of the power that writing and reading have over death. Blake is discussed in a chapter on Milton and Blake that caps off Bloom’s lifelong engagement with the two poets and their relationship. If anyone embodied Bloom’s description of the prolific, life-affirming reader, it was John E. Grant, and Alexander S. Gourlay has a remembrance of his former teacher in Blake 54.3 and at Hell’s Printing Press, along with a checklist of Grant’s many influential and insightful publications. Vera Serdechnaia’s remembrance of the Russian composer Dmitrii Smirnov appears in Blake 54.1 and at Hell’s Printing Press. Smirnov is also memorialized by Jason Whittaker at Zoamorphosis and on the Russian language website Stravinsky.online. Keri Davies commemorates William Goldman, with touching final words by Magnus Ankarsjö; Davies includes a list of Goldman’s works, including his unpublished dissertation on Blake, Robert Browning, and the visionary tradition.
Kevin J. Hayes references Edwin E. Slosson’s work on Blake in his note on Slosson and the Melville revival. A new bibliography of Ruthven Todd includes his scholarship and creative writing, listing both published and unpublished works. Nine Blake essays by the Japanese scholar Koji Toki can be found in a 2020 collection of his works and correspondence. Martin Butlin reviews G. E. Bentley, Jr.’s memoir, Boondoggles, and it is worth noting that 2020 marks the first year since his passing that no new scholarship by Bentley has appeared.
Blakeana
Blake features prominently in Louise Glück’s 2020 Nobel Prize lecture, while Jerusalem and the trope of the daimon is the subject of a new dissertation. A handful of writers have used Blake as a touchstone to discuss COVID, including Sibylle Erle and John Higgs in reflection pieces in the Blake Society’s new journal. Early in the pandemic, Dan Gorman wrote at Hell’s Printing Press on searching the Blake Archive for images of the world ending. James Murray-White updated his film project, Finding Blake, in light of COVID. At the New York Times, Amitha Kalaichandran explored Blake’s Job engravings for their message on grappling with grief. Psychotherapist Mark Vernon employed Blake to critique the structure of society and consciousness during the pandemic. (In a similar vein, without referencing COVID, David Shaddock draws on Blake to discuss the emancipation of consciousness in his Poetry and Psychoanalysis: The Opening of the Field.) Finally, in response to Tiger King on Netflix, Dale Shaw wrote a satirical poem, “William Blake’s ‘The Tyger King,’” which was published in McSweeney’s on 16 April 2020 and includes these eminently applicable lines (complete with Blakean punctuation):
Blake’s Circle
There are two new collections on Mary Wollstonecraft that will be of great service to scholars at every level: Sandrine Bergès, Eileen Hunt Botting, and Alan Coffee’s The Wollstonecraftian MindBotting discusses the work on the podcast Intellectual History. and Nancy E. Johnson and Paul Keen’s Mary Wollstonecraft in Context. They consist of short essays centered around Wollstonecraft’s life, works, critical fortunes, and various historical and cultural contexts, with each chapter including suggested readings. While mentions of Blake in these collections are only cursory, Mary Wollstonecraft in Context includes a chapter devoted to Joseph Johnson. Both are reviewed by E. J. Clery in the Times Literary Supplement. Elsewhere, Sylvana Tomaselli considers Wollstonecraft’s relation to the Platonism of Thomas Taylor, and also touches on Johnson; in Disastrous Subjectivities: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Real, David Collings has a chapter on Wollstonecraft and shipwrecks.
William Hayley was the subject of an online conference organized by Lisa Gee and the Fitzwilliam Museum, 12-13 November 2020. Select presentations can still be found at the conference’s webpage. These address Hayley’s relationship with George Romney (Alex Kidson); his relationship with John Flaxman and Blake (David Bindman); his view of the landscape around Chichester and Eartham (Alexandra Harris); and his experiences with hope, disability, parental love, and grief (Lisa Gee). Not posted were presentations by Mark Crosby on Hayley’s library; Sarah Haggarty on “Paper Scraps, Commonplacing and a New ‘Ballads Manuscript’”; and Jason Whittaker on Hayley in Blake biographies. Also not posted was an exciting preview of the Fitzwilliam’s forthcoming digital edition of Hayley’s letters. While progress on the project has been slowed by the pandemic, the letters will be heavily tagged and annotated and will be extremely useful to scholars of Blake and of the Romantic era in general. Outside of the conference, Hayley is the subject of two interesting essays that consider his depiction of women in relationship to women writers. Brian Goldberg highlights Charlotte Smith’s writings as responses to The Triumphs of Temper, while Susan Matthews shows how Hayley’s depiction of aging women and sexuality in his Essay on Old Maids influenced Hannah More and Joanna Southcott.
Artists who were Blake’s friends or contemporaries have received considerable attention. Josh Hainy analyzes John Flaxman’s “corporeal pedagogy” in his role of professor of sculpture at the Royal Academy. Silvia De Santis’s article examines the influence of Blake and Flaxman on each other in their illustrations to Dante. Flaxman’s funeral monuments are treated in two pieces by Susan Jenkins for the Burlington Magazine, and Flaxman is also discussed in a dissertation on classicism, commerce, and authorship. Two articles consider Fuseli’s influence on other artists (G. F. Watts and William Martin), and another argues that Fuseli disrupts the gender binary of the Sturm und Drang movement.
Georgina Cole treats George Romney’s conception of blindness in Milton and His Daughters, with some references to Hayley. Benjamin West’s painting Penn’s Treaty with the Indians is analyzed in George W. Boudreau’s A Material World: Culture, Society, and the Life of Things in Early Anglo-America, and The Death of General Wolfe is closely read online in an interactive New York Times article. A 2020 dissertation considers West in terms of “Neo-Gothic Literary and Visual Art,” alongside Walpole, Burke, and the architect Robert Adam. Focusing on “portraits of women as modern Sibyls,” Luisa Calè analyzes paintings by West, Angelica Kauffman, and others. Nikita Agranovskii examines John Singleton Copley’s The Death of the Earl of Chatham and his efforts to exhibit it in opposition to the new Royal Academy. Rebecca Senior highlights the depiction of violence in her analysis of Joseph Nollekens’s initial design for his monument to three captains (1782–93). Jane Insley examines the illustrations of crystals by Delvalle Lowry Varley (John Varley’s wife), illuminating her importance as an artist and as a contributor to crystal science. Mark Antliff considers the influence of Blake and Samuel Palmer on the British Neo-Romantics.
Elizabeth A. Williams devotes a chapter to Erasmus Darwin and appetite in Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750–1950. C. A. Vaughn Cross examines how The Loves of the Plants influenced the “general knowledge of drug efficacy” in the Romantic era. Richard Hillyer considers Darwin in a wider book on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scientific poets, while Dahlia Porter looks at the problem of induction through the genre of the philosophical poem. Darwin’s influence on his grandson Charles’s “Historical Sketch” (the preface to Origin of Species) is touched on by Curtis N. Johnson in his book on the “Historical Sketch.” Barry I. Hoffbrand looks at Darwin’s relationship to the painter Joseph Wright of Derby.
Oskar Cox Jensen has an interesting article on another Joseph Johnson of the Romantic era, an Afro-Caribbean busker and ballad singer who was the subject of J. T. Smith’s print “Joseph Johnson” (1815) and whom Smith subsequently described in his Vagabondiana (1817). Christopher Stokes has edited a selection of poetry by the Quaker poet, Bernard Barton, and Stokes’s 2019 essay on Barton considers him in light of “Quaker Romanticism.”
Fleshing out the esoteric world referenced in Sheila Spector’s new book is Susan Mitchell Sommers’s The Siblys of London, a rich study of the Sibly family and, in particular, its two most prominent members, the brothers Manoah and Ebenezer. Blake is discussed slightly but significantly in relationship to the April 1789 General Conference, and Sommers argues that he was driven away from the New Church by Manoah Sibly, who was an important New Church leader in the transformation of Swedenborgianism into an ecclesiastical institution.
The continental origins of this esotericism in Reformation-era mysticism are the subject of a special issue of Daphnis with papers from the conference The Forgotten Reformation, held at the Stadtarchiv Salzburg in 2018. The essays highlight the works of Jacob Boehme, Paracelsus, and the Rosicrucians. (Two gauge the impact of these writers on English readers, with Ariel Hessayon considering the knowledge of Boehme among English speakers before the English Civil War and Lucinda Martin analyzing the reception of Boehme’s idea of Sophia from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries.) In other articles on mysticism and esoteric sources, Michael B. Riordan examines the Scottish French Prophets of the early eighteenth century, and Vincent Roy-Di Piazza argues that Swedenborg’s De telluribus in mundo nostro solari (1758) brought together the eighteenth-century genres of the plurality of worlds and dialogues with the dead.
Symbols
| § |
Works preceded by a section mark are reported on secondhand authority. |
Abbreviations
| BB |
G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Books (1977) |
| BBS |
G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Books Supplement (1995) |
| Blake |
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly
<Blake ([year])> indicates the installment of “William Blake and His Circle” published in the year specified. |
| BSJ |
G. E. Bentley, Jr., with Keiko Aoyama, Blake Studies in Japan (1994) |
| Butlin |
Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake (1981) |
| Diss. |
Dissertation |
| WBHC |
G. E. Bentley, Jr., William Blake and His Circle (2017)
<http://library.vicu.utoronto.ca/collections/special_collections/bentley_blake_collection/blake_circle/2017/William_Blake_and_His_Circle.pdf> |
Division I: William Blake
Part I: Blake’s Writings
Section A: Original Editions, Facsimiles, Reprints, and Translations
Ballads (Pickering) Manuscript (1807?)For updated photographs of the manuscript, see Morgan Library & Museum in Part V.
Augurios de inocencia. Edición bilingüe de Fernando Castanedo. Traducción de Fernando Castanedo. Madrid: Cátedra, 2020. Colección Letras Universales. 8º, 184 pp., 28 illus., including all of the Ballads Manuscript. ISBN: 9788437641300. This is the first complete translation of the Ballads Manuscript into Spanish. It reproduces the new images of the poems.
“Introducción”:
“Vida de William Blake.” 9-43.
“Historia del manuscrito.” 43-45.
“Transmisión y ediciones.” 45-48.
“Características.” 48-49.
“Fecha de transcripción.” 49-56.
“Fecha de composición.” 56-58.
“Los diez poemas.” 59-68.
“Esta edición.” 69-71.
“Bibliografía.” 73-83.
Text of the Ballads Manuscript. 85-135. English and Spanish on facing pages.
“Apéndices”:
“Apéndice 1.” 139-40. Text from Jerusalem plate 52, from the prologue to chapter 3, “To the Deists,” with its version of “The Grey Monk.”
“Apéndice 2.” 141-45. Sampson’s editorial arrangement of “Auguries of Innocence.”
“Apéndice 3.” 147-51. Erdman’s editorial arrangement of “Auguries of Innocence.”
“Manuscrito de los Augurios de inocencia.” 153-76. Reduced-size color reproductions of the manuscript, 12.9 x 8.8 cm. vs. 18.4 x 12.5 cm. in the original.
Review
Ferrero, Jesús. “
La infinitud de lo pequeño.”
El País,
Babelia (27 Feb. 2021): 5.
A Descriptive Catalogue (1809)
For a Portuguese translation, see
fragmentum in Part VI.
Europe (1794)
Europe [C]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2020.
Europe [F]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2020.
The [First] Book of Urizen (1794)
El libro de Urizen. Traducción y noticia de N. N. San Sebastián: Norte, Gráfico-Editora, S.L., 1947. <WBHC p. 218> B. El libro de Urizen, 1794–1818. Presentación y traducción de N. N. Madrid: Archivos Vola, 2020. 8º, 72 pp., 33 illus., including the 27 plates of copy G. ISBN: 9788412170801. In Spanish.
A new edition with the same “noticia” and “traducción” by N. N. “The prose translation … seems to be little more than an adaptation of the translation of Edmundo González-Blanco (1928)” <BB p. 304, WBHC p. 218>. The “presentación” here (5-8) is the “noticia” in the 1947 volume (5-9). Reduced-size color reproductions of copy G (Library of Congress); plates 1-16 on pp. 17-32, plates 17-27 on pp. 49-59 (reproduced plates are 12.1 x 8.5 cm., vs. 16.8 x 11.7 cm. in the original).
The French Revolution (1791)
The French Revolution. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2020.
The Ghost of Abel (1822)
O Fantasma de Abel. Trans. Juliana Steil. Revista Literária em Tradução 1 (Sept. 2010): 157-64. In Portuguese. Includes full-page reproductions of plates 1 and 2 (160-61).
An Island in the Moon (1786?)
Una isla en la luna. Ed. and trans. Fernando Castanedo. 2014. English and Spanish on facing pages. <Blake (2015)> B. 2nd ed., revised, 2020.
Letters (1791–1827)
18 January 1808 to Ozias Humphry
For a Portuguese translation, see Tavares, “William Blake e a (re)visão do juízo final,” in Part VI.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93?)
El matrimonio del cielo y el infierno [H]. Ed. and trans. Fernando Castanedo. 2002, 2007, 2010, 2012 (4th ed., revised), 2014, 2017, 2018, 2019. In Spanish, with facing English for Marriage. <Blake (2003, 2014, 2017, 2018, 2020)> I. 9th ed., 2020.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794)
Canti dell’innocenza e dell’esperienza che mostrano i due contrari stati dell’anima umana. A Cura di Roberto Rossi Testa con uno scritto di T. S. Eliot. Milan: SE, 1997. 8º, 152 pp., 19.5 x 12 cm. ISBN: 9788877103765. B. Milan: SE, 2001. ISBN: 9788877104939. C. Milan: Feltrinelli, 2009. 172 pp. ISBN: 9788807822049. “A colour facsimile in English and Italian. Text of the Songs on facing pages in English and Italian. ‘Note ai Testi’ (pp. 139-44); T. S. Eliot, ‘Blake,’ tr. in Italian (145-49)” <WBHC p. 415>. D. Milan: Feltrinelli, 2014. 192 pp. ISBN: 9788807901065. E. Milan: SE, 2016. ISBN: 9788867232086. F. Milan: SE, 2020. 149 pp. ISBN: 9788867235643.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience. İstanbul: Karbon Kitaplar, 2020. ISBN: 9786257185394. In English. A reprint of the 1901 edition by R. Brimley Johnson <WBHC p. 406>.
To the Public (1793)
To the Public. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2020.
Section B: Collections and Selections
Gourlay, Alexander S. “An Overannotated ‘Auguries of Innocence.’” See Blake 54.2 in Part VI.
Pesni Nevinnosti i Opyta [Songs of Innocence and of Experience]. Trans. Sergei Stepanov. 1993, 2000, 2004, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2014. Moscow: Pal'mira, 2020. ISBN: 9785517017895. In Russian and English. Includes an introduction by Alexandra Glebovskaya and translations of Songs, Marriage, The Book of Thel, and “The Mental Traveller.”
Pіsnі Nevinnostі і Dosvіdu [Songs of Innocence and of Experience]. Trans. Les' Beley. Ivano-Frankivsk: P'ianii korabel', 2019. ISBN: 9789669756145. In Ukrainian.
Review
Zelіsko, Olesia. “
Krіz' sensi ta teksti (Katerina Babkіna, Vіl'iam Bleik, Vatslav Grab'є, Paul' Tselan) [Through Meanings and Texts (Catherine Babkina, William Blake, Václav Hrabě, Paul Celan)].”
prdg.me 2 (2020). In Ukrainian. Includes a review of the new Ukrainian translation of
Songs and other texts. The book contains VR effects: through the phone application
Blake’s images move and change color.
