Table of Contents:
Symbols and Abbreviations
Introductory Essay
Division I: William Blake
Division II: William Blake’s Circle
Astley, Philip
Banks, Thomas
Barry, James
Basire, James, Sr.
Boehme, Jacob
Bowyer, Robert
Boydell, John
Calvert, Edward
Cosway, Maria
Cosway, Richard
Cowper, William
Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition
Cumberland, George
Darwin, Erasmus
Denman, Maria
d’Éon, Chevalier
Flaxman, John
Flaxman, Mary Ann
Fuseli, Henry
Gibson, John
Hayley, William
Hoare, Prince
Hope, Thomas
Johnson, Joseph
Kauffman, Angelica
Lowth, Robert
Macklin, Thomas
Macpherson, James
Malkin, Benjamin
Malkin, Charlotte
Moravianism
Morganwg, Iolo
Mortimer, John Hamilton
Ottley, William Young
Reynolds, Joshua
Romney, George
Society of Antiquaries
Stedman, John Gabriel
Stothard, Thomas
Swedenborg, Emanuel
Tulk, Charles Augustus
Turner, Dawson
Wedgwood, Josiah
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim
Wollstonecraft, Mary
Symbols
| § |
Works preceded by a section mark are reported on secondhand authority |
Abbreviations
Introductory EssayThe annual checklist is a collaborative effort, and I’m indebted to my collaborators for their contributions. Unless otherwise noted, all annotations for their respective language groups are theirs. I also wish to express my gratitude to David Worrall, Sibylle Erle, and Alexander Regier for their sharing of sources with me, and to Morton Paley and Sarah Jones for their assistance and support at a difficult time for all associated with Blake.
Passings
Given that this introduction is being written in the shadow of Morris Eaves’s unexpected death, I thought it only fitting to begin with the passings section. Morris was a longtime co-editor of both Blake and the William Blake Archive. That these two venues are essential parts of the infrastructure of Blake scholarship is due in no small measure to Morris’s numerous abilities as a colleague, collaborator, and, of course, a scholar. He takes with him a profound knowledge of Blake, an unmatched ability to express this knowledge lucidly, and the affection and respect of all those who worked with him.
Hazard Adams passed away in 2023. Another pillar of scholarship, Adams published on Blake for more than sixty years, and his work on Blake, Yeats, Joyce, Cary, symbolism, and the practice of literary criticism in general was highly influential. Also lost in 2023 was Kenzaburo Ōe, the Nobel Prize-winning Japanese writer and author of the Blakean novel Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (1983). In two articles, Hikari Sato discusses how Ōe learned about Blake and his use of Blake in that work.
Editions and Translations
New copies of illuminated books now in the Blake Archive include copy a of Europe (11 proof impressions); copies D, O, Q, and S of Innocence; and copies D, K, L, and M of Visions. (Copy W of Songs, which was Blake’s own copy, can be found in a new facsimile published by the Folio Society.) Now accessible in the archive’s “Manuscripts and Typographic Works” section are the manuscript sketches “then She bore Pale desire” and “Woe cried the muse” (both c. 1783); the poems “A Fairy leapt” (c. 1793) and “The Phoenix to Mrs. Butts” (c. 1794–1803); a flyer for the 1809 exhibition sent to Ozias Humphry, “Exhibition of Paintings in Fresco”; and two advertisements for Blake’s engraving after his Canterbury Pilgrims painting. A full list of items in what the archive is terming the “Chaucer Omnibus” can be found in its 30 April 2023 publication announcement and is also enumerated below in Division I, Part V, under the William Blake Archive.
Jerusalem was partially translated in a French edition by Romain Mollard, and there is a new reproduction of For the Sexes by a German publisher that lacks any scholarly apparatus other than transcriptions (the copy used is not noted). Fernando Castanedo’s recent bilingual edition of the Ballads Manuscript was favorably reviewed. New or reprinted collections of Blake’s works in Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish are recorded. “A Poison Tree” was translated into both Filipino and Ilocano.
Drawings and Paintings
Blake’s illustrations to Pilgrim’s Progress are reproduced in a book of letters to a new Christian (see also Mark Vernon’s YouTube presentation “Jesus the Imagination. Taking William Blake’s Christianity Seriously”), and the illustrations to Dante were reproduced in full for the first time in Russia, in an edition of the Divine Comedy.
Exhibitions and Catalogues
The Blake exhibition at the Getty Museum, having been long delayed by COVID-19, opened in October 2023, and I have listed several reviews under its catalogue (originally published in 2020) in Part VI. (At Hell’s Printing Press, Sarah Jones interviewed its curators, Edina Adam and Julian Brooks.) A plate from The Book of Thel copy N was reproduced in the catalogue for the exhibition J. R. R. Tolkien: The Art of the Manuscript, held at Marquette University, Milwaukee, from August to December 2022. A pencil study of nudes (Butlin #595) appeared in a sale catalogue of works from the collection of Walter Augustus Brandt (1902–78), along with drawings by members of Blake’s circle. Previously unrecorded exhibition catalogues that contain works by or essays on Blake and his circle include L’âge d’or de la peinture anglaise: de Reynolds à Turner (Paris, 2019) and British Art: Ancient Landscapes (Salisbury Museum, 2017).
Bibliographies
In addition to the annual checklists in Blake, there is also a bibliography of scholarly works that address Blake’s representations of animals, which appears in a previously unrecorded article by G. E. Bentley, Jr., “A Blake Bestiary … Part I” (2020).
Digital Resources
The Paul Mellon Centre for British Art has a very useful digital project that compiles the Royal Academy summer exhibition catalogues from 1769 to 2018. In my annotation in Division I, Part V, I have linked to all the entries on Blake, the exhibition of Blake’s portrait by Thomas Phillips, and the major references to Blake in later catalogues.
In what might be a good model for undergraduates tasked with a similar assignment, Timothy Gress, the coordinator of the New York Public Library’s Pforzheimer Collection, posted a comparison of the differences between the two copies of Innocence held by the library (E and K).
The Allen Ginsberg Project continued its posting of Ginsberg’s 1979 Naropa lectures on Blake (including both audio files and transcriptions). Stephen F. Eisenman, the curator of the 2017 exhibition William Blake and the Age of Aquarius, has an online article that addresses the question, “What’s the Use of William Blake?,” and a blog post at UCLA similarly asks, “Why Does William Blake’s Work Resonate Today?” At the Yale Review, Anahid Nersessian has a short article, “William Blake’s ‘Laocoön’: Why the Poet’s Engraving Reads like a Protest Poster.” Keri Davies’s blog has an interesting post on the prostitutes listed as living on South Molton Street (where Blake lived from 1803 to 1821) in Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies (1760–95).
Jason Whittaker’s Zoamorphosis continues to grow, develop, and reorganize. A redesign includes new menu options that greatly assist in accessing the wealth of material. In addition to the tiles announcing recent posts, the blog portion of the site can be accessed through the “Arts & Culture” option, which classifies the entries in the categories of “Blake and Art,” “Blake and Music,” “Blake and Poetry,” and “Reviews.” (The monthly “Blakespotting” article seems to have been discontinued in 2023.)
Under the adjacent menu option, “Projects & Publications,” are four categories: “Zoavision,” “Global Blake,” “Divine Images,” and “VALA.” Zoavision is the site’s YouTube channel, and it has four different series: Blake Bites, which are short (4-5 minute) explications of ideas or context; Blake Sound Bites, which are musical settings or recitations, followed by an analysis; Global Blake, which comprises Zoom presentations by scholars; and Visionary, which consists of longer considerations or discussions. The videos are embedded on the Zoavision page and are also available on YouTube.
The Global Blake category links to the Global Blake Network, a center for information about Blake studies. It includes recent news about Blake, the Global Blake recordings, reviews, and, perhaps most importantly, “What’s On,” a list of upcoming events. There is a digital newsletter available. “Divine Images” and “VALA” link to a description of Whittaker’s recent biography and to a page about VALA, the Blake Society’s annual journal.
Given Whittaker’s 2022 book on the “Jerusalem” hymn, it is not surprising that two of the longer Visionary posts from 2023 are on the lyric and its setting by Hubert Parry; the third is a discussion by Hannah McAuliffe, Jon Mee, and Sharon Choe on Blake and the idea of the body. The Blake Sound Bites post “‘Jerusalem’ by Mark Stewart & the Maffia” was originally recorded in 2010 but rereleased after Stewart’s death.