Poesie scelte. 9 poesie illustrate di William Blake. Lucca: Amianto Comics, 2019. 84 pp. ISBN: 9788894254969. In Italian. Nine of Blake’s poems illustrated in comic-like sequence by Federico Galeotti (“La tigre” [The Tyger], “Non cercare mai di dire al tuo amore” [Never Pain to Tell Thy Love], “La mosca” [The Fly], “Un albero avvelenato” [A Poison Tree], “L’astrazione umana” [The Human Abstract], “La risposta della terra” [Earth’s Answer], “Notte” [Night], “Il giardino dell’amore” [The Garden of Love], “Il giglio” [The Lily]). Blake’s poems are from the translations by Giacomo Conserva in Poesie <WBHC p. 550, Blake (2018)>.
Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii [Complete Short Poems]. Trans. Dmitrii Smirnov(-Sadovskii). Saint Petersburg: Kriga, 2020. ISBN: 9785907253001. In Russian and English. Dmitrii Smirnov, a poet and composer (1948–2020), was one of the best translators of Blake into Russian. This book contains poems from Poetical Sketches, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the Notebook (also known as the Rossetti Manuscript), and the Pickering Manuscript, as well as separate poems from letters, poetic messages, dedications, satirical poems, epigrams, and lyrical fragments from the prophecies.
§ Visioni di William Blake. Trans. Giuseppe Ungaretti. Ed. Mario Diacono. 1965, 1973, 1980, 1993. <WBHC p. 589> E. 1994. F. 1998. G. 2003. H. Milan: Mondadori, 2020. 448 pp. ISBN: 9788804715665. English and Italian on facing pages.
William Blake: Selected Poems. Ed. Nicholas Shrimpton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. <Blake (2020)>
Review
Gourlay, Alexander S. See
Blake 54.1 in Part VI.
Rogers, Annise. See
Vala in Part VI.
William Blake: Selected Works. Ed. Peter Otto. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. <Blake (2019)>
Review
Gourlay, Alexander S. See
Blake 54.1 in Part VI.
Yaşayan Her Şey Kutsaldır. Trans. Robin Derviş. İstanbul: Epona Kitap, 2020. ISBN: 9786058026131. In Turkish. The work consists of translations of extracts from various works of Blake, including The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Europe, and Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
Part II: Reproductions of Drawings and Paintings
Section A: Illustrations of Individual Authors
BUNYAN, John
The Pilgrim’s Progress. With Watercolour Illustrations by William Blake. Intro. Nathalie Collé. Ed. Roger Pooley. London: Folio Society, 2020. 750 copies. New photographs of 28 watercolors.
SHAKESPEARE, William
Illustrations to Shakespeare (composed c. 1779–c. 1825). William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2020.
Lear and Cordelia in Prison (Butlin #53), c. 1779.
Seven Shakespearean Subjects (Butlin #84), c. 1780:
Juliet Asleep (Butlin #84.1).
Falstaff and Prince Hal (Butlin #84.2).
Othello and Desdemona (Butlin #84.3).
Cordelia and the Sleeping Lear (Butlin #84.4).
Lear Grasping His Sword (Butlin #84.5).
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (Butlin #84.6).
Prospero and Miranda (Butlin #84.7).
The Vision of Queen Katharine (Butlin #247), c. 1783–90.
Oberon, Titania, and Puck with Fairies Dancing (Butlin #161), c. 1785.
Oberon and Titania, Preceded by Puck (Butlin #246), c. 1790–93.
Six Extra-Illustrations to a Second Folio Edition of Shakespeare (Butlin #547), 1806 and 1809:
Jacques and the Wounded Stag (Butlin #547.1), 1806.
Richard III and the Ghosts (Butlin #547.2), c. 1806.
Queen Katharine’s Dream (Butlin #547.3), 1809.
Brutus and Caesar’s Ghost (Butlin #547.4), 1806.
Hamlet and His Father’s Ghost (Butlin #547.5), 1806.
As If an Angel Dropped Down from the Clouds (Butlin #547.6), 1809.
The Vision of Queen Katharine (Butlin #548), 1807.
The Vision of Queen Katharine (Butlin #549), c. 1825–26.
Section B: Collections and Selections
Water Color Drawings (composed 1775–c. 1790). William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2020.
Countess Aveline, Three Details from Her Tomb (Butlin #5), c. 1775.
King Sebert, the North Front of His Monument (Butlin #7), c. 1775.
King Sebert, from the Wall-Painting in the Sedilia above His Monument (Butlin #8), c. 1775.
Henry III, from the Wall-Painting in the Sedilia above the Monument of King Sebert (Butlin #9), c. 1775.
King Sebert, Heads and Ornaments from His Monument (Butlin #10), c. 1775.
Saul and the Ghost of Samuel (Butlin #75), c. 1775–80.
The Landing of Brutus in England (Butlin #51), c. 1779.
A Landing in Britain (Butlin #52), c. 1779.
The Death of Earl Goodwin (Butlin #60), c. 1779.
The Making of Magna Charta (Butlin #62), c. 1779.
The Keys of Calais (Butlin #64), c. 1779.
Pestilence (Butlin #184), c. 1779.
Abraham and Isaac (Butlin #109), c. 1780.
Pestilence (Butlin #185), c. 1780–84.
An Allegory of the Bible (Butlin #127), c. 1780–85.
A Crouching Woman, Possibly Later Used for The Gates of Paradise pl. 16 (Butlin #133 recto), c. 1780–85.
The Awards of Athene (Butlin #96), c. 1780–85.
The Witch of Endor Raising the Spirit of Samuel (Butlin #144), 1783.
A Breach in a City, the Morning after the Battle (Butlin #191), c. 1784.
Joseph’s Brethren Bowing before Him (Butlin #155), c. 1785.
Sketch for Joseph Ordering Simeon to Be Bound (Butlin #158), c. 1785.
Joseph Ordering Simeon to Be Bound (Butlin #156), c. 1785.
Joseph Making Himself Known to His Brethren (Butlin #157), c. 1785.
A Man and Woman Kneeling and Warming Themselves at a Fire (Butlin #87 recto), c. 1785–90.
An Enthroned Old Man Offering Two Children to Heaven (Butlin #88 recto), c. 1785–90.
Age Teaching Youth (Butlin #91), c. 1785–90.
Elijah and the Chariot of Fire (Butlin #258), c. 1788–89.
Part IV: Bibliographies and Catalogues
Section A: Bibliographies
[cross-listing articles with substantial bibliographical content]
Calè, Luisa. “Blake and Exhibitions, 2019.” See Blake 54.1 in Part VI.
Davies, Keri. “Bill Goldman, 1950–2020.” See Index Rerum in Part V. Includes a list of Goldman’s works.
Gourlay, Alexander S. “John E. Grant, 1925–2020.” See Blake 54.3 in Part VI. Includes “A Chronological Checklist of Publications by John E. Grant.”
Hagan, Jade. “New Age Blake Memes and Other Psychotechnologies of the Self.” See Hagan in Part VI. Includes selected lists of “New Age and Psychedelic Media That Cite ‘Doors of Perception’ Blake Meme” and “New Age Physics Popularizations That Cite ‘Auguries of Innocence’ Blake Meme.”
Ripley, Wayne C., with Fernando Castanedo, Hikari Sato, and Hüseyin Alhas. “William Blake and His Circle: A Checklist of Scholarship in 2019.” See Blake 54.1 in Part VI.
Sato, Hikari. “Mushakoji Saneatsu to Sylvia Pankhurst: Eikoku shakai-shugi-kei kikanshi de hodosareta ‘Atarashiki mura’ [Saneatsu Mushakoji and Sylvia Pankhurst: ‘A New Village’ Reported in a Socialist Newspaper in Britain].” See Sato in Part VI. Lists works by Blake published by the weekly newspaper Workers Dreadnought.
Whittaker, Jason. “Blake and Music, 2019.” See Blake 54.1 in Part VI.
Section B: Catalogues
Adam, Edina, with Julian Brooks, and an essay by Matthew Hargraves. William Blake: Visionary. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2020. See Adam with Brooks in Part VI.
McCabe, Chris, et al. The Bard: William Blake at Flat Time House. London: Flat Time House, 2020. See McCabe et al. in Part VI.
Part V: Digital Resources
Allen Ginsberg Project
The site’s postings of the recordings and transcriptions of Ginsberg’s 1979 Naropa lectures are to August 1979 as of February 2021.
Ashbourne, Richard. “William Blake’s Dreamy Rendering of The Faerie Queene.” National Trust, Petworth House (7 Apr. 2020): 14 pars.
BARS Digital Events. A series of Zoom discussions on a wide range of topics related to Romanticism. Available at the BARS Blog or on YouTube.
Blake Society
Digital events:
Marina White Raven. “The Sick Rose (Encountering Blake).” 27 May 2020. A performance piece inspired by Blake.
Blake Book Club. 27 July–2 Aug. 2020. A book club meeting held via Twitter on The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
“Blakety Blake 2020.” 30 Sept. 2020. A Blake quiz bowl held via Zoom.
“Blake in Tuebingen.” 21 Oct. 2020. A Zoom presentation by the artist Dieter Loechle and the academic Christoph Reinfandt.
“Harriet Stubbs.” 4 Nov. 2020. A performance by the musician, whose debut album is titled Heaven and Hell: The Doors of Perception.
“Blake’s Night.” 28 Nov. 2020. The launch of Vala, the new journal of the Blake Society.
“Newton.” 7 Dec. 2020. Sarah Haggarty discusses the color print Newton.
Davies, Keri. Index Rerum: A Blog about Books, Book-Collecting, William Blake, and Lots of Other Things.
Scholarship:
Fedorov, Leonid. Music videos of Fedorov’s songs to Blake’s verses. June-Nov. 2020. During the COVID lockdown, Russian musician Leonid Fedorov (Auktyon rock band) wrote an album set to Blake’s lyrics, translated into Russian anew by Andrei Smurov and Alexander Delphinov. This YouTube channel contains music videos of these songs.
Khanukaeva, Raisa. “Uil'iam Bleik: pevets Biblii, bunta i svobodnoi liubvi. Kak strannyi i miatezhnyi angliiskii poet vdokhnovil nobelevskogo laureata Ol'gu Tokarchuk [William Blake: A Bard of the Bible, Rebellion, and Free Love. How a Strange and Rebellious English Poet Inspired the Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk].” 11 Sept. 2020. In Russian. About the influence of Blake’s work on the contemporary Polish writer and Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, especially her novel Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead.
Lisin, Dmitrii. “Drugaia roza. Pochemu na karantine Leonid Fedorov s druz'iami stali pisat' pesni na stikhi Uil'iama Bleika i snimat' videoklipy? [The Other Rose. Why in Quarantine Did Leonid Fedorov and His Friends Begin to Write Songs Based on Poems by William Blake and Shoot Video Clips?].” Colta (9 Nov. 2020). In Russian. How Leonid Fedorov wrote the album Blake during the pandemic and recorded videos (see Fedorov, above); contains an interview with him.
“‘May-Day in London’ by William Blake.” Graphic Arts Collection, Special Collections, Firestone Library, Princeton University. 1 May 2020. A blog post on “May-Day in London” from the Wit’s Magazine (1784).
Morgan Library & Museum
New photographs of the Pickering Manuscript, including flyleaves, are now available.
Murray-White, James. “Blake and the Pandemic.” Finding Blake: Reimagining William Blake for the 21st Century (2 Apr. 2020): 12 pars. An update on the film project in the context of COVID.
Poznanskaia, Anna. “Uil'iam Terner i Uil'iam Bleik. Iz XVIII stoletiia v XX vek [William Turner and William Blake. From the Eighteenth Century to the Twentieth Century].” 27 May 2020. In Russian. An online lecture.
Serdechnaia, Vera. “Uil'iam Bleik kak poet [William Blake as a Poet].” 10 June 2020. In Russian. An online lecture.
Serdechnaia, Vera. “Uil'iam Bleik v russkoi kul'ture [William Blake in Russian Culture].” 17 June 2020. In Russian. An online lecture on Blake reception in Russian culture, 1834–2020.
Smirnov, Dmitrii. “Uvidet' Vechnost': kompozitor Dmitrii Smirnov ob Uil'iame Bleike [Seeing Eternity: Composer Dmitrii Smirnov about William Blake].” Stravinsky.online (18 May 2020). In Russian. Dmitrii Smirnov on his experience of composing music to Blake’s verses.
Volkova, Daria. “Khudozhnik Bleik: graver, romantik, demiurg [Blake the Artist: Engraver, Romantic, Demiurge].” 3 June 2020. In Russian. An online lecture.
Whitson, Roger. “The Interdisciplinary Legacies of Donald Ault.” Romantic Circles Pedagogies Hangout. Romantic Circles (Nov. 2017). A discussion of Ault’s work and influence among Whitson, Ron Broglio, Tof Eklund, Laurie Taylor, and Zach Whalen.
Whitson, Roger. “William Blake Live.” Romantic Circles Pedagogies Hangouts. Romantic Circles (Apr.-June 2020). A series of engaging Zoom discussions with Blake scholars, moderated by Whitson, with participation by other scholars who attended the live sessions. Whitson begins each session by posing the questions, “When did you start reading William Blake, and how did he become important to your work?”
Whittaker, Jason. Zoamorphosis/The Blake 2.0 Blog: William Blake in Art, Music, Film, and Literature.
Significant postings include:
Scholarship:
Katharina Hagen. “Failed Eternity.” 2 Mar. 2020. On Bruce Dickinson’s song “If Eternity Should Fail,” which was recorded and released by Iron Maiden, and its relationship to the Mayans and Milton.
Katharina Hagen. “Le Petit Prince—A French Tale of Innocence and Experience.” 14 May 2020. “While the tale may not strike as explicitly Blakean, it echoes many of Blake’s ideas and topoi” (par. 12).
Review:
Obituary:
“Dmitri Smirnov: 1948–2020.” 10 Apr. 2020. Smirnov “spent most of his career creating stunning and innovative compositions that set a multitude of Blake’s works to music” (par. 1).
William Blake Archive
Robert Rich. “Languages and Ligatures.” 10 July 2020. On the problems of representing non-English languages: “Blake’s use of foreign languages and his own creative twists on them will likely continue to present interesting editorial puzzles” (par. 15).
Scholarship:
Blakeana:
New YouTube tutorials:
“William Blake.” Organic Radicals: Challenging the System to Its Core (3 Jan. 2020). A popular survey of Blake in the radical tradition, with references to E. P. Thompson and antinomianism.
Part VI: Criticism, Biography, and Reviews
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T V W Y Z
A
Adam, Edina. “William Blake’s ‘Bounding Outline’: On the Sources of Artistic Originality.” See Adam with Brooks.
Adam, Edina, and Julian Brooks. “Acknowledgments.” See Adam with Brooks.
Adam, Edina, and Julian Brooks. “Introduction.” See Adam with Brooks.
Adam, Edina, with Julian Brooks, and an essay by Matthew Hargraves. William Blake: Visionary. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2020. ISBN: 9781606066423. Catalogue for the exhibition of the same name, originally slated to run at the J. Paul Getty Museum from 21 July to 11 October 2020, but postponed because of COVID. The catalogue is dedicated to Robert N. Essick.
Potts, Timothy. “Foreword.” 7.
Adam, Edina, and Julian Brooks. “Acknowledgments.” 9. Includes the dedication to Essick.
Adam, Edina, and Julian Brooks. “Introduction.” 11-17. “The book you hold in your hands, and the related Getty exhibition, are modest contributions aimed at bringing the artist and his works to a wider US audience” (11).
Adam, Edina. “William Blake’s ‘Bounding Outline’: On the Sources of Artistic Originality.” 19-27. “Blake’s engagement with the art of the past fueled his originality” (26).
Hargraves, Matthew. “America’s Blake.” 29-35. A survey of major American Blake collectors, from the transcendentalists to Essick.
Review
Wyszpolski, Bondo. “
William Blake: Hello, Goodbye.”
Easy Reader News (10 Dec. 2020): 11 pars. Considers the catalogue in light of the postponement of the exhibition.
Adnot, Camille. “Désordres instinctifs de Tharmas: le corps désœuvré de The Four Zoas de William Blake.” See Braida-Laplace et al.
Adnot, Camille. “Imag(e)iner la création. Construire, déconstruire et reconstruire la Bible de l’enfer blakienne.” See Bonnecase, Hobbes, Blair, Blake.
§ Adnot, Camille. “Le Mariage du Ciel et de l’Enfer, Carte du Maraudeur blakienne? Entre anonymat et pseudonymat.” Le Pardaillan 4 (2018). In French.
Akimoto, Yuko. “Takiguchi Shuzo to shimpi shugi teki sekaikan: William Blake juyo wo shoten nishite [Shuzo Takiguchi and Mystical Worldview: Focus on the Reception of William Blake].” Hokkai-Gakuen Daigaku Jimbun Ronshu [Hokkai-Gakuen University Studies in Culture] 69 (2020): 165-92. In Japanese.
Almeida, Joselyn M., and Sara Medina Calzada. “Romanticism’s Pan-Atlantic Life: Blake, Shelley, and Byron in José Joaquín de Mora’s Meditaciones Poéticas (1826).” Painting Words: Aesthetics and the Relationship between Image and Text. Ed. Beatriz González-Moreno and Fernando González-Moreno. New York: Routledge, 2020. 146-60. “This chapter explores William Blake’s first foray in America with the publication of José Joaquín de Mora’s Meditaciones Poéticas (London, 1826), a collection of poems about death and the afterlife illuminated and inspired by Blake’s designs for Robert Blair’s The Grave” (abstract).
Antliff, Mark. “Pacifism, Realism, and Pathology: Alex Comfort, Cecil Collins, and Neo-Romantic Art during World War II.” Modernism/Modernity 27.3 (Sept. 2020): 519-49. Some references to the influence of Blake and Samuel Palmer on the Neo-Romantics.
Asiatidou, Kyriaki. “Reason and the Deification of Humanity: William Blake.” İnönü University International Journal of Social Sciences 9.1 (2020): 179-94. In English (abstract in English and Turkish).
Azariah-Kribbs, Colin. Rev. of William Blake’s Gothic Imagination: Bodies of Horror, ed. Chris Bundock and Elizabeth Effinger. See Bundock and Effinger.
Azevedo, Mail Marques de. “William Blake: o gênio oitocentista da intermidialidade como personagem em Mad Girl’s Love Song.” Revista Letras Raras 9.3 (Aug. 2020): 136-53. In Portuguese (abstract in Portuguese and English). Discusses “the appropriation of William Blake’s persona as a character in the novel Mad Girl’s Love Song, by the Indian post-colonial writer Rukmini Bhaya Nair” (abstract).
B
Balkır, Sedat. “William Blake—Hayal Gücü ve Sonsuz Beden [William Blake—Imagination and Endless Body].” Journal of Arts 3.1 (2020): 1-10. In Turkish (abstract in Turkish and English).
Beigi, Roohollah Datli. “Tyranny of Conventions: A Comparative Study of Blake’s Visions and Hardy’s Tess.” Kata [Indonesia] 21.2 (2020): 60-67.
Bentley, G. E., Jr. Boondoggles: Travels of a Restless Professor. Victoria: FriesenPress, 2018. <Blake (2019)>
Review
Butlin, Martin.
Postmaster & the Merton Record (2019): 89-90.
Billingsley, Naomi. “‘As the Eye Is Formed’: Seeing as Christ in Blake’s Bartimaeus.” See Ludlow.
Billingsley, Naomi. The Visionary Art of William Blake: Christianity, Romanticism and the Pictorial Imagination. London: I. B. Tauris, 2018. <Blake (2019)>
Review
Lepine, Ayla. “
Heaven, Earth, and Art History’s Theological Turn.”
Art History 43.4 (2020): 862-69. Reviewed alongside T. J. Clark’s
Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come (London: Thames and Hudson, 2018) and Thomas Crow’s
No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art (Sydney: Power Polemics, 2017).
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly
Volume 53, number 4 (spring 2020)
Article
Robert N. Essick. “Blake in the Marketplace, 2019.” 5 pars., plus listings. Major transactions include an unrecorded, hand-colored copy of Night Thoughts (copy BB) discovered and sold; the acquisition of The Day of Judgment, a watercolor illustration of The Grave, by the Art Institute of Chicago; and the auction of an unrecorded copy of Maria: A Novel (London, 1785).
Reviews
Luisa Calè. “William Blake, Tate Britain, 11 September 2019–2 February 2020; Martin Myrone and Amy Concannon, with an afterword by Alan Moore, William Blake.” 29 pars.
R. Paul Yoder. James Rovira, ed., Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2. 16 pars. “The persuasiveness of the collection depends largely on how one views the persuasiveness of [its] understanding of Romanticism” (par. 1).
Minute Particulars
Karen Mulhallen. “The Publisher Not Mad.” 6 pars. Challenges the claim in Myrone and Concannon’s William Blake that Richard Edwards went insane.
Volume 54, number 1 (summer 2020)
Remembrance
Vera Serdechnaia. “Dmitri Smirnov, 1948–2020.” A remembrance of the Russian composer.
Articles
Wayne C. Ripley, with Fernando Castanedo, Hikari Sato, and Hüseyin Alhas. “William Blake and His Circle: A Checklist of Scholarship in 2019.” 37 pars., plus listings.
Luisa Calè. “Blake and Exhibitions, 2019.” 1 par., plus listings.
Jason Whittaker. “Blake and Music, 2019.” 3 pars., plus listings.
Review
Alexander S. Gourlay. Peter Otto, ed., William Blake; Nicholas Shrimpton, ed., William Blake: Selected Poems. 10 pars.
Volume 54, number 2 (fall 2020)
Articles
G. A. Rosso. “Interpreting Blake’s The Magdalene at the Sepulchre.” 23 pars. “The Magdalene at the Sepulchre is a consummate example of Blake’s incarnational aesthetic and a striking visualization of his interpretive approach to scripture” (par. 23).
Juliana Steil and Lawrence Flores Pereira. “Translating Blake’s Prophetic Poetry: The Case of Milton.” 15 pars. On translating Milton into Portuguese.
Minute Particulars
Wayne C. Ripley. “James Blake of Rotherhithe, Timber Merchant.” 4 pars. Notes the discovery of the admission paper that documents that Blake’s father was granted the Freedom of the City of London, with the same document recording that Blake’s paternal grandfather was a timber merchant.
Alexander S. Gourlay. “An Overannotated ‘Auguries of Innocence.’” 2 pars., plus annotated text. A richly annotated “edition” of “Auguries of Innocence,” with a brief but informative introduction.
Review
Mark Crosby. Sendak and Blake Illustrating “Songs of Innocence” with an Essay by Prof. Robert N. Essick. 8 pars.
Volume 54, number 3 (winter 2020–21)
Remembrance
Alexander S. Gourlay. “John E. Grant, 1925–2020.” Includes “A Chronological Checklist of Publications by John E. Grant.”
Articles
Chen, Kang-Po. “Violence, Death, and Autoeroticism: The Alternative Self-Annihilation in Visions of the Daughters of Albion.” 20 pars. Explores how “self-annihilation is a major source of eroticism in [Blake’s] portrayal of unconventional sexual experiences” (par. 2).
Hagen, Katharina. “‘If you want to learn the secrets, close your eyes’: Bruce Dickinson’s ‘Gates of Urizen’ as Contrary Version of The [First] Book of Urizen.” 20 pars. “Dickinson’s adaptation changes the outcome of Urizen and turns the plot into practical advice on how to pass the gates of Urizen” (par. 1).
Minute Particulars
King, Shelley, and John B. Pierce. “‘Remarkable both for Genius, & Extravagance’: Amelia Opie and Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job.” 11 pars. Sketches Opie’s probable knowledge of Blake and details the history of the copy of Job now held by the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College.Their account offers a more likely origin for the copy than G. E. Bentley, Jr.’s speculation that it originated with John Linnell (Blake Records, 1st ed. [1969] 602n3).
Bloom, Harold. “Milton and William Blake: The Human Form Divine.” Take Arms against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader’s Mind over a Universe of Death. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. 110-58. Bloom’s last reflections on two figures who dominated his work, with comments as well on Northrop Frye, T. S. Eliot, and William Hayley. Quoting plate 41 of Milton, Bloom writes, “If that should be my final quotation from Blake, I am content” (158).
Bobb, Desmond. “Why the Y in ‘The Tyger’?” See Vala.
Bois, Catherine. Un langage investi: rhétorique et poésie lyrique dans le long XVIIIe siècle britannique. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2020. 21.5 cm. 424 pp. ISBN: 9782729709556. In French. Chapters 4 (“Le poète du premier romantisme et le langage lyrique: pathème et métafigure”) and 5 (“La rhétoricité lyrique: la poésie est-elle chant ou discours?”) address the “romantic rhetorization of lyrical language in Blake’s poetry,” arguing that “the process emerges from displacement of classic use of rhetorical pathos and voice.” Three sections (“Rejet du pathos fondateur de l’énonciation syntaxique: le ‘style coupé’ de William Blake” [306-23]; “L’impossible figure blakienne: la satire à la limite du pathos lyrique” [337-40]; “Chez William Blake: la non-invocation et le pathos du langage auto-réflexif” [347-51]) include close readings of several Songs (“Infant Joy,” “The Divine Image,” “The Tyger,” “London,” “Infant Sorrow,” “The Human Abstract,” “To Tirzah”) and offer insights on The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and The Book of Urizen. In “Le mot, la chose et le dire du poète chez William Blake” (254-60), sections from Milton, Jerusalem, and the annotations to Reynolds are briefly discussed.
Bonnecase, Denis. “Énergie, prophétie, mise en scène de l’écriture dans The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” See Bonnecase, Hobbes, Blair, Blake.
Bonnecase, Denis, ed. Hobbes, Blair, Blake: Hommage à François Piquet. Paris: Michel Houdiard Éditeur, 2018. 24 cm. 129 pp. ISBN: 9782356921642. In French. Includes three essays on Blake:
Bonnecase, Denis. “Énergie, prophétie, mise en scène de l’écriture dans The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”
Adnot, Camille. “Imag(e)iner la création. Construire, déconstruire et reconstruire la Bible de l’enfer blakienne.”
Dauphin, Caroline. “Histoire(s) naturelle(s) du tigre: reconstruire l’animal dans l’œuvre de William Blake.”
Review
Ibata, Hélène.
XVII-XVIII: Revue de la Société d’études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles 76 (2019): 9 pars. In French.
Braida-Laplace, Antonella, Sophie Laniel-Musitelli, and Céline Sabiron, eds. Inconstances romantiques: Visions et révisions dans la littérature britannique du long XIXe siècle. Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy-Éditions universitaires de Lorraine, 2019. 24 cm. 282 pp. ISBN: 9782814305489. In French. Includes:
Adnot, Camille. “Désordres instinctifs de Tharmas: le corps désœuvré de The Four Zoas de William Blake.”
Dauphin, Caroline. “La métamorphose d’Ovide: transformations poétiques et végétales dans la poésie d’Erasmus Darwin et de William Blake.” On Ovid’s Metamorphoses as hypotext for Blake’s hybrid plants in the Songs, The Book of Thel, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion.
Review
Scarpa, Sébastien.
Miranda: Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone 21 (2020): 7 pars. In French. Pars. 3 and 5 comment on Adnot’s and Dauphin’s articles.
Bruder, Helen P., and Tristanne Connolly, eds. Beastly Blake. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. <Blake (2019)>
Review
Otto, Peter. “
Looking ‘thro … & not with’ the Eye: From Romanticism to the Counter Culture, Rock and Roll, and the Anthropocene.”
European Romantic Review 31.1 (2020): 67-74. Also reviews
Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2, ed. James Rovira.
Bundock, Christopher. “Blake’s Nervous System: Hypochondria, Judaism, and Jerusalem.” See Rajan and Faflak, William Blake.
Bundock, Chris, and Elizabeth Effinger, eds. William Blake’s Gothic Imagination: Bodies of Horror. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. <Blake (2019)>
Reviews
Azariah-Kribbs, Colin.
Eighteenth-Century Fiction 32.2 (winter 2019–20): 371-73. “The intellectual energy and breadth of the various articles will assuredly stimulate the interests of other scholars to find further productive intersections between Blake’s work and the rise of the gothic as either a genre or an aesthetic mode” (371).
Whitson, Roger. “
Living Forms of History: Strategic Presentism in Blake Studies.”
European Romantic Review 31.4 (2020): 484-89. Also reviews
William Blake in Context, ed. Sarah Haggarty.
Butlin, Martin. Rev. of G. E. Bentley, Jr., Boondoggles: Travels of a Restless Professor. See Bentley.
C
Calè, Luisa. “Blake and Exhibitions, 2019.” See Blake 54.1.
Calè, Luisa. “‘A Dream of Thiralatha’: Promiscuous Book Gatherings and the Wanderings of Blake’s Separate Plates.” Studies in Romanticism 59.4 (2020): 431-45.
Calè, Luisa. Rev. of William Blake, Tate Britain, and its catalogue. See Blake 53.4.
Carey, John. “Romantic Eccentrics: Blake, Byron, Burns.” A Little History of Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. ISBN: 9780300232226. 128-31. A brief overview of Blake in a literary history of poetry aimed at a popular audience.
Carlson, Kristen. Rev. of Richard C. Sha, Imagination and Science in Romanticism. See Sha.
Chen, Kang-Po. “Violence, Death, and Autoeroticism: The Alternative Self-Annihilation in Visions of the Daughters of Albion.” See Blake 54.3.
Choe, Sharon. “Deformed Bodies and Norse Origins in William Blake.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 60.3 (summer 2020): 529-49. “The scope of this article then is to rethink how the formation of Urizen’s deformed body speaks to Blake’s antiquarian interests, specifically in the North and Old Norse, and how this interest in an alternate creation narrative reveals the limits of the Genesis narrative when examining The Book of Urizen” (531).
Clark, David L. “Blake’s Decomposite Art: On the Image of Language and the Ruins of Representation.” See Rajan and Faflak, William Blake.
Collings, David. “Labouring with/in Disaster: Blake’s Workless Work in Jerusalem.” See Rajan and Faflak, William Blake.
Collyer, Ed. “Teaching ‘The Tyger.’” See Vala.
Corti, Claudia. “L’allegra discesa di Blake nell’Inferno dantesco.” See Dante e l’arte.
Cox, Octavia. Rev. of The Regency Revisited, ed. Tim Fulford and Michael E. Sinatra. See Mazzeo.