The Blake Society had fewer online events than in the years immediately after COVID-19, but those available on YouTube include Carl Gopalkrishnan’s discussion of using Blake’s America as the basis for his own painting Australia a Prophecy (see his contribution to VALA as well); Annise Rogers’s presentation on Blake’s and Tolkien’s art; Mark Bowler, Dan Norman, and Marianna Suri’s discussion of their project Fragments of Experience (a six-minute preview is at 47:30 of the video); and a conversation with employees of the Folio Society regarding the 2023 facsimile of Songs copy W. Also accessible is the online launch party for issue 4 of VALA.
Other significant engagements on YouTube are Tat'yana Levina’s series of seventeen lectures on Blake in Russian; Steve Dempsey, the creator of the role-playing game Fearful Symmetries, appearing on Mage: The Podcast to discuss Blake’s cosmology; Nerdwriter1’s explication of “London”; and Comics and Lit’s animation of that poem. (It turns out that animated recitations of “London” on YouTube are enough of a genre that Jane Glennie reviews them in her “Set Texts, Poetry Film, & William Blake.”)
In conjunction with the 2022–23 exhibition Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism, the Courtauld held a series of lectures entitled “Fuseli and the Graphic Body,” which are now available on YouTube. Blake is addressed most substantially in Sarah Carter’s “The Art of Thinking through Collaboration: Fuseli, Blake and Darwin”; she suggests that the economic conditions of the early 1790s facilitated their collaboration. The other presentations (Kevin Saltino, “‘Female Trouble’: Vamps, Vixens and Viragoes in the Art of Henry Fuseli”; Camilla Smith, “Fools, Heroes and Whores: Henry Fuseli’s Switzerland”; and Martin Myrone, “Fuseli’s Mutable Bodies”) focus in different ways on Fuseli’s representations of the female body especially.
Scholarship
Discoveries
In separate articles in Blake, Lisa Sherlock—who sadly passed away as this checklist was being prepared for publication—and Mark Crosby discuss the copy of Richard Bentley’s 1732 edition of Paradise Lost, once owned by Michael Phillips and now at Victoria University Library (University of Toronto), that contains two annotations signed “WB.” Sherlock compares these annotations with the handwriting of a previous owner, William Backwell, as well as Blake’s. For his part, Crosby distinguishes the provenances of three copies of Bentley’s edition associated with William Cowper. Among his evidence is a previously unpublished letter from William Hayley to Lady Harriet Hesketh that is dated 10 Jan. 1802 and contains an allusion to Blake.
In VALA, Angus Whitehead and Catherine Kelly offer a concise but detailed history of 17 South Molton Street from the 1750s to the current day. In his presentation for Global Blake, Wayne C. Ripley provides new information about Stephen Horncastle and his family, neighbors of the Blake family, who resided at 29 Broad Street and held the lease for 30 Broad Street. This information includes the fact that Horncastle and his two wives originated from the same region of Yorkshire as Thomas Armitage and that, as suspected by Mark Yates,Mark Yates, “Illuminated Instruction: A Paratextual, Intertextual, and Iconotextual Study of William Blake,” PhD diss., Ghent University and University of Salford, Manchester, 2014 (27). Horncastle sold paper.
The twenty-fifth anniversary of Helen P. Bruder’s William Blake and the Daughters of Albion was commemorated by Elizabeth Effinger’s interview with Bruder, who reflects on the book’s and feminism’s impact on Blake studies. (For important work on the female artists of Blake’s era, see Paris A. Spies-Gans’s A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830 [2022] and her article “Why Do We Think There Have Been No Great Women Artists? Revisiting Linda Nochlin and the Archive,” both described below.) With many references to the engagement of Blake studies with the problem, Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa and Jason Whittaker take up the perennial question of how to read Blake without imposing an authoritative meaning.
Songs
Marsha Keith Schuchard persuasively argues that Moravian-Swedenborgian education theory and practices should be seen as essential contexts for understanding Blake’s Songs. (See William Blake’s Circle for a description of her article on Charles Augustus Tulk’s and John Flaxman’s interest in alchemy.) Among other new work on the Songs, a section in Elizabeth S. Dodd’s The Lyric Voice in English Theology reads the prophetic implications of the lyrical first person, while Ian Thomson analyzes the instrument held by the piper in the frontispiece to Innocence, concluding that it is “an eighteenth-century clarinet.” Wiebke Katharina Schäfer closely examines the designs in three companion poems in copy T of Songs, and Ines Tebourski’s presentation for Global Blake explores the symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships of the companion poems. Sun Shuting reads “The Little Vagabond” as an attack on organized religion, while Jonathan Perris sees in “The Little Black Boy” a critique of evangelical abolitionist writing (including Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative). Milena Stepanyan compares Russian translations of “The Little Boy Found” and “The Little Boy Lost,” and Harriet Kramer Linkin explores how Blake’s handwritten Songs disrupted late eighteenth-century print culture. Finally, a new essay by Sibylle Erle considers “A Poison Tree” alongside Urizen, Marriage, and “The Ancient of Days” to examine Blake’s depictions of creation and the fall.
Political and Historical Readings
Hüseyin Alhas argues for the impact of newspaper accounts on The French Revolution and “The Tyger.” In contrast, Tara Lee, looking at The French Revolution and Urizen, contends that Blake’s notion of “the body politic metaphor” stemmed from his “intimate dialogue with Burke, [Emmanuel Joseph] Sieyès, and other revolutionary and reactionary writers.” Joey S. Kim’s chapter on Blake in her book Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation fruitfully utilizes the different meanings of orientate to capture his ambiguous and ambivalent relationship to empire and Orientalism. (See Matthew Sangster’s “Five Questions: Joey S. Kim on Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation” at the BARS Blog in Part V for Kim’s explication of her argument.) Li Qi Peh contends that Stedman relied on Blake’s engravings of his drawings to counter the editing of the Narrative by the pro-slavery William Thompson.
Collections of Essays
In a special issue of Studies in Romanticism devoted to Romanticism and Palestine, published before the Hamas terror attack and the Israeli decimation of Gaza, Saree Makdisi distinguishes Blake from other Romantics who saw Palestine as a blank slate, suggesting that “Jerusalem” shows that Blake’s true concerns were in England and not Palestine. (The issue also contains an essay on Volney.)
As noted in Sibylle Erle’s introduction to VALA, both Gaza and Ukraine offer heartbreaking backdrops to the theme of its latest issue, war and peace. Many of the articles highlight Blake’s (or the contributor’s) experiences with war or how art and poetry can heal the wounds caused by war, if not preclude it. The former approach is embodied by Hugo Larman’s and Carl Gopalkrishnan’s pieces, which both explain how war and its damage fuel their Blakean art. The latter is represented by Mark Vernon’s explication of Blake’s idea of forgiveness; Rumyana Hristova’s stress on “the invisible war for human consciousness”; Perienne Christian’s vision of a humanity either dominated by AI or enhanced by the organic; and much of the art and poetry in the issue. Erle considers how Blake’s lifetime was structured by a series of wars; Stephen Pritchard examines Blake’s depictions of war and hunting in his works; and an excerpt from Jason Whittaker’s Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness describes Blake’s encounter with the soldier John Scolfield in Felpham.
Articles in VALA outside of the topic of war and peace include David Fallon’s experiments with getting AI to produce Blakean poetry and images; John Riordan’s examination of allusions to Blake in the work of the comic book writer Grant Morrison; Roger Whitson’s experience of using the press now at Rice University; and, as noted above, Angus Whitehead and Catherine Kelly’s history of 17 South Molton Street. Andy Wilson reviews the stage production of Simon McBurney’s adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, and Sibylle Erle describes the rehanging of Blakes at Tate Britain and reviews Keith G. Davies’s book on Blake and Newton.
Maureen McCue and Sophie Thomas’s Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts, which focuses on the relationship between British Romanticism and the visual arts, is a collection that every Blake scholar will want to explore. The vast majority of the chapters deal at least in part with Blake and/or members of his circle, though only James Grande’s examination of Blake’s depictions of music and musical instruments considers Blake exclusively. The chapters that discuss Blake at any length are listed in Division I, Part VI, while any that discuss members of Blake’s circle are listed under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition in Division II. Chapters that touch on Blake include Katie Garner’s discussion of his designs for The Grave; Martin Myrone’s positioning of Blake in terms of exhibition culture; Susan Matthews’s consideration of the illustrations for Thomas Gray and Edward Young in light of what she argues is a nascent idea of book illustration in the eighteenth century; Laura Engel’s comparison of Diana Beauclerk’s and Blake’s illustrations for Bürger’s Leonora; and Jason Whittaker’s examination of Blake’s depiction in comics. (On a similar topic, Catherine Spooner’s article for Gothic Studies considers the influence of Blake on the graphic novel Satania.)
Blake also figures significantly in several chapters of Angelica Duran and Mario Murgia’s 2021 collection, Global Milton and Visual Art. Nathalie Collé considers his portrait of Milton for the Eighteen Heads of Poets; Joshua Reid compares his illustrations of Paradise Lost with Salvador Dalí’s; and Joseph Wittreich surveys eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century illustrations of Paradise Lost, with substantial reference to Blake’s.
Art History
Rebecca Marks’s presentation for Global Blake examines Blake’s drawings after Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling (Butlin #167-70), pointing to the importance of Fuseli’s description of the figures. Emilia di Rocco looks at “the relationship between literature and the arts” in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century artists and writers, including Reynolds, Blake, and Byron, by examining their depictions of Dante’s Ugolino. Sam Solecki’s book on the modern reception of the Etruscans contains a chapter on Blake and his allusions to Etruscans in Island and A Descriptive Catalogue, with earlier chapters highlighting Winckelmann’s descriptions, the collection of William Hamilton, Josiah Wedgwood’s pottery, and Erasmus Darwin’s references to Wedgwood’s Etruria and the Etruscans in The Botanic Garden. Lissette Lopez Szwydky’s Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (2020) discusses Blake’s engravings for Stedman and his illustrations of Young, Gray, Milton, and Dante, as well as referencing Boydell, Macklin, and Fuseli. Tracing the British reception of Friedrich August Moritz Retzsch’s illustrations to Goethe’s Faust, Evanghelia Stead highlights the role of Henry Crabb Robinson, with references to Flaxman (who saw the illustrations) and to Blake. Mónica Sánchez Tierraseca suggests “artistic cartography” as a way to represent Blake’s Golgonooza. Finally, Evan R. Firestone’s Mist and Fog in British and European Painting: Fuseli, Friedrich, Turner, Monet and Their Contemporaries has a chapter on Blake and his circle (mostly Fuseli) that focuses on the use of mist and haze in their depictions of the supernatural, with a reference to Blake’s annotations to Reynolds in the book’s conclusion.
Science
Two new books engage with Blake’s relationship to science. Andrew M. Cooper’s A Bastard Kind of Reasoning: William Blake and Geometry explicitly sets out to rewrite Donald Ault’s influential account of Blake’s relationship to Newton in Visionary Physics (1974). Cooper reads most of the prophetic books, the Newton color print, and The Vision of the Last Judgment and refers to both late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century figures—including, in addition to Newton, Henry More, George Berkeley, David Hartley, and Joseph Priestley—and to many contemporary scientists. Suggesting that Blake anticipates the insights of post-Newtonian physics, Cooper offers many (dare one say Aultian?) diagrams to represent Blake’s cosmological ideas. (In a similar vein, Mark Lussier’s presentation for Global Blake addresses the intersections of Blake’s work with contemporary physics.)
In terms of Blake and the life sciences, Gillian Xu’s Global Blake presentation highlights the imagery of blood and circulation in The Four Zoas and Jerusalem. David Worrall argues that Blake’s visions were rooted in his experience of migraine auras and synesthesia in an article published in a 2021 exhibition catalogue for the contemporary painter Degard, whose works depict her own experiences of auras.
Milton a Poem and Religion
A large number of scholarly works in the last year focused on Milton. G. A. Rosso seeks to correct the confusion between the eschatological and the apocalyptic common in Blake studies since Northrop Frye, and he reads Milton in light of contemporary biblical studies to illustrate Blake’s ideas of the different concepts. Tristanne Connolly looks at what the imagery of the wine press crushing human grapes suggests about Blake’s views of redemption and violence. Revisiting and, at times, challenging Angela Esterhammer’s Creating States: Studies in the Performative Language of John Milton and William Blake (1994), Brian Russell Graham’s Speech Acts in Blake’s “Milton” provides a book-length reading of the entire poem (which was not considered in Esterhammer’s study). Focusing on the prosody of Milton, Richard Ness suggests that the poem’s “metrical experiments” explain its “strange temporal frameworks.” Jared S. Richman’s presentation for Global Blake also takes up the issue of time in Milton, but considers it through Blake’s “construction of non-normative embodiment and the senses.” A chapter in Matthew Leporati’s Romantic Epics and the Mission of Empire highlights how Milton subverts the epic genre’s typical “imperial allegory.”
Works that consider Milton and Jerusalem include Leporati’s “Emanuel Swedenborg’s Conjugial Love and the Erotic Politics of William Blake’s Epics,” which emphasizes the importance of Swedenborg’s ideas of erotic love to the transformation of the epic, and Zoe Beenstock’s “Jerusalem Moves West: Undoing the Hebrew Bible in Blake’s Milton and Jerusalem,” which examines Blake’s reconstruction of the Bible and the biblical world.
Dar'ya Tarabanova similarly considers “Blake’s approach to the genre of vision” and his turn to “the prophetic books of the Old Testament.” (Listed in Division II, Yosefa Raz’s article on Robert Lowth provides further context for Blake’s rewriting of the Bible, with Raz suggesting that Lowth’s influential fusing of classical genres with the Hebrew Bible continues to shape our own notion of biblical genres today.)
The well-entrenched association of Blake and antinomianism receives some pushback in Matthew Mauger’s interesting book William Blake and the Visionary Law: Prophecy, Legislation and Constitution. Mauger seeks to determine the role that Blake saw for law in Eternity and to explore his understanding of and encounters with English law. (For a counterview, see Duane Williams, who makes the case that Blake can be understood as a Christian anarchist.) Like other Calvinist Methodists, James Hervey was accused of antinomianism, and Dennis M. Read examines Blake’s painting Epitome of James Hervey’s “Meditations among the Tombs.” Read contends that the painting is not an illustration of Hervey’s work per se but, rather, a “strong suggestion of a common religious belief between Blake and [Thomas] Butts, one that shows their bond of friendship and shared values, specifically allied with Hervey’s Methodism, following George Whitefield’s belief in sanctification rather than John Wesley’s doctrine of perfectionism.”
Ecological Studies
Noah Heringman’s Deep Time: A Literary History has a chapter that looks at Blake’s relationship to the Romantic ballad revival and to Johann Gottfried Herder, reading the “Introduction” and “Earth’s Answer” from the Songs of Experience and geological imagery in Milton and Jerusalem. In an article, William Ilan Rubel argues that the climate emergency can only be solved by “a ‘haptic’ approach to nature” found in Alfred North Whitehead and earlier in Blake and William Wordsworth.
Written during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Joey S. Kim’s article “A Series of Digital Research Discoveries” reflects on encountering the Blake Archive as an undergraduate and how it affected her teaching during the lockdown. Fuson Wang’s The Smallpox Report: Vaccination and the Romantic Illness Narrative, conceived during the pandemic, has related chapters on Erasmus Darwin and on Blake, exploring their representations of vaccination and its related figures of the social body and disease.
Somehow, a two-part article by G. E. Bentley, Jr., published three years after his 2017 passing, was missed in previous checklists; it considers Blake’s depictions of animals both real and fictitious. (As noted above, the first part includes a bibliography.)
Reception and Influence
Complementing the recent attention to Blake’s reception in America and Europe,See, inter alia, the special issue “Blake in Europe,” Blake 55.3 (winter 2021–22), ed. Sibylle Erle; The Reception of William Blake in Europe, ed. Sibylle Erle and Morton D. Paley, 2 vols. (2019); and Linda Freedman, William Blake and the Myth of America: From the Abolitionists to the Counterculture (2018). Alexis Harley, Claire Knowles, and Chris Murray provide an overview of his reception in Australia in relationship to English identity and empire. M. Cecilia Marchetto Santorun’s “William Blake in Spanish Popular Culture and Literature” surveys his reception in Spain and stresses how it was shaped by different communities and regions.
Reiko Onodera has a chapter on Blake and medieval manuscripts that examines the Songs and the Night Thoughts illustrations. In addition to his two articles on Kenzaburo Ōe, mentioned above, Hikari Sato also published on Bunsho Jugaku, discussing his thesis on Jerusalem and why he compared Blake with Buddhism.
Jerome McGann’s book on Byron contains a chapter comparing him and Blake. Isobel Armstrong examines Blake’s influence on the text and image combinations of Christina Rossetti. Melih Karakuzu and Özlem Sayar compare Blake’s and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s depictions of child labor in the “Chimney Sweeper” poems and “The Cry of the Children.” Clare Broome Saunders argues that Phoebe Anna Traquair’s illustrations for Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese reveal “striking connections” with Blake’s work. In a collection on the Victorian critic Walter Pater, Luisa Calè contends that the influence of Blake on Pater was more substantial than most readers have assumed. Andrés Ferrada Aguilar reads Blake alongside Emerson and Whitman regarding Protestant modernity.