Crisafulli, Edoardo. “La rinascita della fortuna di Dante in Gran Bretagna vis-à-vis l’ideologia e l’estetica mainstream nell’epoca romantica: il caso della metamorfosi del Lucifero dantesco nella triade Milton, Cary, e Blake.” See Dante e l’arte.
Curbet, Joan. “Prophetic Gestures: How Blake Drew His Virgil.” See Dante e l’arte.
D
Dante e l’arte
Number 7 (2020)
“Dante e Blake”
“Introduzione.” 5. In Italian.
“Introduction.” 7. In English.
Corti, Claudia. “L’allegra discesa di Blake nell’Inferno dantesco.” 11-28. In Italian (abstract in Italian and English). On Blake’s illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy, especially to Inferno, and “his humourous and complicit involvement with the motivations of the supposed sinners, with whom he transparently identifies himself” (abstract).
Villa, Marianna. “Dal testo all’immagine: Blake in dialogo con Dante.” 29-58. In Italian (abstract in Italian and English).
Crisafulli, Edoardo. “La rinascita della fortuna di Dante in Gran Bretagna vis-à-vis l’ideologia e l’estetica mainstream nell’epoca romantica: il caso della metamorfosi del Lucifero dantesco nella triade Milton, Cary, e Blake.” 59-100. In Italian (abstract in Italian and English). On Cary’s translation of the Divine Comedy and Blake’s images of both Milton’s Satan and Dante’s Lucifer. “Blake’s Satan is the epitome of a humanity whose fall from grace stems from a withered poetic imagination. This view modernizes, but does not cloud, the notion of absolute evil underpinning Christian metaphysics” (abstract).
De Santis, Silvia. “How can I help thy Husband’s copying Me? Dante tra Blake, Füssli e Flaxman.” 101-28. In Italian (abstract in Italian and English). Considers the bonds of friendship linking Blake, Fuseli, and Flaxman, and how their interpretations of Dante may have influenced one another.
Curbet, Joan. “Prophetic Gestures: How Blake Drew His Virgil.” 129-54. In English (abstract in Italian and English). On Blake’s depiction of Dante’s Virgil in the Divine Comedy by means of prophetic gestures.
Font Paz, Carme. “‘Che son la Pia’: Liminal Female Figures of Intercession in Blake’s Illustrations of the Commedia.” 155-72. In English (abstract in Italian and English). Analyzes how Blake portrays the mediating role of key female characters in Dante’s Divine Comedy, especially in Purgatorio.
Dauphin, Caroline. “Histoire(s) naturelle(s) du tigre: reconstruire l’animal dans l’œuvre de William Blake.” See Bonnecase, Hobbes, Blair, Blake.
Dauphin, Caroline. “La métamorphose d’Ovide: transformations poétiques et végétales dans la poésie d’Erasmus Darwin et de William Blake.” See Braida-Laplace et al.
Dearing, Todd. “‘Every thing is Human, mighty! sublime!’: New Literary Humanism and the Trope of the Daimon in William Blake’s Jerusalem.” PhD diss., Flinders University, 2020.
De Santis, Silvia. “How can I help thy Husband’s copying Me? Dante tra Blake, Füssli e Flaxman.” See Dante e l’arte.
Dmitrieva, Tatiana. “Tvorchestvo i mifologiia Uil'iama Bleika v kontekste kinoproizvedeniia Dzh. Dzharmusha ‘Mertvets’ [William Blake’s Works and Mythology in the Context of J. Jarmusch’s Film Dead Man].” Sibirskii antropologicheskii zhurnal [Siberian Journal of Anthropology] 4.4 (2020): 201-11. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). The author analyzes the film Dead Man, comparing it with the poems and graphic works by William Blake, in particular the Visionary Heads, The Ghost of a Flea, and “The Little Boy Lost.”
Dombowsky, Philip. “The Illustrated Books of William Blake.” National Gallery of Canada Magazine (20 Feb. 2020): 7 pars. Also available in French: “Les livres illustrés de William Blake.” Description of the exhibition of the same name held at the National Gallery of Canada [Ottawa] that was originally slated to run from 14 January to 26 April 2020. Due to COVID, the gallery closed on 14 March and did not reopen until 18 July.
E
Effinger, Elizabeth. “Forgiving Blake’s Disaster: The Changing Face(s) of Science and ‘Governmentalized’ Bodies of Knowledge.” See Rajan and Faflak, William Blake.
Effinger, Elizabeth. Rev. of The Reception of William Blake in Europe, ed. Sibylle Erle and Morton D. Paley. See Erle and Paley.
Eisenman, Stephen F. Rev. of William Blake, Tate Britain. See Myrone and Concannon.
Erle, Sibylle. “Blake, Children and Lockdown.” See Vala.
Erle, Sibylle, and Morton D. Paley, eds. The Reception of William Blake in Europe. 2 vols. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. <Blake (2020)>
Reviews
Effinger, Elizabeth.
European Romantic Review 31.4 (2020): 490-94. “This volume … marks the first editorial collaboration between Erle and Paley, a relationship I hope will continue in future herculean projects” (490).
Ferber, Michael.
Eighteenth-Century Studies 53.2 (2020): 330-33.
Matthews, Susan.
BARS Review 53 (2019): 5 pars. “Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of these two volumes, however, is what they reveal about the distinct Blakes that have been shaped by politics” (par. 4).
Essick, Robert N. “Blake in the Marketplace, 2019.” See Blake 53.4.
F
Faflak, Joel. “Blake’s Milton and the Disaster of Psychoanalysis.” See Rajan and Faflak, William Blake.
Ferber, Michael. Rev. of The Reception of William Blake in Europe, ed. Sibylle Erle and Morton D. Paley. See Erle and Paley.
Ferreira, Isabel Cristina Rodrigues, and Ingrid Oliveira Pinto. “Songs of Innocence and of Experience: um olhar sobre o processo de tradução.” Revista Eletrônica do Instituto de Humanidades 50 (2020): 130-47. In Portuguese (abstract in Portuguese and English). Analyzes and compares Paulo Vizioli’s and Renato Suttana’s translations (1993 and 2011 respectively) of Blake’s “The Blossom” and “The Sick Rose.”
Filippovskii, German. “Dve kontseptsii detstva v evropeiskoi i russkoi poezii XVIII-XIX v. [Two Conceptions of Childhood in European and Russian Poetry of the Eighteenth to Nineteenth Centuries].” Verkhnevolzhskii filologicheskii vestnik [Verhnevolzhski Philological Bulletin] 3 (22) (2020): 8-17. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). The article is devoted to the comparison of childhood images in the works of Russian poets Derzhavin and Nekrasov and English poets Blake and Wordsworth.
Font Paz, Carme. “‘Che son la Pia’: Liminal Female Figures of Intercession in Blake’s Illustrations of the Commedia.” See Dante e l’arte.
fragmentum
Number 42 (July–Sept. 2014)
“A poesia e a arte de William Blake: o Catálogo Descritivo”
Santos, Alcides Cardoso dos. “APRESENTAÇÃO WILLIAM BLAKE E A OPOSIÇÃO ARTE VERSUS COMÉRCIO [Presentation: William Blake and the Opposition of Art and Commerce].” 9-11. In Portuguese.
Tavares, Enéias Farias. “William Blake e o turbulento ano de 1809: catálogos descritivos, desavenças criativas e obras visionárias [William Blake and the Turbulent Year of 1809: Descriptive Catalogues, Creative Disagreements, and Visionary Works of Art].” 13-26. In Portuguese (abstract in Portuguese and English).
A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures, Poetical and Historical Inventions. 27-55. Text in English.
Um CATÁLOGO DESCRITIVO DE PINTURAS, INVENÇÕES HISTÓRICAS E POÉTICAS. 57-87. Text in Portuguese, trans. Enéias Tavares, Ana Paula Cabrera, Daniela do Canto, Andrio Santos, and Leandro Oliveira.
Santos, Alcides Cardoso dos. “‘I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create’: Blake e a questão do método [Blake and the Problem of Method].” 89-108. In Portuguese (abstract in Portuguese and English).
“UM CATÁLOGO DESCRITIVO DE PINTURAS & OUTRAS OBRAS VISIONÁRIAS.” N. pag. Images of the works described in the catalogue.
G
Gardner, James. “William Blake Revisited at the Morgan.” Magazine Antiques (13 July 2020): 8 pars. Calls attention to the digital version of the 2009–10 Morgan exhibition William Blake’s World: “A New Heaven Is Begun.”
§ Gillet, Louis. “Le cas de William Blake.” Revue des deux mondes (1 July 1923). B. 1924. C. 2012. <WBHC p. 2073> D. Le cas de William Blake. Angoulême: Éditions Marguerite Waknine, 2020. 24 pp. 12 color plates. ISBN: 9791094565636. In French. “About Crabb Robinson’s account of Blake in Morley’s edition” <WBHC p. 2073>.
Glück, Louise. “Nobel Lecture by Louise Glück.” Nobel Prize (7 Dec. 2020). Partly on Blake and particularly “The Little Black Boy.”
Göktepe, Mehmet. “Romantizm Sanat Akımı ve Sanatçıları Üzerine bir Değerlendirme [An Assessment of the Romantic Movement and Its Advocates].” Journal of Arts 3.1 (2020): 45-66. In Turkish (abstract in Turkish and English).
Goldsmith, Steven. “Nothing Lost: Blake and the New Materialism.” See Rajan and Faflak, William Blake.
Goldstein, Amanda Jo. “Blake’s Mundane Egg: Epigenesis and Milieux.” Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. <Blake (2018)>
Reviews
Hamilton, Ross.
Wordsworth Circle 50.4 (2019): 515-20. An “impressive and erudite study” (515).
Ruston, Sharon.
Eighteenth-Century Studies 53.4 (2020): 748-50.
Goldstein, Amanda Jo. “William Blake and the Time of Ontogeny.” Systems of Life: Biopolitics, Economics, and Literature on the Cusp of Modernity. Ed. Richard A. Barney and Warren Montag. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. <Blake (2019)>
Review
Mitchell, Robert.
Eighteenth-Century Studies 53.3 (2020): 481-90.
Goode, Mike. “Blakespotting” and “The Joy of Looking: What William Blake’s Pictures Want.” Romantic Capabilities: Blake, Scott, Austen, and the New Messages of Old Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. ISBN: 9780198862369. 35-98. Interesting work on Romantic and contemporary media. The two chapters on Blake are in a section titled “Viral Blake,” and both are revised versions of articles <WBHC p. 2091>. See also the interview with Goode at Hell’s Printing Press.
Goswamy, B. N. “The Fascinating Works of William Blake.” Tribune [India] (8 June 2020): 5 pars. An overview of Blake for a popular audience.
Gourlay, Alexander S. “John E. Grant, 1925–2020.” See Blake 54.3.
Gourlay, Alexander S. Rev. of William Blake: Selected Works, ed. Peter Otto, and William Blake: Selected Poems, ed. Nicholas Shrimpton. See Blake 54.1.
Gurton-Wachter, Lily. “Blake’s Blush: Wartime Shame in ‘London’ and Jerusalem.” See Rajan and Faflak, William Blake.
Gurton-Wachter, Lily. “Blake’s ‘Little Black Thing’: Happiness and Injury in the Age of Slavery.” English Literary History 87.2 (2020): 519-52. A very significant reading of the line “And because I am happy, & dance & sing” from “The Chimney Sweeper” of Experience: “I take the discomfort of trying to make sense of this perplexing line as a prompt for exploring the politics of joy in the 1790s, particularly in British writing about slavery and abolition” (520).
H
Habchi, Sobhi. “K. Gibran entre le ‘troisième oeil’ et W. Blake: jalons pour une esthétique visionnaire.” Revue de littérature comparée 326 (2008): 237-57. In French.
Hagan, Jade. “New Age Blake Memes and Other Psychotechnologies of the Self.” Configurations 28.2 (spring 2020): 211-53. “Blake became an emblematic figure of the Hippie and New Age’s mode of critique and their vision of a holistic and ecologically attuned way of life” (215). Includes selected lists of “New Age and Psychedelic Media That Cite ‘Doors of Perception’ Blake Meme” and “New Age Physics Popularizations That Cite ‘Auguries of Innocence’ Blake Meme.”
Haggarty, Sarah, ed. William Blake in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. <Blake (2020)>
Review
Whitson, Roger. See
Bundock and Effinger.
Hamilton, Ross. Rev. of Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science. See Goldstein, “Blake’s Mundane Egg: Epigenesis and Milieux.”
Hancock, Stephen. Rev. of Hélène Ibata, The Challenge of the Sublime. See Ibata, The Challenge of the Sublime.
Hargraves, Matthew. “America’s Blake.” See Adam with Brooks.
Hayes, Kevin J. “Edwin E. Slosson and the Melville Revival.” Notes and Queries 67.1 (2020): 133-34. “Slosson is the first to identify a similarity between Moby-Dick and the poetry of William Blake” (133).
Heath, Tim. “Introduction to Vala.” See Vala.
Heringman, Noah. “Primitive Arts and Sciences and the Body of Knowledge in Blake’s Epics.” See Rajan and Faflak, William Blake.
Higgs, John. “Blake under Lockdown.” See Vala.
Howard, Cameron B. R. “‘And Was Jerusalem Builded Here?’: Agency and Longing in Blake and Biblical Poetry.” Word & World 40.2 (spring 2020): 103-11. “The questions in Blake’s opening stanzas testify not simply to a nostalgic query about the past, but rather to a sense of longing for a new and better future” (110). [Word & World: Theology for Christian Ministry is a quarterly journal published by the Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota.]
Hudson, Robert. “Imagination: William Blake.” The Poet and the Fly: Art, Nature, God, Mortality, and Other Elusive Mysteries. Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2020. 39-64.
Hunnekuhl, Philipp. “‘matters of Religion & Morality’: Herder, Wordsworth, and Blake.” Henry Crabb Robinson: Romantic Comparatist, 1790–1811. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020. ISBN: 9781789621785. 159-93. The section on Blake is 184-93, though the preceding discussion of Herder and Wordsworth is relevant to Hunnekuhl’s wider argument. “Robinson’s underlying criteria for the appreciation of Blake the ‘Artist, Poet, and Religious Enthusiast’ … echo the concerns of Wordsworth and Herder: through invoking a childlike naivety, or simplicity, Blake frees compassion from religious dogmatism” (192). Hunnekuhl also reproduces the two pages of Robinson’s pocket diary that describe his visit to Blake’s exhibition and the writing of his 1811 article for Vaterländisches Museum.
I
Ibata, Hélène. The Challenge of the Sublime: From Burke’s “Philosophical Enquiry” to British Romantic Art. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. <Blake (2020)>
Review
Hancock, Stephen.
European Romantic Review 31.1 (2020): 122-27.
Ibata, Hélène. Rev. of Hobbes, Blair, Blake: Hommage à François Piquet, ed. Denis Bonnecase. See Bonnecase.
Ibata, Hélène. Rev. of William Blake, Tate Britain. See Myrone and Concannon.
Ibrayeva, Moldyr, and Aigul Orynbayeva. “Bitter Truth.” Aktual'nye voprosy sovremennoi nauki [Actual Issues of Modern Science] 3-4 (2020): 31-34. In English. The article presents a comparative analysis of two poems by Blake: “The Little Black Boy” and “I Saw a Chapel All of Gold.”
J
Jones, Josh. “William Blake Illustrates Mary Wollstonecraft’s Work of Children’s Literature, Original Stories from Real Life (1791).” Open Culture (13 May 2020): 9 pars. Aimed at a popular audience.