Pijush Bhadra analyzes how Blake and Yeats similarly utilized “symbols of materiality and spirituality,” while Arianna Antonielli considers the divergence of Yeats’s and John Ellis’s views of Blake after their collaboration on The Works of William Blake (1893). (Blake’s influence on James Joyce is traced in Matthew Leporati’s presentation for Global Blake.)
Aimed at a more popular audience than Jason Whittaker’s Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness, Edwin John Lerner’s Jerusalem: The Story of a Song similarly recounts the origins and popularization of “Jerusalem,” including its setting by Hubert Parry. (Both books are reviewed by James Murray-White at his blog, Finding Blake.) Alla Baeva looks at Dmitri Smirnov’s opera Tiriel.
Becoming What You Behold
2023 saw much work on Blake scholars. Dara Barnat’s study of the response of Jewish American poets to Walt Whitman includes Alicia Ostriker, with part of one chapter examining her relationship to Whitman and part of another examining Ginsberg’s. (Ostriker is also the subject of a study by Sean Burt.) Anne Cranny-Francis’s Jack Lindsay: Writer, Romantic, Revolutionary has two chapters on Lindsay’s writing on and relationship to Blake. James Crossley seeks to recover the importance of A. L. Morton in the British Marxist tradition, highlighting his English Utopia (1952) as well as touching on his Blake scholarship. Writing in VALA, David Worrall has a fascinating account of Anthony Blunt’s career as a spy for the Soviet Union in Britain during the Cold War. Michael Davis’s William Blake: A New Kind of Man, originally published in 1977, has been reprinted as part of the University of California Press’s Voices Revived series.
While Blake is mentioned only once, Laura Cleaver’s article on the great Blake collectors and dealers George D. Smith and Bernard Alfred Quaritch discusses their role in creating the collections of medieval manuscripts at the Huntington, the Morgan, and the Walters.
Psychoanalytic and Therapeutic Uses of Blake
Jason Wright’s Blake’s Job: Adventures in Becoming is a book-length explication of the Illustrations of the Book of Job as a therapeutic model. Jeff McLaughlin suggests that Blake’s works can be seen as models for educational psychology. The preface to Mark Edmundson’s The Age of Guilt: The Super-Ego in the Online World ties the idea of the superego to Blake’s Nobodaddy, Urizen, and Spectre. Lorenz Hindrichsen has an article on aging that examines “The Ecchoing Green” and argues that it encourages the reader to laugh away old age.
Dissertations
Five recent dissertations have at least a chapter on Blake. Elizabeth Giardina (UC Davis) positions Blake within “the poetics of earth system design”; Rasheed Martin Hinds (CUNY) considers representations of Africans and revolution largely in the Lambeth prophecies and the engravings for Stedman; Collin D. Lam (SUNY Binghamton) reads Blake’s Los and Albion in relationship to Rousseau’s Social Contract; Jodie Marley (University of Nottingham) positions Blake and Yeats within the mystic communities of both their own times and those of their later reception history; and Ramazan Saral (Ege University, Türkiye) reads the minor prophecies “as a means to re-evaluate the perception of history through mythopoeia.” (Saral’s poem “Self-Doubt” is in the latest issue of VALA.)
Blakeana
Blakeans may be interested in William Cook Miller’s book The Enthusiast: Anatomy of the Fanatic in Seventeenth-Century British Culture, which has a chapter on John Locke’s view of enthusiasm. Because of the retirement of its editor, the British Art Journal’s last issue will be 24.3.
McCormick Templeman and Rachel Feder’s AstroLit: A Bibliophile’s Guide to the Stars analyzes Blake and other literary figures and their work according to their signs (Blake was a Sagittarius). The Japanese novelist Sumito Yamashita has a short story where the narrator recites parts of “The Tyger”; the poet Rita Dove, who received a National Book Foundation award for lifetime achievement, cited a parody of “The Tyger” in Mad Magazine as one of her influences. David R. Ewbank’s The Lamb Cycle: What the Great English Poets Would Have Written about Mary and Her Lamb (Had They Thought of It First) contains a parody of Blake entitled “The Book of Hell.” The 250th anniversary of Blake’s becoming an apprentice was commemorated by the Stationers’ Company.
Blake’s Circle
Several chapters in The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts consider members of Blake’s circle. Katharina Boehm highlights James Basire’s and George Vertue’s engravings for the Society of Antiquaries; Kacie L. Wills discusses Reynolds’s Portrait of Omai (1776); Joan Coutu surveys Charles Townley’s collecting and displaying of statues at his country house, with references to Canova, Flaxman, and Richard Cosway; Peter Funnell examines celebrity portraits by Reynolds, Lawrence, Nollekens, and Romney; Heather McPherson focuses on representations of the stage in paintings by Fuseli, Lawrence, and Romney; Thora Brylowe presents an overview of Angelica Kauffman’s life, including her relationship to the Royal Academy and the Boydell and Macklin galleries; and Alison Chapman explores illustrated poetry, including Stothard’s vignette in Samuel Rogers’s Italy, a Poem (1830).
Other chapters in the collection look at wider issues of display and exhibition. Charlotte Boyce discusses merchandise that commemorated Nelson; Susanna Avery-Quash charts the development of public art galleries; Sarah Zimmerman examines the space of the public lecture (including those given at the Royal Academy); Peter Otto traces the rise of technologies of illusion and the commercialization of spectacle; Maureen McCue surveys the London print shop; Jennie Batchelor analyzes the role of illustrations in the Lady’s Magazine; Samantha Matthews explores the practice of compiling scrap albums; and Hila Shachar considers “cultural developments in the representation of Romantic ideologies on screen.”
Late in 2022, the Fondazione Maria Cosway in Lodi, Italy, held an exhibition of her works and produced a catalogue. On YouTube, the Cosway scholar Stephen Lloyd has a presentation on the exhibition and catalogue. Cosway’s The Duchess of Devonshire as Cynthia from Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene” (c. 1782) is the cover illustration for Paris A. Spies-Gans’s magnificent study of women artists, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830. The book includes many charts, tables, and graphs quantifying the number of exhibitions in which women participated, the number of women artists, the genres in which they worked, and other useful facts. In addition to its lengthy treatment of Cosway (most of pp. 129-45 and passim), it discusses Angelica Kauffman, Mary Moser, Mary Ann Flaxman, Maria Denman, Mary Hoare, Maria Spilsbury, Anne Seymour Damer, Anne Mee, and Frances Reynolds, with high-quality reproductions of their works. A related article by Spies-Gans provides a more detailed discussion of women artists in the field of art history, with many of the same artists examined.
I have recorded more reviews for the 2022–23 Fuseli exhibition at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris, and Fuseli’s paintings were featured in a new exhibition, Götter, Helden und Verräter, held at the Albertina Museum. Frederick Antal’s classic Fuseli Studies (1956) was reprinted in 2022. Stephanie O’Rourke’s Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism has a chapter on Fuseli, which argues that he intentionally drew and painted bodies that could not be read according to Lavater’s physiognomic system.
Marsha Keith Schuchard documents the alchemical interests of Charles Augustus Tulk and John Flaxman, with references to many Swedenborgian and Masonic figures and slight mention of Blake. Caspar Meyer and Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis’s collection, Drawing the Greek Vase, has one chapter on Flaxman’s representation of Greek vases and another on Thomas Hope’s. Cassie, Lise, and David Mayer have an article on the early life of the circus owner Philip Astley, Blake’s neighbor.
2023 marked the 300th anniversary of Joshua Reynolds’s birth, and he was the subject of two exhibitions. The first was held at the Box in Plymouth, UK, and, though no catalogue was produced, there is a video at the museum’s website. The second was at Kenwood House, and, again, no catalogue was produced, though images of some of the works displayed can be found at its website. Both had public lectures on Reynolds, which were posted to YouTube. Interestingly, the reviews for the Kenwood exhibition seem to reflect the tension between Blake and Reynolds, with the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times praising the exhibition and Reynolds, but with the Guardian condemning Reynolds, with explicit references to Blake’s animosity. Miriam Al Jamil highlights an etching of Reynolds’s painting Johnson Arguing by Mary Dawson Turner, the wife of Blake’s would-be patron Dawson Turner.