K
Kalaichandran, Amitha. “How Can We Bear This Much Loss?” New York Times (23 Sept. 2020): 18 pars. On Blake’s Job and the grief of COVID: “The lesson offered by Blake’s Job: understanding his role in a wider universe and cosmos, transformed in his surrender, and the release from the attachments to his old life” (par. 17).
§ Karaçoban, Atanas, and Patricia Denisa Dita. “Painting, Poetry and the Interference of the Genres in English Art: The Case of William Blake.” Border Crossing 10.1 (2020): 29-42.
Khachaturov, Sergei. “Gotitsizmy istoricheskoi zhivopisi epokhi romantizma. Bruni, Ivanov, Fiusli, Bleik [Gothicism in Romantic Historical Painting. Bruni, Ivanov, Fuseli, Blake].” Russkoe iskusstvo. II. Neuchtennye detali. Sbornik statei [Russian Art. II. Overlooked Details. Digest of Articles]. Saint Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2020. ISBN: 9785001650300. 75-94. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). The era of Romanticism made its main themes “overlooked details,” difficult and “incorrect,” “Gothic,” and “Romantic” signs of historical time, and personal understanding of incidents, accomplishments, and human deeds.
Khalip, Jacques. “Flea Trouble.” See Rajan and Faflak, William Blake.
Kikui, Takashi. “Meguru hikari no uta: Okada Takahiko wo tsuranuku William Blake [Songs of Encircling Light: Takahiko Okada Inspired by William Blake].” Gendai-shi techo [Contemporary Poetry Magazine] 63.11 (2020): 102-05. In Japanese. An article about Takahiko Okada (1939–97), a Japanese poet and art critic, who wrote his poetry under the influence of Blake.
King, Shelley, and John B. Pierce. “‘Remarkable both for Genius, & Extravagance’: Amelia Opie and Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job.” See Blake 54.3.
§ Ko, Joon Seog. “The Harmonizing Poetics of the Opposites in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Yeats Journal of Korea 60 (2019): 267-85. In Korean (abstract in English and Korean).
Kondo, Ariyuki. “William Blake Job-ki no sashie ko: Gothic seido ni chikaduki gakki wo teni shuno eikowo tataeyo [William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job: Get Close to the Gothic Cathedral and Praise the Lord with Your Instruments].” Ferris Jogakuin Daigaku Kirisuto-kyo Kenkyujo Kiyo [Bulletin of the Institute for the Study of Christianity, Ferris University] 5 (2020): 39-54. In Japanese. 18 plates by Blake.
L
Lepine, Ayla. Rev. of Naomi Billingsley, The Visionary Art of William Blake. See Billingsley.
Levy, Michelle. “Afterword: Blake’s Digitised Printed Script.” Literary Manuscript Culture in Romantic Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 259-67. Coda on Blake.
Ludlow, Elizabeth, ed. The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. ISBN: 9783030400811. Includes:
Rowland, Christopher. “Blake, Enoch and the Emergence of the Apocalyptic Christ.” 23-38.
Billingsley, Naomi. “‘As the Eye Is Formed’: Seeing as Christ in Blake’s Bartimaeus.” 39-52. “The chapter argues that the painting reflects a broader concern in Blake’s thought: the formation of sight” (abstract).
M
Marchetto Santorun, M. Cecilia. “‘Terrible monsters Sin-bred’: Blakean Monstrosity in Alan Moore’s Graphic Novels.” Palgrave Communications 6 (2020).
Matthews, Susan. Rev. of The Reception of William Blake in Europe, ed. Sibylle Erle and Morton D. Paley. See Erle and Paley.
Matthews, Susan. Rev. of William Blake, Tate Britain. See Myrone and Concannon.
Mazzeo, Tilar J. “William Blake and the Decorative Arts.” The Regency Revisited. Ed. Tim Fulford and Michael E. Sinatra. New York: Palgrave, 2016. <Blake (2018)>
Review
Cox, Octavia.
Romanticism 26.1 (2020): 107-09. Mazzeo “exposes that Blake was seated far nearer the heart of the Regency establishment than often thought, and that the impression of him as a radicalised artist disengaged from contemporary London culture ‘requires some urgent rethinking’ (65)” (108).
McCabe, Chris. “The Commission as Vision.” See McCabe et al.
McCabe, Chris, et al. The Bard: William Blake at Flat Time House. London: Flat Time House, 2020. 28 pp. A description of the exhibition is available at <http://flattimeho.org.uk/exhibitions/bard>.
McCabe, Chris. “The Commission as Vision.” 3-9.
Jarrett, Keith. “A Basic Diagram (or, On Alternate Time Signatures, Two Incidental Persons Converge upon Frameworks of Cosmology)” (2020).
McCabe, Chris. From “Civic” (2020).
McDevitt, Niall. “Edward I” (2020).
Montgomery, Robert. From “Poem in Lights to Be Scattered in the Square Mile” (2015/2020).
Shandhu, Karen. From “The Oak Tree Wears a Dress” (2020).
Sinclair, Iain. From “Mental Travailers: or, The Battle of the Books” (2020).
Yoseloff, Tamar. From “Belief Systems” (2020).
Rena, Magnus. “The Bard and the Fatal Sisters.” 19-23.
Review
Whaley, Henry.
Flat Time House (n.d.): 5 pp.
McQuail, Josephine A. “The Secret History of William Blake.” See Vala.
Mitchell, Robert. Rev. of Systems of Life: Biopolitics, Economics, and Literature on the Cusp of Modernity, ed. Richard A. Barney and Warren Montag. See Goldstein, “William Blake and the Time of Ontogeny.”
Mulhallen, Karen. “The Publisher Not Mad.” See Blake 53.4.
Muşlu, Meltem. “A Corpus-Based Analysis of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.” English Studies in the 21st Century. Ed. Zekiye Antakyalıoğlu et al. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020. 244-61.
Myrone, Martin, intro. Lives of William Blake. London: Pallas Athene, 2019. <Blake (2020)> B. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2020. ISBN: 9781606066614.
Myrone, Martin, and Amy Concannon, with an afterword by Alan Moore. William Blake. London: Tate Publishing, 2019. Catalogue for the 2019–20 Tate Britain exhibition. <Blake (2020)>
Reviews
Bhanot, Sunil. “
Exhibition: William Blake: Lost in Translation.”
British Journal of General Practice 70.690 (2020): 31. “Tate Britain was built partly on the profits of slavery, from the toil on the sugar plantations of Alabama and the Caribbean. The Tate & Lyle business flourished with the blood, sweat, and tears of captive Africans forcibly transported or born captive in the British colonies. Perhaps it’s a form of atonement for this legacy for the Tate to embrace an artist who believed in emancipation and social justice.”
Calè, Luisa. See
Blake 53.4.
De Courcier, Scar. “William Blake at Tate Britain.”
Jeviscachee.com (4 Feb. 2020): 11 pars.
Dobson, Chris. “
Last Chance to See: William Blake at Tate Britain.”
DailyArt (14 Jan. 2020): 3 pars.
Dumont, Etienne. “
La Tate Britain londonnienne montre William Blake à une nouvelle génération d’amateurs.”
Bilan (11 Jan. 2020): 6 pars. In French.
Eisenman, Stephen F. “
A Tate Retrospective Tamed the Visionary Radicalism of William Blake.”
Art in America (6 Apr. 2020): 21 pars. “Tate curators Martin Myrone and Amy Concannon offered what I would call a liberal Blake—someone neither radical nor conservative, neither mad nor sober, and neither bourgeois nor bohemian” (par. 4). Eisenman was the curator of William Blake and the Age of Aquarius at the Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Illinois, 2017–18.
Enciso, Adriana Díaz. “
Blake en la Tate.”
Literal: Latin American Voices/Voces LatinoAmericanas (9 Feb. 2020): 25 pars. In Spanish.
Ford, Laura Grace. “
A Visionary Sense of London.”
British Art Studies 15 (27 Feb. 2020): 39 pars.
Halliday, Ayun. “
William Blake’s Paintings Come to Life in Two Animations.”
Open Culture (4 Sept. 2020): 12 pars. A pairing of Sam Gainsborough’s animation for the 2019–20 Tate exhibition with that created by Sheila Graber for the Tate in 1978.
Hutchings-Georgiou, Hannah. “
William Blake. Tate Britain, London. £18. Until 2 February 2020.”
London Journal 45.3 (Nov. 2020): 335-39.
Ibata, Hélène. “
William Blake.”
Miranda: Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone 20 (2020): 11 pars. “It is truly a superlative exhibition” (par. 2).
Jacobs, Alan. “
Everything Is Illuminated: False Revolution: William Blake at the Tate Britain.”
Harper’s (22 Apr. 2020): 22 pars. “Blake spent a good deal of time in the company of political radicals and probably shared many of their political views, but his tendency to what he called ‘Nervous Fear’ kept him relatively quiet in public about such matters” (par. 9).
Jacobs, Alan. “
Why Blake Is Terrifying.”
Snakes and Ladders (23 Apr. 2020): 4 pars. Suggests that the Tate played down “Blake’s religious sensibilities”: “Politically radical? Check. Pacifist? Check. Feminist? Check. Pop culture maven? Check. In short, Blake was basically a
Guardian reader. And that’s the kind of ‘Rebel, Radical, Revolutionary’ that the corporate world is happy to support” (par. 4).
Kavanagh, Dave. “
Fearful Symmetry: William Blake as an Artist.”
Blue Nib Literary Magazine (23 Jan. 2020): 7 pars.
Kelly, Jane. “
The Wimminisation of Art Is Complete.”
Conservative Woman (25 May 2020): 14 pars. “Whether [Josephine Hopper] was talented or not belongs to the old canon of judgment; the fact that she was female is more important. At the Tate Britain William Blake exhibition last year, I read that his work was inspired by his wife Catherine. It was even suggested that she’d had a big hand in his etching and illustrations” (par. 3).
Matthews, Susan. “
Review of William Blake at Tate Britain: ‘For the pictures.’”
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 30 (2020): 6 pars. Engages with other reviews.
McIver, Gillian. “
Art Travelling: ‘Inside the mind of William Blake’—Tate Britain, London.”
Art Traveller (31 Jan. 2020): 11 pars.
Murray-White, James. “
With Mr. Blake at the Tate.”
Finding Blake: Reimagining William Blake for the 21st Century (22 Jan. 2020): 12 pars.
Simon. “
Content Warnings at Tate.”
Books & Boots: Reflections on Books and Art (3 Mar. 2020). References to the signage at the William Blake exhibition in a wider blog post on Tate Britain content warnings.
Sriskandarajah, Shamini. “
Tracing the ‘bounding line’: William Blake at Tate Britain.”
Lucy Writers (13 Feb. 2020): 8 pars.
“
William Blake—Artist of Apocalypse.”
WoaWomen Urra (20 Mar. 2020): 13 pars. “His famous illustration of his poem ‘The Tyger’ is smaller than a postcard!” (par. 5).
“
William Blake at Tate Britain.”
Timsformational (11 Mar. 2020): 4 pars.
N
Ngide, George Ewane. “Romantic Individuation and Individualism: Re-reading William Blake’s Vision of Romantic ‘Thingliness.’” International Journal of Language and Literature 7.2 (2019): 16-27. Ngide suggests the Songs portray “journeys of life from individuation, through individualism and back to individuation” (abstract).
O
Otto, Peter. “Negotiating the ‘Holy Land’: Cross-Cultural Encounters from Bonaparte to Blake.” Postcolonial Studies 23.3 (2020): 404-29. Special issue, “Catalysts of Change: Colonial Transformations of Anglo-European Literary Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century.”
Otto, Peter. Rev. of Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2, ed. James Rovira, and Beastly Blake, ed. Helen P. Bruder and Tristanne Connolly. See Bruder and Connolly.
Otto, Peter. “‘Second Birth’ and Gothic Fictions in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Catherine Blake’s ‘Agnes,’ and William Blake’s Vala, or The Four Zoas.” See Rajan and Faflak, William Blake.
P
Pashchenko, M. “Vzaimodeistvie slova i izobrazheniia v khudozhestvennykh proizvedeniiakh s avtorskimi illiustratsiiami (na materiale poezii U. Bleika) [The Interaction of Words and Images in Works of Art with Author’s Illustrations (Based on the Poetry of W. Blake)].” Aktual'nye problemy lingvistiki i literaturovedeniia. Sbornik materialov VI (XX) Mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii molodykh uchenykh [Actual Problems of Linguistics and Literary Criticism. Collection of Materials of the VI (XX) International Conference of Young Scientists]. Tomsk: STT, 2020. ISBN: 9785936296420. 215-16. In Russian. The author analyzes the mechanisms of interaction between text and images in Blake’s poem “The Clod and the Pebble.”
Pervozvanskii, Roman. “Pesni nevinnosti i opyta U. Bleika kak khudozhestvennoe edinstvo [Songs of Innocence and of Experience by W. Blake as an Artistic Unity].” Nauka i obrazovanie segodnia [Science and Education Today] 1 (48) (2020): 40-41. In Russian.
§ Piskorska, Anna. “Jedna rodzina duchowa: intertekstualna obecność natchnionej poezji Williama Blake'a w Truposzu Jima Jarmuscha [One Spiritual Family: The Intertextual Presence of William Blake’s Inspired Poetry in Dead Man Directed by Jim Jarmusch].” Rodzina: naturalna, duchowa, społeczna. Ed. Jan Zimny. Wrocław: Akademia Wojsk Lądowych imienia generała Tadeusza Kościuszki, 2020. ISBN: 9788395792915. 99-108. In Polish (abstract in Polish and English).
§ Pitruzzella, Salvo. “Note su Sanesi, Blake, e l’educazione alle arti.” Roberto Sanesi, filosofo e pedagogista dell’arte. Ed. Alessandro Di Chiara. Macerata: Edizioni Quodlibet, 2020. ISBN: 9788822905611. 125-38. In Italian.
Potter, Elizabeth. Rev. of Spoor (Pokot), dir. Agnieszka Holland. See Vala.
Potts, Timothy. “Foreword.” See Adam with Brooks.
R
Rajan, Tilottama. “System(s), Body, Corpus: The Autogenesis of Blake’s Lambeth Books.” See Rajan and Faflak, William Blake.
Rajan, Tilottama, and Joel Faflak. “Introduction: From Prophecy to Disaster.” See Rajan and Faflak, William Blake.
Rajan, Tilottama, and Joel Faflak, eds. William Blake: Modernity and Disaster. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. ISBN: 9781487506568.
Rajan, Tilottama, and Joel Faflak. “Introduction: From Prophecy to Disaster.” 3-29.
Heringman, Noah. “Primitive Arts and Sciences and the Body of Knowledge in Blake’s Epics.” 30-53. “By extending the myth of the Fall to bodies of knowledge, Blake enters a field of competition that encompasses speculative domains ranging from mythography to Naturphilosophie as well as empirical histories of custom and manner and of nature” (31).
Rajan, Tilottama. “System(s), Body, Corpus: The Autogenesis of Blake’s Lambeth Books.” 54-76. “This essay takes up the grotesque body of Urizen as an autoreferential figure for Blake’s own corpus, as the body’s systems and ecosystem disturb the System that Blake later constructs as an immunitary enclosure” (55).
Otto, Peter. “‘Second Birth’ and Gothic Fictions in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Catherine Blake’s ‘Agnes,’ and William Blake’s Vala, or The Four Zoas.” 77-102. With substantial analysis of Catherine’s painting of Agnes from The Monk, Otto reads The Four Zoas “as a Gothic fiction that takes ruin … and the dynamics of ruination … as its primary themes” (77).
Faflak, Joel. “Blake’s Milton and the Disaster of Psychoanalysis.” 103-25. “Milton constitutes and reads as a vast identity crisis” (112).
Gurton-Wachter, Lily. “Blake’s Blush: Wartime Shame in ‘London’ and Jerusalem.” 126-49. “Blake, I argue, describes a general, national shame that is dispersed, displaced, and collective, that belongs to no one in particular and yet infects everyone, and that is a symptom of—but also a way to critique—the disease called war” (128).
Bundock, Christopher. “Blake’s Nervous System: Hypochondria, Judaism, and Jerusalem.” 150-71. Reads the body of Albion in Jerusalem through the lens of the long reaction to the 1753 Jewish Naturalization Bill: “Albion thus seems to become the living embodiment of the anti-Semitic image of the Jew that he himself generates” (165).
Effinger, Elizabeth. “Forgiving Blake’s Disaster: The Changing Face(s) of Science and ‘Governmentalized’ Bodies of Knowledge.” 172-93. Examines Hand in Jerusalem as representing the “disastrously disfigured body” of “the industry of science” (174).
Collings, David. “Labouring with/in Disaster: Blake’s Workless Work in Jerusalem.” 194-211. “Blake suggests that the golden road out of ideology is to relinquish all appeals to law and to embrace wholesale forgiveness” (200).
Goldsmith, Steven. “Nothing Lost: Blake and the New Materialism.” 212-29. “Blake’s unqualified religious enthusiasm (including his redemptive ideal of art) grasps the force and magnitude of loss more persuasively than does the covert, secularized faith characteristic of many materialist discourses today” (221).
Clark, David L . “Blake’s Decomposite Art: On the Image of Language and the Ruins of Representation.” 233-61. Discusses how Blake rejects conventional models of illustration, reading Pity as “beautifully ruinous for illustrative theory and practice” (235). (A revised and shortened version of his “How to Do Things with Shakespeare: Illustrative Theory and Practice in Blake’s Pity” <WBHC p. 1853>.)
Khalip, Jacques. “Flea Trouble.” 262-83. Examines “Behemoth and Leviathan” and The Ghost of a Flea in light of Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am.
Raz, Yosefa. “Robert Lowth’s Bible: Between Seraphic Choirs and Prophetic Weakness.” Modern Language Quarterly 81.2 (2020): 139-67. Considers Blake’s use of Isaiah 6 in terms of Lowth’s work on biblical poetics.
Rena, Magnus. “The Bard and the Fatal Sisters.” See McCabe et al.
Riordan, John. “Billy Blake’s Cab or the Vehicular Form of William Blake.” See Vala.
Ripley, Wayne C. “James Blake of Rotherhithe, Timber Merchant.” See Blake 54.2.
Ripley, Wayne C., with Fernando Castanedo, Hikari Sato, and Hüseyin Alhas. “William Blake and His Circle: A Checklist of Scholarship in 2019.” See Blake 54.1.
Rogers, Annise. Rev. of William Blake: Selected Poems, ed. Nicholas Shrimpton. See Vala.
Rosso, G. A. “Interpreting Blake’s The Magdalene at the Sepulchre.” See Blake 54.2.
Rovira, James, ed. Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018. <Blake (2019)>
Reviews
Otto, Peter. See
Bruder and Connolly.
Yoder, R. Paul. See
Blake 53.4.
Rowland, Christopher. “Blake, Enoch and the Emergence of the Apocalyptic Christ.” See Ludlow.
Ruston, Sharon. Rev. of Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science. See Goldstein, “Blake’s Mundane Egg: Epigenesis and Milieux.”
S
Santos, Alcides Cardoso dos. “APRESENTAÇÃO. WILLIAM BLAKE E A OPOSIÇÃO ARTE VERSUS COMÉRCIO [Presentation: William Blake and the Opposition of Art and Commerce].” See fragmentum.
Santos, Alcides Cardoso dos. “‘I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create’: Blake e a questão do método [Blake and the Problem of Method].” See fragmentum.
Sato, Hikari. “Mushakoji Saneatsu to Sylvia Pankhurst: Eikoku shakai-shugi-kei kikanshi de hodosareta ‘Atarashiki mura’ [Saneatsu Mushakoji and Sylvia Pankhurst: ‘A New Village’ Reported in a Socialist Newspaper in Britain].” Hikaku Bungaku [Journal of Comparative Literature] 62 (2020): 7-21. In Japanese. Although this essay mainly discusses the correspondence between Saneatsu Mushakoji, a Japanese novelist, dramatist, and social reformer, and Sylvia Pankhurst, a British suffragette, it points out that some poems from Songs of Experience were reprinted in Workers Dreadnought, a weekly newspaper edited and issued by Pankhurst in London (“The Chimney Sweeper” and “The Little Vagabond,” 2 Dec. 1922, p. 1; “London” and “A Little Girl Lost,” 9 Dec. 1922, p. 1; “Holy Thursday” and “A Little Boy Lost,” 9 June 1923, p. 1).
Scarpa, Sébastien. Rev. of Inconstances romantiques, ed. Antonella Braida-Laplace, Sophie Laniel-Musitelli, and Céline Sabiron. See Braida-Laplace et al.
Sellars, Michael. “‘Lo, a shadow of horror is risen’: William Blake and the Horror Tradition.” Horrified (28 Sept. 2020): 28 pars. Calls attention to Blake’s horror imagery for a popular audience.
Selz, Gabrielle. “San Francisco’s William Blake Gallery: A Visionary’s Venue.” Art & Object (9 Mar. 2020): 9 pars. An article on John Windle’s William Blake Gallery.
Serdechnaia, Vera. “Dmitri Smirnov: 1948–2020.” See Blake 54.1.
Serdechnaia, Vera. “Pesni opyta, i tol'ko opyta: dialog Bleika i Dostoevskogo v ‘Elektroteatre’ [Songs of Experience, and Only Experience: A Dialogue between Blake and Dostoevsky in the ‘Electrotheatre’].” Peterburgskii teatral'nyi zhurnal [Petersburg Theatre Journal] 1 (99) (2020): 147-50. In Russian. Review of Alexander Belousov’s opera The Book of Seraphim at the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre in Moscow: the text of the opera is based on a combination of Blake’s The Book of Thel and an excerpt from Dostoevsky’s novel Demons.
Serdechnaia, Vera. “‘Russkaia tema’ v proizvedeniiakh Uil'iama Bleika [‘Russian Theme’ in William Blake’s Works].” Izvestiia Iuzhnogo federal'nogo universiteta. Filologicheskie nauki [Proceedings of Southern Federal University. Philology] 4 (2020): 137-45. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). “Blake counts Russia and its territories in his great prophecies Milton and Jerusalem. … There is a reason to believe that the image of the Russian Empress Catherine II was for Blake the embodiment of the sinister Female Will and became a model for the harlot of Babylon, captured by him in a portrait of 1809, as well as one of the prototypes of the powerful demiurge-spinner Enitharmon” (abstract).
Serdechnaia, Vera. “Russkii literaturnyi naslednik Bleika: Po materialam neopublikovannykh poem Borisa Anrepa [Blake’s Russian Literary Heir: Based on Unpublished Poems by Boris Anrep].” Literaturnyi fakt [A Fact of Literature] 1 (15) (2020): 352-65. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). The author shows that poems of Boris Anrep (1883–1969) are an attempt to embody in Russian the principles of English Romantic poetry, primarily the prophecies of William Blake. The author also studies the reception of Anrep’s poems in the work of the artist Dmitry Stelletsky (1875–1947).
Serdechnaia, Vera. “Stavrogin sovrashchaet Tel': Kniga Serafima Aleksandra Belousova v Elektroteatre Stanislavskii [Stavrogin Seduces Thel: The Book of Seraphim by Alexander Belousov at the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre].” Dostoevskii i mirovaia kul'tura. Filologicheskii zhurnal [Dostoevsky and World Culture. Philological Journal] 2 (2020): 211-21. In Russian. Review of Alexander Belousov’s opera The Book of Seraphim at the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre in Moscow: the text of the opera is based on a combination of Blake’s The Book of Thel and an excerpt from Dostoevsky’s novel Demons.
Serdechnaia, Vera. “Uil'iam Bleik i F. M. Dostoevskii: istoriia sopostavleniia [William Blake and F. M. Dostoevsky: A History of Comparison].” Dostoevskii i mirovaia kul'tura. Filologicheskii zhurnal [Dostoevsky and World Culture. Philological Journal] 3 (2020): 158-68. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). The article is devoted to the history of comparing the works of William Blake and Fyodor Dostoevsky: the lectures of André Gide; the works of Jean Wahl, Georges Bataille, Melvin Rader, and D. Gustafsson; Czesław Miłosz’s The Land of Ulro; and the opera The Book of Seraphim in Moscow (2020).
Serdechnaia, Vera. “Uil'iam Bleik v sovetskoi retseptsii: formirovanie obraza ‘revoliutsionnogo romantika’ [William Blake in the Soviet Reception: Forming the Image of ‘Revolutionary Romantic’].” Vestnik Permskogo universiteta. Rossiiskaia i zarubezhnaia filologiia [Perm University Herald. Russian and Foreign Philology] 12.4 (2020): 136-46. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). “Soviet Blake was officially ‘born’ in 1957—after the World Peace Council’s decision on celebrations of the poet’s bicentennial. Blake, with a reputation tainted by the Symbolists, needed serious justification in Soviet literary criticism. The arguments for his justification were the revolutionary pathos of his poems, his democratic background and his humanism” (abstract).
Sergodeev, I. “Opyt analiza i sinteza kontekstnykh znachenii dominantnoi edinitsy Child poeticheskogo teksta U. Bleika ‘The Lamb’: intertekstual’nyi aspect [The Experience of Analyzing and Synthesizing the Contextual Meanings of the Dominant Child Lexeme in W. Blake’s Poetic Text ‘The Lamb’: An Intertextual Aspect].” Nauchnyi dialog [Scientific Dialogue] 1 (2020): 158-74. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English).
Sha, Richard C. “William Blake and the Neurological Imagination: Romantic Science, Nerves, and the Emergent Self.” Imagination and Science in Romanticism. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2018. <Blake (2019)>
Review
Carlson, Kristen.
Configurations 28.1 (winter 2020): 147-50.
Shaddock, David. “Mind-Forg’d Manacles: William Blake and the Emancipation of Consciousness.” Poetry and Psychoanalysis: The Opening of the Field. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. ISBN: 9780415699006. 106-24.
Siegel, Jonah. “Blake.” Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 171-80. Although Blake is addressed directly only in a short section on “the value of reading his response to main lines of art-thought in his period as deeply enmeshed in the institutional and intellectual structures in which they arose” (172), he is referenced throughout Siegel’s “study of the power of evocations of the material in influential reflections on art” (viii).
Sommers, Susan Mitchell. The Siblys of London: A Family on the Esoteric Fringes of Georgian England. See Sibly in Division II.
Spector, Sheila A. The Evolution of Blake’s Myth. New York: Routledge, 2020. ISBN: 9780815363712. A strong reassertion of Blake’s place in the esoteric tradition, which Spector sees as central to the development of Blake’s myth.
Steil, Juliana, and Lawrence Flores Pereira. “Translating Blake’s Prophetic Poetry: The Case of Milton.” See Blake 54.2.
§ Suzuki, Masashi. “‘foundations for grand things’: Blake to Swedenborg [‘foundations for grand things’: Blake and Swedenborg].” Tohoku Roman-shugi Kenkyu [Tohoku Romantic Studies] 6 (2019): 39-55. In Japanese.
T
Tavares, Enéias Farias. “The William Blake Archive: repensando o acervo físico e o arquivo digital [The William Blake Archive: Rethinking Physical Collection and Digital Archive].” Letras 23.46 (Jan.-June 2013): 109-32. In Portuguese (abstract in Portuguese and English).
Tavares, Enéias Farias. “William Blake e a (re)visão do juízo final: tradução e crítica literária [William Blake and the (Re)Vision of the Last Judgment: Translation and Literary Criticism].” Concinnitas 1.20 (June 2013): 82-102. In Portuguese. Includes a translation of Blake’s letter of 18 January 1808 to Ozias Humphry.
Tavares, Enéias Farias. “William Blake e o turbulento ano de 1809: catálogos descritivos, desavenças criativas e obras visionárias [William Blake and the Turbulent Year of 1809: Descriptive Catalogues, Creative Disagreements, and Visionary Works of Art].” See fragmentum.
Tempest, Kae. “Blakean Intensity.” See Vala.
Todd, Christopher, with revisions by Peter Main and Forbes Gibb. Ruthven Todd (1914–1978): A Finding List. Stirling: Lomax Press, 2020. ISBN: 9780992916077. A bibliography of Todd that includes his unpublished works and poems as well as his published scholarship, poetry, and fiction.
Toki, Koji. Sho-o to Sogo: Toki Koji chosaku-shu + symposium [Correspondence and Synthesis: Koji Toki Collection of Essays + Symposium]. Ed. Tomonao Yoshida. Tokyo: Takanashi Shobo, 2020. 1026 pp. ISBN: 9784909812285. In Japanese. This book includes the following essays:
“William Blake no Sozoryoku [The Imagination of William Blake].” 41-50. <BSJ p. 117, BBS p. 662> Originally published in Jimbun Gakuho [Bulletin of Humanities] 86 (1972): 59-75, and reprinted in Metropolitan 58 (2016): 109-28.
“Blake to ‘Fukugo Geijutsu’ [Blake and Composite Art].” 51-54. <BSJ p. 117, BBS p. 662> Originally published in Eigo Seinen [Rising Generation] 119.4 (1973): 12-13, and reprinted in Metropolitan 58 (2016): 174-80.
“Blake no Hikyo Shinwa [The Mystic Mythology of Blake].” 55-61. <BSJ p. 116, WBHC p. 2774> Originally published in Yuriika [Eureka] 6.9 (1974): 192-99, and reprinted in Metropolitan 58 (2016): 212-25. 6 plates by Blake and 1 plate by Catherine Blake.
“Yomigaeru Albion: William Blake sobyo [Rerising Albion: A Short Introduction of William Blake].” 62-72. <BSJ p. 66, WBHC p. 2372> Originally published in Marie Claire Japon 95 (1990): 257-63. 1 plate by Blake.
“‘Seishin no Tabibito’ no Jikan Kozo [The Structure of Time in ‘The Mental Traveller’].” 75-80. <BSJ p. 117, WBHC p. 2774> Originally published in Yuriika [Eureka] 5.9 (1973): 160-65, and reprinted in Metropolitan 58 (2016): 181-191.
“Gui to Genshi: Gray no Neko kara Blake no Neko e [Allegory and Vision: From Gray’s Cat to Blake’s Cat].” 561-68. <BSJ p. 117, BBS p. 662> Originally published in Yuriika [Eureka] 5.13 (1973): 170-77, and reprinted in Metropolitan 58 (2016): 192-211. 6 plates by Blake.
“Joyce to Blake [Joyce and Blake].” 697-700. Originally published in Yuriika [Eureka] 9.11 (1977): 57-59, and reprinted in Metropolitan 58 (2016): 231-36.