The influence of Erasmus Darwin on his grandson Charles has long been debated. Eva Guadalupe Hernández-Avilez and Rosaura Ruiz-Gutiérrez analyze Charles’s annotations to Erasmus’s The Temple of Nature (1803) to suggest affinities with Charles’s The Descent of Man (1871). Two chapters in Melissa Bailes’s Regenerating Romanticism: Botany, Sensibility, and Originality in British Literature, 1750–1830 address Erasmus Darwin, with slight mention of Blake and Fuseli in relationship to the designs and engravings for The Botanic Garden. Darwin also figures in Stephen Leach’s book on the Lunar Society member Peter Perez Burdett.
Like Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft is also being used for therapeutic purposes. In Joanna Biggs’s memoir of starting her life over, she retells the lives of nine women writers who did the same, beginning with Wollstonecraft. For her part, Regan Penaluna uses Wollstonecraft as one of four women philosophers who help her challenge the male-dominated traditions and profession of philosophy. In the Journal of the History of Philosophy, Lauren Kopajtic contends that Adam Smith was not a gender essentialist and that this fact was recognized by Wollstonecraft herself. Elena Makarova has two articles on Wollstonecraft, the first on Helen Maria Williams’s and Wollstonecraft’s lives in France during the French Revolution and the second on Wollstonecraft’s life in Scandinavia. Eileen M. Hunt’s Portraits of Wollstonecraft: The Making of a Feminist Icon, 1785 to 2020 records and analyzes artistic and written depictions. Written in the wake of the overturning of Roe vs. Wade in the US, Susan J. Wolfson’s On Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”: The First of a New Genus is both a close reading and reception history of the work as well as a plea for not ignoring its lessons.
Division I: William Blake
Part I: Blake’s Writings
Section A: Original Editions, Facsimiles, Reprints, and Translations
“Albion rose” (1795)
See Morley in Part VI.
Ballads (Pickering) Manuscript (1807?)
Augurios de inocencia. Ed. and trans. Fernando Castanedo. Madrid: Cátedra, 2020. <Blake (2021, 2023)>
Review
Sanz Jiménez, Miguel.
Hikma 22.1 (2023): 345-48. In Spanish. “Castanedo’s careful editing and translation offer a documented and rigorous reading that invites reflection and allows readers to solve, on their own, Blake’s riddles” (348).
“Blake’s Chaucer: An Original Engraving” (1810)
“Blake’s Chaucer: An Original Engraving” [A]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2023.
“Blake’s Chaucer: The Canterbury Pilgrims” (1809)
“Blake’s Chaucer: The Canterbury Pilgrims” [A]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2023.
Europe a Prophecy (1794)
Europe a Prophecy [a]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2023.
“Exhibition of Paintings in Fresco” (1809)
“Exhibition of Paintings in Fresco” [A]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2023.
“A Fairy leapt” (c. 1793)
“A Fairy leapt.” William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2023.
For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise (1793, c. 1818)
For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise. Obernkirchen [Germany]: Black Letter Press, [2023].
A reproduction without any scholarly apparatus.
An Island in the Moon (1786?)
Una isla en la luna. Ed. and trans. Fernando Castanedo. Madrid: Cátedra, 2014. <Blake (2015)> B. 2nd ed., rev., 2020. <Blake (2021)> C. 2023.
Jerusalem (c. 1804–20)
§ Jérusalem: L’émanation du géant Albion. Ed., trans., and pref. Romain Mollard. Paris: Arfuyen, 2023. 192 pp. ISBN: 9782845903500. In French with English text.
This bilingual edition is the first solo edition and translation of Jerusalem into French. It does not, however, contain the full text of Blake’s illuminated work. The four-volume edition of Blake’s Oeuvres (Aubier/Flammarion, 1974–83), directed by Pierre Leyris and translated by Leyris and Jacques Blondel (for vol. 4, Vala), did not include Jerusalem. Leyris did include “extracts from Jerusalem (bilingual)” in his Ecrits prophétiques des dernières années, suivis de Lettres ([Paris]: Editions José Corti, 2000) <WBHC p. 495>.
Review
Porée, Marc. “
La forge de l’imagination.”
En attendant Nadeau 187 (13-26 Dec. 2023). In French. Whilst welcoming the publication, Porée laments the fragmentary result of the gathered excerpts from
Jerusalem. He also regrets some typographical errors and “risky choices” in translation, even if “the breath, the power and the glory” remain of a
Jerusalem “cut apart, but nevertheless liberated.”
Laocoön (c. 1826–27)
§ El Laocoonte de William Blake, el museo de la obra eterna. Buenos Aires-Madrid: Mochuelo Libros, 2022. In Spanish.
A limited-edition handcrafted box (ten copies when launched, in Aug. 2022) containing three items: a reproduction of Blake’s annotated Laocoön (c. 1826–27); a leaflet with a bilingual edition (English and Spanish) of Blake’s engraved epigrams and maxims; and a separate pamphlet with an essay titled “El museo de la obra eterna,” “on Blake’s work and complex symbols and their relation to this reproduction” (publisher’s webpage).
Laocoön [A]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2023.
“The Phoenix to Mrs. Butts” (c. 1794–1803)
“The Phoenix to Mrs. Butts.” William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2023.
Songs of Innocence (1789)
Songs of Innocence [D]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2023.
Songs of Innocence [O]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2023.
Songs of Innocence [Q]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2023.
Songs of Innocence [S]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2023.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794)
Songs of Innocence and of Experience [W]. Folio Society, 2023.See the Blake Society interview with staff members of the Folio Society about this edition.
“then She bore Pale desire” and “Woe cried the muse”
“then She bore Pale desire” and “Woe cried the muse.” William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2023.
Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793)
Visions of the Daughters of Albion [D]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2023.
Visions of the Daughters of Albion [K]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2023.
Visions of the Daughters of Albion [L]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2023.
Visions of the Daughters of Albion [M]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2023.
Section B: Collections and Selections
Dante Rihaku ni Au: Yotsumoto Yasuhiro Honyakushu Kotenshihen [Dante Meets Li Bai: A Collection of Classical Poems Translated by Yasuhiro Yotsumoto]. Tokyo: Shichosha, 2023. 267 pp. ISBN: 9784783727934. In Japanese. “Infant Joy,” “Laughing Song,” “The Little Boy Lost,” “The Clod & the Pebble,” “The Fly,” “Auguries of Innocence,” and “Proverbs of Hell” are translated into Japanese in chapter 16, “Yorokobi ga harami Kanashimi ga umiotosu [Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth]” (231-48).
Kimi tachi wa Shikashi Futatabi Koi [You, However, Come Again]. By Sumito Yamashita. Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 2022. 252 pp. ISBN: 9784163915258. In Japanese. Sumito Yamashita is a novelist and a winner of the Akutagawa Prize in 2017, and this is a collection of his short stories, which includes “Hara no inu, ibun. Neko no hara [A Dog in the Stomach, a Variant. The Stomach of a Cat],” originally published in Bungakukai [Literary World] 75.6 (2021). In one scene, the narrator quotes the first, second, fifth, and sixth stanzas of “The Tyger” in English, thinking of a tiger, a lamb, God, a dog, and a cat after he undergoes surgery and before he is shown a part of the sigmoid colon cut out by a man in white.
Libros Proféticos. Intro. Patrick Harpur; trans., prol., and glossary (in vol. 2) Bernardo Santano. 2 vols. Vilaür [Spain]: Atalanta, 2013. In Spanish. <WBHC pp. 519-21, Blake (2014)> B. 2023.
Il matrimonio del cielo e dell’inferno. Canti dell’innocenza e altri poemi. Trans. and pref. Edmondo M. Dodsworth. Lanciano, Chieti: Rocco Carabba editore, 1923.This earliest translation of Blake into Italian is not listed in either WBHC or D. W. Dörrbecker’s Blake checklists (note by Fernando Castanedo). Consists of “Prefazione” (5-28), “Canti dell’innocenza” (29-36), “Canti dell’esperienza” (37-49), “Versi del manoscritto di Rossetti” (50-54), “Squarci dal ‘Milton’” (55-62), “Il matrimonio del cielo e dell’inferno” (63-80), “Il libro di Thel” (81-87), “Tiriel” (88-106), and “Il primo libro di Urizen” (107-25). In Italian. B. 2011. ISBN: 9788863441741.
§ O matrimônio do céu e do inferno. O livro de Thel. Trans. José Antônio Arantes. São Paulo: Iluminuras, 1987. In Portuguese. B. 2001. <Blake (2019)> C. 2009. D. 2020. ISBN: 9786555190663.