“(honyaku) James Joyce, ‘William Blake’ [(Translation) James Joyce, ‘William Blake’].” 701-10. <BSJ p. 50> Originally published in Sekai Hihyo Taikei 3: Shiron no Tenkai [World Literary Criticism Series 3: The Development of Theories of Poetry], ed. Kazushi Shinoda et al. (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1975). Translated from The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (London: Faber & Faber, 1964).
“(honyaku) Northrop Frye, ‘Blake and Joyce: Futari no “tankyu” to “junkan” wo megutte’ [(Translation) Northrop Frye, ‘Blake and Joyce: On Their Quest and Cycle’].” 711-19. <BSJ p. 30, WBHC p. 2372> Originally published in Marie Claire Japon 95 (1990): 264-68. Translated from Northrop Frye, “Quest and Cycle in Finnegans Wake,” Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963).
Torres, Alexander. “From Swedenborgianism to Abolitionism: The Reprinting of William Blake in Antebellum America.” ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture 66.2 (2020): 251-89. Foregrounding Blake’s early American reception in Swedenborgian circles, he argues that “the Spiritualist strain in Blake’s Songs addresses the concerns of nineteenth-century social reformers, who enlisted a Spiritualist ideology to advance their goals” (254).
Townsend, Colby. “Revisiting Joseph Smith and the Availability of the Book of Enoch.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 53.3 (fall 2020): 41-71. With substantial reference to work on the book of Enoch by Blake scholars from G. E. Bentley, Jr., to Susan Matthews, Townsend suggests that Smith had knowledge of the book, even if he did not see Richard Laurence’s 1821 English translation.
V
Vala: The Journal of the Blake Society
Issue 1 (Nov. 2020)
Articles
Heath, Tim. “Introduction to Vala.” 3.
Tempest, Kae. “Blakean Intensity.” 4-5. The president of the Blake Society describes the influence of Blake on their career.
Erle, Sibylle. “Blake, Children and Lockdown.” 6-9. The editor of Vala describes her experience of the COVID lockdown, which “spawned the idea to make the first issue of VALA about Blake’s Songs and the children around us” (8).
Higgs, John. “Blake under Lockdown.” 10-11. Reflections on Blake’s bust in Westminster Abbey and the lockdown: “If we remember why we are doing it, though, I suspect Blake may have grudgingly approved” (11).
Riordan, John. “Billy Blake’s Cab or the Vehicular Form of William Blake.” 12-16. Riordan, creator of the comic William Blake, Taxi Driver and the graphic poem Capital City, reflects on his relationship to Blake.
Whittaker, Jason. “Divine Images.” 18-19. Whittaker considers Blake’s influence on his life and career.
McQuail, Josephine A. “The Secret History of William Blake.” 20-24. A fictitious biography of Blake drawn from the record of another William Blake found in the London Metropolitan Archives.
Collyer, Ed. “Teaching ‘The Tyger.’” 25-27. An essay on teaching Blake without engaging in what Collyer usefully terms “teacherisation,” “when teachers don’t even give pupils the opportunity to experience a text for the first time” (25).
Bobb, Desmond. “Why the Y in ‘The Tyger’?” 29. Argues that Blake’s English “y” invokes the shape of the Hebrew letter ayin, which means “eye.”
Reviews
Rogers, Annise. Nicholas Shrimpton, ed., William Blake: Selected Poems. 31-32.
Potter, Elizabeth. Agnieszka Holland, dir., Spoor (Pokot). 32-33. The film is an adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead.
Vernon, Mark. “The Four-Fold Imagination.” Aeon (4 Sept. 2020): 32 pars. “During a pandemic, it [single vision] motivates what it takes to flatten the curve or increase the amount of testing and, more generally, it organises life around metrics such as economic growth and GDP. Only, it’s never quite clear what these seeming goods are for, with the upshot that people and societies feel stuck in Ulro’s ‘dull round,’ to use Blake’s phrase” (par. 10).
Villa, Marianna. “Dal testo all’immagine: Blake in dialogo con Dante.” See Dante e l’arte.
W
Whaley, Henry. Rev. of The Bard: William Blake at Flat Time House. See McCabe et al.
Whitson, Roger. Rev. of William Blake’s Gothic Imagination, ed. Chris Bundock and Elizabeth Effinger, and William Blake in Context, ed. Sarah Haggarty. See Bundock and Effinger.
Whittaker, Jason. “Blake and Music, 2019.” See Blake 54.1.
Whittaker, Jason. “Divine Images.” See Vala.
Wood, Christopher S. “The History of Art according to William Blake.” A History of Art History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. ISBN: 9780691156521. 205-06. Very slight overview of Blake’s sense of art history.
Y
Yoder, R. Paul. Rev. of Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2, ed. James Rovira. See Blake 53.4.
Z
Živković, Dušan. “Mythological Transformations in the Poem ‘The Tyger’ by William Blake and the Cycle ‘There Was a Tiger Here’ by Gregor Strniša.” Primerjalna književnost 43.2 (2020): 233-45. In English. Gregor Strniša (1930–87) was a Slovenian poet.
Division II: William Blake’s Circle
Barton, Bernard (1784–1849)
Quaker poet
Stokes, Christopher. “Poetics at the Religious Margin: Bernard Barton and Quaker Romanticism.” Review of English Studies 70 (2019): 509-26.
Stokes, Christopher, ed. Selected Poems of Bernard Barton, the “Quaker Poet.” London: Anthem Press, 2020. ISBN: 9781785274404.
Basire, James (1730–1802)
Engraver, Blake’s master
Payne, Matthew. “The Islip Roll Re-examined.” Antiquaries Journal 97 (2017): 231-60. Slight reference to Basire’s engravings of drawings from the Islip Roll manuscript in Vetusta Monumenta (1809).
Boehme, Jacob [Jakob Böhme] (1575–1624)
Mystic
Daphnis
Volume 48, issues 1-2 (2020)
“The Forgotten Reformation,” ed. Andrew Weeks, Bo Andersson,
and Urs Leo Gantenbein
Andersson, Bo, Urs Leo Gantenbein, and Andrew Weeks. “Introduction to ‘The Forgotten Reformation.’” 1-3.
Gantenbein, Urs Leo. “The Virgin Mary and the Universal Reformation of Paracelsus.” 4-37. “Paracelsus defended the purity and eternity of Mary and saw her as a goddess” (abstract).
Bulang, Tobias. “Wissensgenealogien der frühen Neuzeit im Vergleich: Epistemische Entwürfe des Paracelsismus im wissensgeschichtlichen Kontext [A Comparison between Genealogies of Science in Early Modernity: Epistemic Designs of Paracelsism from the Perspective of the History of Science].” 38-64.
Kahn, Didier. “De Pestilitate and Paracelsian Cosmology.” 65-86.
Pfister, Kathrin. “Zwei Himmel—zwei Körper: Zur paracelsischen Kosmologie im astrologischen Tagesschrifttum [Two Heavens—Two Bodies: On the Paracelsian Cosmology in Everyday Astrological Publications].” 87-103.
Gunnoe, Charles D., Jr., and Dane T. Daniel. “Anti-Paracelsianism from Conrad Gessner to Robert Boyle: A Confessional History.” 104-39.
Weeks, Andrew. “Valentin Weigel and Anticlerical Tradition.” 140-59. Considers the relationship of Paracelsus, Valentin Weigel, and Boehme to German intellectual history.
Andersson, Bo. “Jacob Böhmes Lehre von den sieben Quellgeistern in der Morgen Röte im auffgang (1612): Eine politische Perspektive [Jacob Boehme’s Doctrine of the Seven Source Spirits in His Aurora (1612): A Political Perspective].” 160-83.
Žemla, Martin. “From Paracelsus to Universal Reform: The (Pseudo-)Paracelsian-Weigelian Philosophia Mystica (1618).” 184-213.
Martin, Lucinda. “Jacob Böhme and the Spiritualist Reformation of Gender: Exemplified by the Correspondence of Anna Magdalena Francke and the Angelic Brethren.” 214-46. Analyzes the reception of Boehme’s idea of Sophia from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries.
Hessayon, Ariel. “‘Teutonicus’: Knowledge of Boehme among English Speakers before the English Civil War.” 247-69.
de Vries, Lyke. “The Rosicrucian Reformation: Prophecy and Reform at Play in the Rosicrucian Manifestos.” 270-95.
Gantenbein, Urs Leo. “‘Himmlische Philosophia’ bei Paracelsus und Caspar Schwenckfeld [‘Celestial Philosophy’ in Paracelsus and Casper Schwenckfeld].” 296-318.
Hannak, Kristine, and Andrew Weeks. “Sebastian Franck, Johann Arndt, and the Varieties of Religious Dissent.” 319-27.
Cosway, Maria (1760–1838)
Painter
Holowchak, M. Andrew. “Jefferson’s Love Letter to Maria Cosway.” Thirty-Six Short Essays on the Probing Mind of Thomas Jefferson: “A sentimental traveller.” Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020. ISBN: 9781527541856. 67-70.
Darwin, Erasmus (1731–1802)
Scientist, poet
Hillyer, Richard. Four Augustan Science Poets: Abraham Cowley, James Thomson, Henry Brooke, Erasmus Darwin. London: Anthem Press, 2020. ISBN: 9781785272912.
§ Hoffbrand, Barry I. “Joseph Wright of Derby and Dr. Erasmus Darwin, the Artist and His Physician.” Journal of Medical Biography (6 Apr. 2020).
Johnson, Curtis N. “Early Transmutationists: J. B. Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin, Goethe, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.” Darwin’s “Historical Sketch”: An Examination of the “Preface” to the “Origin of Species.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. ISBN: 9780190882938. 52-77.
Lee, Yoon Sun. “Vection, Vertigo, and the Historical Novel.” Novel 52.2 (2019): 179-99. “The work of Erasmus Darwin … bears particular relevance to [Walter] Scott’s handling of motion and movement” (181).
Porter, Dahlia. “Erasmus Darwin’s Prose of the World: Induction and the Philosophical Poem.” Science, Form, and the Problem of Induction in British Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. ISBN: 9781108418942. 73-112.
Vaughn Cross, C. A. “Blurring Plant and Human Boundaries: Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants.” Psychopharmacology in British Literature and Culture, 1780–1900. Ed. Natalie Roxburgh and Jennifer S. Henke. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 93-115. “This essay considers why [The Loves of the Plants] stood out among contemporary literary efforts to advance general knowledge of drug efficacy prior to nineteenth-century sumptuary laws that regulated drug processing, prescribing and consuming” (94).
Williams, Elizabeth A. “Perils and Pleasures of Appetite at 1800: Xavier Bichat and Erasmus Darwin.” Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750–1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. ISBN: 9780226692999. 77-89. “Darwin, a cheerful optimist about human nature, celebrated the appetites, defending their essential role in the activities of life and imagining human improvement based on gratification of hunger and other needs” (88).
Flaxman, John (1755–1826)
Sculptor, friend of Blake
De Santis, Silvia. “How can I help thy Husband’s copying Me? Dante tra Blake, Füssli e Flaxman.” See Dante e l’arte in Division I, Part VI.
Hainy, Josh. “Grecian Theory at the Royal Academy: John Flaxman and the Pedagogy of Corporeal Representation.” Visualizing the Body in Art, Anatomy, and Medicine since 1800: Models and Modeling. Ed. Andrew Graciano. New York: Routledge, 2019. 61-83. “As Professor of Sculpture, Flaxman taught a corporeal pedagogy focused on replicating scientific principles utilized by the Greeks” (62).
Jenkins, Susan. “John Flaxman’s Funerary Monument for the 1st Earl of Mansfield in Westminster Abbey.” Burlington Magazine 162.1405 (Apr. 2020): 277-87.
Jenkins, Susan. “Modelling and Mapping Flaxman’s Monument to William Murray.” Burlington Magazine 162.1409 (Aug. 2020): 644-45.
von Preussen, Brigid. “Manufactories of Virtù: Classicism, Commerce, and Authorship in Georgian Britain, c. 1759–1800.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2020. According to the abstract, it discusses the architect Robert Adam, Josiah Wedgwood, John Flaxman, and Angelica Kauffman.
French Prophets
Riordan, Michael B. “Mysticism and Prophecy in Early Eighteenth-Century Scotland.” Scottish Historical Review 98, supplement: no. 248 (Oct. 2019): 333-60. Largely on the Scottish French Prophets.
Fuseli, Henry [Johann Heinrich Füssli] (1741–1825)
Painter, friend of Blake
Addison, Rhian. “‘The Up-springing Stem of the Neck’ in G. F. Watts’s Paintings.” Visual Culture in Britain 21.2 (2020): 247-74. References, in part, Fuseli’s influence on George Frederic Watts’s depiction of the neck in his paintings.
De Santis, Silvia. “How can I help thy Husband’s copying Me? Dante tra Blake, Füssli e Flaxman.” See Dante e l’arte in Division I, Part VI.
Oppenheimer, Margaret. “Reinventing Henry Fuseli’s Nightmare: A Forgotten Painting by William Martin.” British Art Journal 21.1 (2020): 64-71. Considers Martin’s Iachimo in the Apartment of Imogen (1784) as a response to Fuseli’s Nightmare.
Rykov, Anatolii. “Buria, natisk i legkoe dominirovanie. Genri Fiuzeli [Storm, Stress, and Light Domination. Henry Fuseli].” Studia Culturae 43 (2020): 68-77. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). The author comes to the conclusion that the reception of the male-female opposition, typical for the Sturm und Drang movement, is transformed by Fuseli into the deconstruction and erosion of stable gender identities. The erotization of art, the sexualization of the set of subjects and themes traditional for European art by Fuseli, leads to a rethinking of the problems of power and social relations.
Hayley, William (1745–1820)
Man of letters, patron
Hayley2020 Conference
Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, 12-13 Nov. 2020
Organizer: Lisa Gee
Select presentations can be found at <
https://hayley.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/news/2021-01-04-video-presentations>:
Kidson, Alex. “Hayley and Romney.”
Harris, Alexandra. “‘Dear Retreats’: Hayley’s Places.”
Gee, Lisa. “Hope, Disability, Love, and Grief.”
Bindman, David. “Hayley and Flaxman.”
Cole, Georgina. “Blindness and Creativity in Romney’s Milton and His Daughters.” See Cole under Romney.
Goldberg, Brian. “Charlotte Smith, William Hayley, and Discriminated Anguish.” Wordsworth Circle 51.3 (2020): 360-76.
Matthews, Susan. “Productivity, Fertility and the Romantic ‘Old Maid.’” Romanticism 25.3 (2019): 225-36. Considers Hayley’s influence on Hannah More and Joanna Southcott.
Johnson, Joseph (1738–1809)
Bookseller, employer of Blake
Fallon, David. “Joseph Johnson.” See Johnson and Keen under Wollstonecraft.
Tomaselli, Sylvana. “‘Have Ye Not Heard That We Cannot Serve Two Masters?’: The Platonism of Mary Wollstonecraft.” See Tomaselli under Wollstonecraft.
Kauffman, Angelica [Angelika Kauffmann] (1741–1807)
Painter
Calè, Luisa. “Modern Sibyls and Sibylline Media.” Studies in Romanticism 59.1 (2020): 59-83. Examines “portraits of women as modern Sibyls, focusing on the works of Benjamin West, Angelica Kauffmann, Emma Hamilton, Friedrich Rehberg, and Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun” (60).
von Preussen, Brigid. “Manufactories of Virtù: Classicism, Commerce, and Authorship in Georgian Britain, c. 1759–1800.” See von Preussen under Flaxman.