Tamashii no Koe: Eishi wo tanoshimu [Voices of Soul: Enjoyable Readings of Poetry in English]. By Shunsuke Kamei. Tokyo: Nan’undo, 2021. 221 pp. 1 plate by Blake and Blake’s portrait by Thomas Phillips. ISBN: 9784523293316. In Japanese. An anthology of poetry in English with Japanese translations, which includes “Infant Joy,” “Infant Sorrow,” “The Tyger,” and “The Lamb” (17-24, 78-85).
“Tigr, o tigr, svetlo goryashchiy …” [“Tyger, Tyger, burning bright …”]. Trans. Samuil Marshak, Grigoriy Kruzhkov, Viktor Toporov, et al. Moscow: Azbuka-Atticus, 2023. ISBN: 9785389230491. In Russian. This book contains translations of some of Blake’s short poems, and the whole of Songs of Innocence and of Experience. All the translations have been published earlier.
§ Timeless: Klasiko: Classic Poems, a Trilingual Edition: English-Pilipino-Ilocano. Ed. and trans. Norma B. Hennessy. [Clapham, South Australia]: Norma B. Hennessy, 2023. ISBN: 9780645442366. Prints and translates “A Poison Tree.”
§ Visões. Ed., trans., pref., and notes José Antônio Arantes. São Paulo: Iluminuras, 2020. 428 pp. ISBN: 9786555190588. In Portuguese, with facing English. Includes eleven works: Songs of Innocence, Thel, Marriage, America, Visions, Europe, Urizen, Songs of Experience, Ahania, The Song of Los, and The Book of Los.
Part II: Reproductions of Drawings and Paintings
Section A: Illustrations of Individual Authors
Bunyan, John
Freeman, Curtis W. Pilgrim Journey: Instruction in the Mystery of the Gospel. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023. A book of letters to a new Christian, each accompanied by an illustration to Pilgrim’s Progress. There is also the frontispiece to Jerusalem. Freeman’s Pilgrim Letters: Instruction in the Basic Teaching of Christ (2021), from the same publisher, appears to have the same format.
Chaucer, Geoffrey
The Canterbury Pilgrims: Sketch for the Engraving. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2023. Previously available in the archive’s digital exhibition on the Chaucer painting and engraving; now also accessible under Paintings and Drawings, in preview mode.
Dante Alighieri
‘Bozhestvennaya komediya’ Dante Alig'eri v illyustratsiyakh Uil'yama Bleyka [The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, Illustrated by William Blake]. Trans. Mikhail Lozinskii. Moscow: Azbuka-Atticus, 2023. ISBN: 9785389230163. In Russian. Blake’s illustrations to Dante, published in full for the first time in Russia. The book contains the complete Inferno and selected verses from Purgatorio and Paradiso, with comments by Mikhail Lozinskii (1950).
Section B: Collections and Selections
Eighteen Heads of Poets (c. 1800–03)
Chaucer. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2023.
Part III: Commercial Engravings
Section A: Illustrations of Individual Authors
Chaucer, Geoffrey
The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1783). William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2023.
The Prologue and Characters of Chaucer’s Pilgrims (1812). William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2023.
Part IV: Bibliographies and Catalogues
Section A: Bibliographies
[cross-listing articles with substantial bibliographical content]
Bentley, G. E., Jr. “A Blake Bestiary: Animals, Birds, Fish, Insects, and Supernatural Beings in Blake’s Words and Designs—Part I: Blake’s Acquaintance with Animals.” See Bentley, “A Blake Bestiary … Part I,” in Part VI. It contains a bibliography of scholarly works that address Blake’s representations of animals.
Calè, Luisa. “Blake and Exhibitions, 2022.” See Blake 57.1 in Part VI.
Oliveira, Camila, and Jason Whittaker. “Blake and Music, 2022.” See Blake 57.1 in Part VI.
Ripley, Wayne C., with Fernando Castanedo, Hikari Sato, Hüseyin Alhas, and Vera Serdechnaia. “William Blake and His Circle: A Checklist of Scholarship in 2022.” See Blake 57.1 in Part VI.
Section B: Catalogues
Catalogue 70. William Blake: Present Joy: A Chronological Catalogue of Blake’s Works. San Francisco: John Windle Antiquarian Bookseller, 2022. <Blake (2023)> According to Essick’s “Blake in the Marketplace, 2022,” “This is the second-largest sale catalogue devoted to Blake and his circle, exceeded only by Windle’s October 2009 catalogue 46” (par. 1).
Fliss, William M., Sarah C. Schaefer, et al. J. R. R. Tolkien: The Art of the Manuscript. Milwaukee: Haggerty Museum of Art, 2022. ISBN: 9780945366362. The catalogue for the exhibition at the Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, from 19 Aug. to 23 Dec. 2022. Includes plate 4 (Bentley; Erdman plate 2) of The Book of Thel copy N. For images of the book’s display at the exhibition, see Cincinnati Art Museum, Blog in Part V.
Grouhel-Le Tellec, Anne-Sophie, ed., with Martin Myrone and Alice Insley. L’âge d’or de la peinture anglaise: de Reynolds à Turner. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2019. ISBN: 9782711874347. The catalogue for the exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, from 11 Sept. 2019 to 16 Feb. 2020. It reproduces Blake’s Homer and the Ancient Poets and includes essays on Romney, Lawrence, Fuseli, and Blake.
Night Thoughts: Romantic Drawings from the Brandt Collection. London: Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker Ltd., 2023. ISBN: 9781999978365. Includes a biographical overview of Walter Augustus Brandt (1902–78) and contains drawings by Blake and members of his circle (Fuseli, Flaxman, Romney, Mortimer, Ottley, and Hoare) that Brandt owned. Blake is represented by a two-sided pencil sketch titled Nude Studies (c. 1810) (Butlin #595). His Fertilization of Egypt sketch after Fuseli (British Museum) is reproduced alongside Fuseli’s chalk sketch Satan Summoning His Legions. The entry for Flaxman’s design depicting a scene from William Sotheby’s “Rienzi” includes transcriptions of the lines illustrated and the accompanying letter.
Smiles, Sam. British Art: Ancient Landscapes. London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2017. ISBN: 9781911300144. The catalogue for the exhibition at the Salisbury Museum from 8 Apr. to 3 Sept. 2017. It includes Milton copy A, plate 4 (Bentley; Erdman plate 6) and Jerusalem copy A, plate 100.
“William Blake.” Epic and Divine: Dante’s World. Epic and Divine was an exhibition held in the Noel Shaw Gallery at the University of Melbourne from 3 Mar. to 26 June 2022. The digital version of the exhibition includes images of the facsimiles created for the 1978 Blake Trust edition of Blake’s Dante engravings.
Part V: Digital Resources
Allen Ginsberg Project
“Blake and the Stationers.” Stationers’ Company (4 Aug. 2022). Commemorates the 250th anniversary of Blake’s becoming an apprentice stationer and highlights his work for Joseph Johnson.
Blake Society (see also VALA in Part VI)
Gopalkrishnan, Carl. “Australia a Prophecy.” 25 Jan. 2023. On “his experience of using William Blake’s 1793 poem, America a Prophecy, as a lens to explore the mythic, subconscious, and literary constructions of military interventions in the Indo-Pacific in his painting Australia a Prophecy.”See Gopalkrishnan’s “An Artists [sic] Exploration of the Mythic, Subconscious and Literary Constructions of Military Interventions in the Indo-Pacific,” Critical Military Studies 9.2 (2023): 279-83. <Blake (2023)>
Harpur, Patrick. “A Conversation with Patrick Harpur.” 22 Feb. 2023. “A conversation with Patrick Harpur on the subject of Imagination and Vision; Blake and Tradition, followed by a Q&A with the author.”
Westbrook, Mike, and Kate Westbrook. “A Music Celebration of William Blake: Mike and Kate Westbrook.” 19 Apr. 2023.
“Hercules Road—Blake’s Old Haunt.” 7 May 2023. “Members of the Blake Society are invited to be involved in the ‘finale’ event of an exhibition of artworks, inspired by William and Catherine’s years living in Hercules Road. The venue ‘Hercules Road’ is located inside a flat, next to the William Blake Estate, the site of the Blakes’ former home from 1790–1800.” No video is available, but images of some of the artworks are on the website.
“Auguries of Innocence: First Experiences with Letterpress.” 22 May 2023. Held at Swedenborg House, London. “Graphic design students at Cambridge School of Art turn their hands to letterpress in a five-year project celebrating William Blake and ‘Auguries of Innocence.’” No video is available, but images from the book produced are on the website.
“Blake at Bradford Literature Festival.” 24 June 2023. Three events at the festival tied to Blake. No video is available.
“Meeting at Blake’s Grave.” 12 Aug. 2023. An announcement of the meeting at Blake’s grave. No video is available.
“Blake Talk at St. Bartholomew the Great.” 14 Sept. 2023. Announcing Stephen Pritchard’s talk on Blake. No video is available.
Rogers, Annise. “The Edge of Human Experience: Blake and Tolkien’s Art.” 11 Oct. 2023. An examination of Blake’s and Tolkien’s art.
Bowler, Mark, Dan Norman, and Marianna Suri. “Fragments of Experience.” 8 Nov. 2023. “The team will talk about the inspiration behind the project and the years-long journey that began with a trip to Petworth House and has culminated in a classical song cycle paired with electronic music, live film footage, 2D animation and cutting edge AI animation.”
“VALA 4 Launch.” 29 Nov. 2023. “The launch of issue 4 of VALA, the journal of The Blake Society, with the sadly apposite theme of ‘War and Peace.’” (See VALA in Part VI.)
Rosewell, Tamsin. “A Glimpse behind the Scenes with the Folio Society.” 13 Dec. 2023. “Illustrator and Blake Society Trustee, Tamsin Rosewell, will be talking to Folio Society Art Director, Raquel Leis Allion, Production Director, Kate Grimwade, and Senior Designer, Charlotte Tate—all of whom have worked on the creation of this new Folio Society edition [of Songs of Innocence and of Experience].”
The Box, Plymouth
British Association for Romantic Studies
Sangster, Matthew. “Five Questions: Joey S. Kim on Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation.” 21 Dec. 2023. On Kim’s new book: “I argue that Blake’s composite art—printing technique, handwriting, and visual art—offers a site of imaginative multimodality that moves Romantic poetics toward new paradigms, contours, and shapes of relation. In doing so, Blake’s works propose alternative aesthetic horizons beyond the lyric poem and an openness to new, shifting orientations beyond an East/West binary.”
BARS Digital Events:
“State of the Arts: Reframing the Visual in Romantic Period Studies.” 28 May 2021. “This roundtable was held on the 27th May 2021 and showcased some of the innovative work being undertaken in this field for The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts. Each participant offered a five-minute presentation of their chapter, organized around a key image, allowing plenty of time for discussion about how visual studies have reshaped how we approach and understand the boundaries between print and visual culture in the period.”
Cincinnati Art Museum, Blog
Comics and Lit. “‘London’ by William Blake—Illustrated Poem.” YouTube. 19 Oct. 2023. Animation of the poem.
The Courtauld
Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series: Fuseli and the Graphic Body. Organized by Ketty Gottardo and David Solkin:
Salatino, Kevin. “‘Female Trouble’: Vamps, Vixens and Viragoes in the Art of Henry Fuseli.” 13 Oct. 2022. “Closely looking at what might be called his ‘private’ or ‘secret’ drawings, the vast number of which were of his wife, this lecture teases out the ways in which Fuseli both succumbed to and defied fashion in a multi-decade exploration of the female form at its most fetishized and eroticized.”
Smith, Camilla. “Fools, Heroes and Whores: Henry Fuseli’s Switzerland.” 22 Nov. 2022. “This paper explores Fuseli’s Swiss roots. It focuses in particular on drawings taken from his Jugendalbum (Youth Album) now housed in the Kunsthaus Zürich. It explores the type of place Zürich was—its cultural traditions, religious beliefs and social attitudes—in order to explain why patriotic, religious and sexual themes feature prominently in the artist’s formative works.”
Carter, Sarah. “The Art of Thinking through Collaboration: Fuseli, Blake and Darwin.” 29 Nov. 2022. “Bringing The Fertilization of Egypt into conversation with Falsa ad Coelum (c. 1790) and a series of erotic drawings that Fuseli made between 1800–1810, it contends that the bold virility first realised and later frustrated in these graphic works speaks to the economic climate that brought Fuseli, Blake and Darwin into professional alliance.”
Myrone, Martin. “Fuseli’s Mutable Bodies.” 6 Dec. 2022. “This lecture would explore the mutability of Fuseli’s graphic bodies, and how they operate around but also defy distinctions between life and death, the sculpted and the fleshy, orderly and disorderly anatomies.”
Davies, Keri. Index Rerum: A Blog about Books, Book-Collecting, William Blake, and Lots of Other Things.
Scholarship:
Eisenman, Stephen F. “What’s the Use of William Blake?” Sheerpost (28 May 2023). “The first thing to know about Blake, apart from his extraordinary skill, is that he was clued in to the exigencies of his time: war and revolution; immiseration of the masses and enrichment of the few; the rise of the fossil fuel economy; and grave threats to political and expressive freedom. To Blake, what mattered in both art and politics, was radicalism, meaning getting to the heart of the matter, and imagination, freeing the mind to enable liberation.”
Fara, Patricia. “Glory or Gravity?” History Today (1 Mar. 2023): 84-89. On John Hutchinson’s criticism of Isaac Newton, with many references to Blake and to Eduardo Paolozzi’s statue of Newton.
Foolish Fish. “For the Sexes—The Gates of Paradise by William Blake [Esoteric Book Review].” YouTube. 16 Mar. 2023. A puff for the Black Letter Press reproduction (see Part I, Section A).
Friends of Kenwood Sunday Lecture
Glennie, Jane. “Set Texts, Poetry Film, & William Blake.” Moving Poems Magazine (28 Oct. 2023). An analysis of YouTube recitations of “London”: “I think the poetry film community could create something infinitely more exciting and engaging than any of these.”
Global Blake Network
“In Conversation” series:
Marley, Jodie. “In Conversation with Jodie Marley—Reflection.” 27 Jan. 2023. “Jodie Marley reflects on finishing her PhD on William Blake, and changing her mind (many times).”
Lussier, Mark. “A Return to William Blake’s Visionary Physics: or What Defines ‘Sweet Science’?” 10 Mar. 2023. “This talk begins by addressing where contemporary physical theory meets physiological and psychological descriptions in several works by William Blake which presage what has been termed ‘the new physics’ of quantum mechanics and relativity.”
Tebourski, Ines. “Symmetry/Assymetry in William Blake’s Companion Poems.” 24 Apr. 2023. “This presentation seeks to show how Blake’s symmetry is coupled with hidden ‘asymmetrical’ features that are to be approached through the ‘companion poems’ which are in themselves part of Blake’s ‘dualities.’ They are called ‘companion poems’ as a reference to the fact that selected poems in Innocence have their counterpart in Experience.”
Steil, Juliana. “In Conversation with Juliana Steil—Reflection.” 19 May 2023. Steil discusses “José Antonio Arantes’ translations of twelve books by William Blake collected in Visões (Iluminuras, 2020), and on the translator’s role in the continuing life of Blake’s work in the Portuguese speaking context.”
Richman, Jared S. “Blake’s Visionary Temporalities: Disability and Form in Milton a Poem.” 2 June 2023. “The essay delineates Blake’s alternative temporalities by interrogating his construction of non-normative embodiment and the senses in Milton: A Poem (1804). Blake’s approach to time, I argue, opens new ontological possibilities for a critical disability framework of Romantic production especially with regard to corporeal variability for both poet and reader.”
Xu, Gillian. “The Metamorphosis of Blood: William Blake’s Chemical, Circulatory Poetics.” 21 July 2023. “In William Blake’s The Four Zoas and Jerusalem, a fallen world is regenerated into one filled with hope and potential. I argue that in these two texts Blake is imagining a way in which bodies can learn to understand—through the concept of flexible bloodlines—nonhuman organisms and environments. Blake may have been drawn to Herman Boerhaave, who was a seventeenth-century chemist and who emphasized that chemistry can allow for surprising combinations of existing elements.”
Marks, Rebecca. “‘Organs of Embodied Sentiment’: Contextualising William Blake’s Sistine Studies c. 1770–1790.” 16 Oct. 2023. “In this paper, I use Fuseli’s description of Michelangelo’s Sistine figures as a frame for reading a series of little-known watercolours by Blake, which he completed between 1770–1790, and which indicate how Michelangelo was increasingly being used as a source of affective, emblematic, visual language.”
Leporati, Matthew. “There’s Lots of Blake in Finnegans Wake: James Joyce’s Adaptation of Jerusalem.” 14 Nov. 2023. “While Ulysses is typically regarded as Joyce’s major engagement with epic literature, I argue in this presentation that Finnegans Wake more radically engages it by adapting Jerusalem into a postmodern, postcolonial reflection on empire’s fragmentation of the world and on the possibility of creating global unity.”