Morganwg, Iolo [Edward Williams] (1747–1826)
Welsh antiquarian
Shestakova, Nadezhda. “Ot Khamfri Lluida do Iolo Morganuga: osnovnye etapy razvitiia antikvarnoi traditsii Uel'sa v XVI-seredine XIX veka [From Humphrey Llwyd to Iolo Morganwg: Main Stages of Development of the Antiquarian Tradition of Wales from the Sixteenth to Mid-Nineteenth Centuries].” Izvestiia Saratovskogo universiteta. Novaia seriia. Seriia: Istoriia. Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia [Bulletin of Saratov University. New Series. History. International Relationships] 20.3 (2020): 353-58. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English).
Murray, John (1778–1843)
Bookseller
Cutmore, Jonathan Burke, ed. John Murray’s “Quarterly Review”: Letters 1807–1843. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019. No mention of Blake.
Nollekens, Joseph (1737–1823)
Sculptor
Senior, Rebecca. “A History of Violence: Joseph Nollekens’ First Design for the Monument to Three Captains, 1782–93.” Sculpture Journal 28.1 (2019): 103-21.
Opie, Amelia (1769–1853)
Writer
King, Shelley, and John B. Pierce. “‘Remarkable both for Genius, & Extravagance’: Amelia Opie and Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job.” See Blake 54.3 in Division I, Part VI.
Palmer, Samuel (1805–81)
Painter, Blake’s disciple
Antliff, Mark. “Pacifism, Realism, and Pathology: Alex Comfort, Cecil Collins, and Neo-Romantic Art during World War II.” See Antliff in Division I, Part VI.
Robinson, Henry Crabb (1775–1867)
Writer
Hunnekuhl, Philipp. Henry Crabb Robinson: Romantic Comparatist, 1790–1811. See Hunnekuhl in Division I, Part VI.
Romney, George (1734–1802)
Painter
Cole, Georgina. “Blindness and Creativity in Romney’s Milton and His Daughters.” Art History 43.1 (2020): 176-99. “Romney’s Milton and His Daughters represents Milton’s blindness as a privileged state of creativity, but also as a way of thinking about the objectives of high art” (197). Reference to Hayley as well.
Royal Academy of Arts
Agranovskii, Nikita. “‘Salon otvergnuvshego’: Dzhon Singlton Kopli i amerikanskii vzgliad na khudozhestvennye institutsii XVIII veka [‘Exhibition of the Rejected’: John Singleton Copley and the American View of Eighteenth-Century Artistic Institutions].” Vestnik Sankt-Peterburgskogo universiteta. Iskusstvovedenie [Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Arts] 10.1 (2020): 106-31. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). The article examines the painting The Death of the Earl of Chatham by John Singleton Copley and the experience of exhibiting it, undertaken by the artist in 1781 in opposition to the newly formed Royal Academy of Arts.
Sibly, Ebenezer (1750–99), and Manoah Sibly (1757–1840)
Esoteric booksellers
Sommers, Susan Mitchell. The Siblys of London: A Family on the Esoteric Fringes of Georgian England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. ISBN: 9780190687328. Some references to William and Catherine Blake and their relationship to Swedenborgianism.
Reviews
Ferguson, Christine.
Aries 19.1 (2019): 159-62.
Grene, Clement William.
Reviews in Religion & Theology 26.3 (July 2019): 505-07.
Smith, John Thomas (1766–1833)
Biographer, artist
Jensen, Oskar Cox. “Joseph Johnson’s Hat, or, The Storm on Tower Hill.” Studies in Romanticism 58.4 (winter 2019): 545-69. An essay on the subject of Smith’s print “Joseph Johnson” (1815), whom Smith also describes in his Vagabondiana (1817). Johnson was “a disabled ex-sailor, ballad-singer, and busker of Afro-Caribbean origins” (545).
Stedman, John Gabriel (1744–97)
Soldier, writer, friend of Blake
Leigh, Devin. “A Disagreeable Text: The Uncovered First Draft of Bryan Edwards’s Preface to The History of the British West Indies, c. 1792.” New West Indian Guide 94.1-2 (2020): 39-74. References the discrepancies between Stedman’s manuscript and journals and the published version of Narrative.
Senior, Emily. “Skin, Textuality and Colonial Feeling.” The Caribbean and the Medical Imagination, 1764–1834: Slavery, Disease and Colonial Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. <Blake (2020)>
Review
Ogborn, Miles.
New West Indian Guide 94.3-4 (2020): 315-16. “Chapters 3 and 4 then consider colonial bodies, with the first reading John Gabriel Stedman’s
Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1790) as revealing a cultural politics of skin, sentiment, and suffering in a context of racialized violence” (316).
Thomas, Sarah. “Unmasking ‘simple truth.’” Witnessing Slavery: Art and Travel in the Age of Abolition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. <Blake (2020)>
Review
Price, Richard.
New West Indian Guide 94.3-4 (2020): 311-12. “Thomas next turns to Stedman, in a strong chapter that builds on the Price and Price 1988 edition, arguing that Stedman’s role as an artist/draughtsman played a more significant role in the production of its famous plates than previous art historians (and Blake scholars) have acknowledged” (311).
Stothard, Thomas (1755–1834)
Painter, illustrator, Blake’s friend/enemy
Grandy, Claire. “Poetics of the Record: Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus.” Criticism 62.4 (fall 2020): 519-45. Slight reference to Stothard’s engraving in an essay on Lewis’s 2015 poem.
Swedenborg, Emanuel (1688–1772)
Mystic
Roy-Di Piazza, Vincent. “‘Ghosts from other planets’: Plurality of Worlds, Afterlife and Satire in Emanuel Swedenborg’s De Telluribus in mundo nostro solari (1758).” Annals of Science 77.4 (2020): 469-94. “De Telluribus combined for the first time the literary codes of two popular genres during the period, namely those concerning the plurality of worlds and the dialogues of the dead” (abstract).
§ Suzuki, Masashi. “‘foundations for grand things’: Blake to Swedenborg [‘foundations for grand things’: Blake and Swedenborg].” See Suzuki in Division I, Part VI.
Taylor, Thomas (1758–1835)
Platonist, Blake’s acquaintance
Tomaselli, Sylvana. “‘Have Ye Not Heard That We Cannot Serve Two Masters?’: The Platonism of Mary Wollstonecraft.” See Tomaselli under Wollstonecraft.
Trusler, John (1735–1820)
Clergyman, friend of George Cumberland
Dyer, Jenny. “The Role of Boys as Domestic Servants, 1760–1830.” History 104 (2019): 630-48. Repeatedly references the topic of boy servants in Trusler’s The Way to Be Rich and Respectable (1787).
Grandjouan, Kate. “Refugees, Patriotism, and Hogarth’s The Gate of Calais (1748).” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 20.3 (2020): 287-303. Some discussion of Trusler’s Hogarth Moralized (1768).
Varley, Delvalle Lowry (1800–59)
Mineralogist, wife of John Varley
Insley, Jane. “Illustrating the Ideal: Crystal Models and Illustrations in the Early Nineteenth Century.” Earth Sciences History 37.2 (2018): 333-41. On her crystal illustrations.
West, Benjamin (1738–1820)
Painter
Boudreau, George W. “Picturing Penn: Portraits, Public Memory, and the Political Culture of Late Colonial Pennsylvania.” A Material World: Culture, Society, and the Life of Things in Early Anglo-America. Ed. George W. Boudreau and Margaretta M. Lovell. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. 13-44. Considers Penn’s Treaty with the Indians (1771–72).
Calè, Luisa. “Modern Sibyls and Sibylline Media.” See Calè under Kauffman.
Carver, Dylan. “Total Artifice: Neo-Gothic Literary and Visual Art in Britain, 1750–1789.” PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2020. In addition to West, Carver treats Horace Walpole, Edmund Burke, and the architect Robert Adam.
Farago, Jason. “The Myth of North America, in One Painting.” New York Times (25 Nov. 2020). An interactive reading of West’s painting The Death of General Wolfe.
Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759–97)
Author, radical, known in Blake’s circle
Bergès, Sandrine, Eileen Hunt Botting, and Alan Coffee, eds. The Wollstonecraftian Mind. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. ISBN: 9781138709973. Collection of short essays on Wollstonecraft’s background, major works, interlocutors, and philosophy.
Bergès, Sandrine, Eileen Hunt Botting, and Alan Coffee. “Editor’s Introduction.” 1-10.
Part 1: Background
Green, Karen. “The Defence of Women, 1400–1700.” 13-24.
Broad, Jacqueline. “The Early Modern Period: Dignity and the Foundation of Women’s Rights.” 25-35.
Taylor, Natalie Fueher. “The Social Contract Tradition.” 36-48.
Smith, Orianne. “Rational Dissent.” 49-62.
O’Neill, Daniel. “The Scottish Enlightenment.” 63-76.
Tegos, Spiros. “The Revolutionary Period.” 77-89.
Part 2: Major Works
Tomaselli, Sylvana. “A Vindication of the Rights of Men.” 93-103.
Johnson, Nancy. “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” 104-15.
Laird, Susan. “Educational Works.” 116-30.
Dolan, Elizabeth. “The Novels.” 131-44.
Carroll, Ross. “Epistolary and Historical Writings.” 145-58.
Part 3: Interlocutors
Brooke, Christopher. “Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” 161-70.
Carlson, Liane. “Immanuel Kant.” 171-82.
Fairclough, Mary. “Edmund Burke.” 183-97.
Coffee, Alan. “Catharine Macaulay.” 198-210.
Philp, Mark. “William Godwin.” 211-23.
Cronin, Madeline Ahmed. “Jane Austen.” 224-35.
Vetter, Lisa Pace. “Lucretia Mott.” 236-47.
McCabe, Helen. “Harriet Taylor.” 248-60.
Botting, Eileen Hunt. “John Stuart Mill.” 261-72.
Gordon, Lyndall. “Virginia Woolf.” 273-82.
Marso, Lori J. “Simone de Beauvoir.” 283-94.
Part 4: Philosophy
Dumler-Winckler, Emily. “Theology and Religion.” 297-310.
Bour, Isabelle. “Epistemology.” 311-22.
Sapiro, Virginia. “Virtue.” 323-37.
Reuter, Martina. “Reason, Passion, Imagination.” 338-50.
Gunther-Canada, Wendy. “Patriarchy and Social Power.” 351-64.
Abbey, Ruth. “Masculinity.” 365-77.
Part 5: Legacies
Kendrick, Nancy. “Marriage, Love, and Friendship.” 381-90.
Weiss, Penny. “Feminist Liberalism.” 391-403.
Halldenius, Lena. “Feminist Republicanism.” 404-16.
Frazer, Elizabeth. “Democracy.” 417-28.
Lefèbvre, Alexandre. “Human Rights.” 429-40.
Brace, Laura. “Family.” 441-51.
White, Melanie. “Citizenship.” 452-63.
Bergès, Sandrine. “Capabilities, Adaptive Preferences, and Education.” 464-75.
Bracewell, Lorna. “Gender and Social Theory.” 476-88.
Regier, Emily F., and Nancy J. Hirschmann. “Freedom.” 489-500.
Review
Clery, E. J. “
Vindicated: The Ongoing Relevance of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Celebrated Daughter.”
Times Literary Supplement (8 May 2020): 24-25. Also reviews
Mary Wollstonecraft in Context, ed. Nancy E. Johnson and Paul Keen.
Collings, David. “Catastrophic Benevolence, Ruinous Immortality: Wollstonecraft’s Shipwreck.” Disastrous Subjectivities: Romaniticism, Modernity, and the Real. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. ISBN: 9781487506148. 31-55.
Johnson, Nancy E., and Paul Keen, eds. Mary Wollstonecraft in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. ISBN: 9781108416993. The book includes many short but useful chapters on a range of contexts and issues, with targeted references for further research.
Johnson, Nancy E., and Paul Keen. “Preface.” xxi-xxvii.
Part I: Life and Works
Chisholm, Kate. “Biography.” 3-10.
McInnes, Andrew. “Correspondence.” 11-20.
Carlson, Julie. “Family.” 21-28.
Fallon, David. “Joseph Johnson.” 29-37.
Part II: Critical Fortunes
Johnson, Nancy E. “Early Critical Reception.” 41-49.
Botting, Eileen Hunt. “Nineteenth-Century Critical Reception.” 50-56.
Murray, Julie. “1970s Critical Reception.” 57-63.
O’Brien, Eliza. “Recent Critical Reception.” 64-72.
Part III: Historical and Cultural Contexts
The French Revolution Debate
Favret, Mary A. “Writing the French Revolution.” 77-86.
O’Shaughnessy, David. “Radical Societies.” 87-94.
Mee, Jon. “Radical Publishers.” 95-101.
Keen, Paul. “British Conservatism.” 102-08.
The Rights of Woman Debate
Fairclough, Mary. “Jacobin Reformers.” 111-18.
Levy, Michelle. “Liberal Reformers.” 119-26.
Grogan, Claire. “Conservative Reformers.” 127-35.
Philosophical Frameworks
Tomaselli, Sylvana. “French Philosophes.” 139-45.
McKendry, Andrew. “Dissenters.” 146-54.
Kirkley, Laura. “Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” 155-63.
de Bruyn, Frans. “Edmund Burke.” 164-72.
Clemit, Pamela. “William Godwin.” 173-81.
Halldenius, Lena. “Political Theory.” 182-88.
Moore, Jane. “Feminist Theory.” 189-96.
Legal and Social Culture
Ward, Ian. “The Constitution.” 199-206.
Packham, Catherine. “Property Law.” 207-14.
Probert, Rebecca. “Domestic Law.” 215-21.
Donington, Katie. “Slavery and Abolition.” 222-29.
Schellenberg, Betty A. “The Bluestockings.” 230-37.
Jones, Vivien. “Conduct Literature.” 238-45.
Ferguson, Frances. “Theories of Education.” 246-54.
Literature
Wetmore, Alex. “Sentimentalism and Sensibility.” 257-63.
London, April. “English Jacobin Novels.” 264-72.
Kelly, Gary. “Anti-Jacobin Novels.” 273-80.
O’Malley, Andrew. “Children’s Literature.” 281-88.
Gamer, Michael. “Gothic Literature.” 289-96.
Perkins, Pamela. “Travel Writing.” 297-304.
Sachs, Jonathan. “History Writing.” 305-13.
George, Jacqueline. “Periodicals.” 314-22.
Johns, Alessa. “Translations.” 323-31.
Review
Clery, E. J. See
Bergès, Botting, and Coffee.
Tomaselli, Sylvana. “‘Have Ye Not Heard That We Cannot Serve Two Masters?’: The Platonism of Mary Wollstonecraft.” Revisioning Cambridge Platonism: Sources and Legacy. Ed. Douglas Hedley and David Leech. Cham: Springer, 2019. ISBN: 9783030221997. 175-89. Also references Thomas Taylor and the Joseph Johnson circle.
Tumanova, A. “Idei o vospitanii i ob obrazovanii Meri Uolstonkraft [Mary Wollstonecraft’s Ideas about Parenting and Education].” Dni nauki studentov Vladimirskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta imeni Aleksandra Grigor'evicha i Nikolaia Grigor'evicha Stoletovykh. Sbornik materialov zaochnykh nauchno-prakticheskikh konferentsii [Days of Science of Vladimir State University Students. Collection of Materials of Correspondence Scientific and Practical Conferences]. Vladimir, 2020. ISBN: 9785998412370. 2346-51. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English).