Ripley, Wayne C. “‘How dye do Neighbour?’: Stephen Horncastle in Relationship to Blake’s Family, Neighbours, and Circle.” 11 Dec. 2023. “Despite living across the street from the Blake family for thirty years, the stationer Stephen Horncastle has only been recognized as existing by Blake criticism since 2005. This presentation will highlight key elements of Horncastle’s biography, his professional life, and his place in Blake’s social and commercial networks.”
Regier, Alexander. “Printing Blake in Texas: The Story of a Replica of William Blake’s Printing Press.” 11 Mar. 2024. Discusses how and why Michael Phillips’s replica of Blake’s press ended up at Rice University, and its availability to scholars. See also Phillips’s “William Blake’s Rolling Press at Christ Church” for how the designs were created, and Josh Howard-Saunders’s “Building William Blake’s Printing Press” for an account of its construction.
Glover, Michael. “William Blake, Our Contemporary.” Hyperallergic (26 Sept. 2023). On the rehang of Blake’s works at the Tate.
Gourley, Bernie. “A Quick & Dirty Guide for Reading William Blake’s Prophetic Poetry.” Tiger Riding for Beginners (20 Mar. 2023). Offers a chart of Blake’s mythology.
Gress, Timothy. “Illuminated Blake: Why Multiple Copies Matter.” New York Public Library (5 July 2023). On Innocence copies E and K and their differences. (Gress is the coordinator of the NYPL Pforzheimer Collection.)
Guite, Malcolm. “‘The Divine Image’ by William Blake.” Malcolm Guite (6 Jan. 2023). A brief description and application of the poem.
Horio, Emma. “Why Does William Blake’s Work Resonate Today? A UCLA Art Historian [Zirwat Chowdhury] Offers Perspective.” UCLA College Humanities (19 Dec. 2023). Includes a photo of the drawing Donald the Hammerer (Butlin #782).
Hudson, Frank. “William Blake’s ‘The [sic] Poison Tree.’” Frank Hudson: The Parlando Project—Where Music and Words Meet (28 Oct. 2023). An analysis and a musical setting.
Kennedy, Áine Kim. “Jerusalem—How William Blake’s Poem Became an Anthem for All Causes.” Financial Times (1 May 2023). Includes links to recordings of “Jerusalem.”
Lennon, Wendy. “‘The Little Black Boy’ by William Blake.” Ten-Minute Book Club, University of Oxford (18 Apr. 2023).
Levina, Tat'yana. “Uil'yam Bleyk [William Blake].” YouTube. 2023. In Russian. A set of lectures on Blake’s life and works, read by Tat'yana Levina, senior lecturer in the Department of Pedagogy of Psychology, Kazakh-American Free University.
Lucas, James. “William Blake.” Gallerythane (Mar. 2023). A biographical sketch.
Mage: The Podcast. “Fearful Symmetries: The Cosmology of William Blake with Steve Dempsey.” YouTube. 8 Apr. 2023. An interview with Dempsey on his role-playing game Fearful Symmetries.
Murray, Douglas. “Things Worth Remembering: William Blake’s ‘The Lamb.’” The Free Press: For Free People (2 Apr. 2023).
Murray-White, James. Finding Blake: Reimagining William Blake for the 21st Century.
Nerdwriter1. “William Blake’s Dark Vision of London.” YouTube. 31 Oct. 2023. A video explication of “London.”
Nersessian, Anahid. “William Blake’s ‘Laocoön’: Why the Poet’s Engraving Reads Like a Protest Poster.” Yale Review (15 Nov. 2023).
Paul Mellon Centre
Hallett, Mark, Sarah Victoria Turner, and Jessica Feather, eds. The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018. Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2018. A digital compilation of the Royal Academy catalogues, with essays and images. Blake exhibited in 1780, 1784, 1785, 1799, 1800, and 1808. His portrait by Thomas Phillips was exhibited in 1807. Other catalogues or articles about them that mention Blake are 1947, 1974, and 1988.
Ravikumar, Adhithi. “William Blake: Prophet against Empire.” Essex Blogs, University of Essex (11 Oct. 2023). On Blake and the exhibition at the Albert Sloman Library at the University of Essex, Colchester campus, 11 Oct. to 17 Nov. 2023. No catalogue that I could find.
Rice University (and articles announcing its acquisition of Michael Phillips’s replica of Blake’s press)
Staveley-Wadham, Rose. “Exploring Evolving Attitudes to the Art of William Blake.” British Newspaper Archive (5 Apr. 2023). A blog post on Blake’s reception using the British Newspaper database.
Stevens, Lenhardt. “William Blake and the Endurance of Satan as Hero in Paradise Lost.” Medium (10 Aug. 2023). “I want to introduce William Blake’s interpretation of Satan in this post. Blake falls squarely in the Satan as admirable camp and has, for better or worse, become one of the earliest ‘Satanist’ critics.”
Vernon, Mark. “Jesus the Imagination. Taking William Blake’s Christianity Seriously.” YouTube. 29 Nov. 2023.
Whittaker, Jason. Zoamorphosis: The William Blake Blog.
Reviews:
Blakeana:
Zoavision (
Zoamorphosis’s YouTube channel). In addition to the categories listed below, Zoavision includes the recordings of
Global Blake events.
“The Role of the Poetic Form in William Blake’s ‘Holy Thursday’ (Innocence).” 13 Jan. 2023. “This short video explores how William Blake’s use of a particular poetic form in his poem ‘Holy Thursday’ in Songs of Innocence changes the way that we read his verses.”
“What Is Meant by Human Form in William Blake’s Poem, ‘The Divine Image’?” 13 Jan. 2023. “This short video explores some of William Blake’s Christian beliefs in contrast to those of his contemporaries, drawing upon his poem from Songs of Innocence, ‘The Divine Image.’”
“Swedenborg and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” 23 Apr. 2023. “This short video explains the importance of the philosopher, scientist and theologian, Emanuel Swedenborg, on William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”“The Origins of Religion in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” 30 Apr. 2023. “This video looks at plate 11 of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which he proposes that the religious impulse originates in the desire of poets to tell stories.”
“I Must Create a System.” 28 May 2023. “Hannah McAuliffe from the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York, examines how Blake’s famous epigram—“I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans”—is part of a much more complex relation with Enlightenment thinking and system building than is often appreciated.”
Blake Sound Bites (on musical settings of Blake’s works or recitations and short analyses):
“‘Jerusalem’ by Mark Stewart & the Maffia.” 22 Apr. 2023. “While William Blake’s stanza has become one of his most famous poems since it was set to music as the hymn “Jerusalem,” probably the most unique version is that recorded by Mark Stewart in 1982. This short podcast explores what makes Stewart’s version so unusual and explains how it works to both appeal to—and alienate—its listeners. This was first recorded as an audio in 2010 and is now republished following the sad news of Mark’s death.”
“To Spring.” 22 Apr. 2023. “In this podcast, Jason Whittaker explores how James Thomson’s The Seasons influenced Blake.”
“Jah Wobble Presents the Inspiration of William Blake.” 24 Apr. 2023. “Jah Wobble’s 1996 setting of poems by William Blake is one of the most inventive and enjoyable albums that takes Blake as its inspiration. This podcast was first recorded in 2010.”
“‘Jerusalem’ by Test Dept.” 24 Apr. 2023. On a setting of “Jerusalem.” “The podcast was first recorded in 2010.”
“John Tavener and Thelema.” 3 May 2023. “This audio podcast explores two radically different settings [of “The Tyger”], one by the classical composer, John Tavener, and another by a Belorussian black metal band, Thelema. This podcast was first published in 2010.”
Visionary (videos longer than Blake Bites, analyzing or discussing Blake):
“And Did Whose Feet? William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem.’” 30 May 2023. “This podcast explores the circumstances in which [Blake] wrote his stanzas, as well as answering questions as to the poem’s meaning.”
“William Blake and the Idea of the Body.” 16 June 2023. “In this podcast, Hannah McAuliffe, Jon Mee, and Sharon Choe (Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York) discuss William Blake’s changing conception of the body.”
“‘Jerusalem’: From Blake to Parry.” 3 July 2023. “For decades after his death, no one read William Blake’s stanzas from Milton a Poem beginning ‘And did those feet in ancient time,’ and the lyric was nearly forgotten. This podcast explores how Blake’s lines were rediscovered and reinterpreted as a nationalist celebration, how they came to be set to music by Sir Hubert Parry as the hymn Jerusalem, and how Parry turned against their use in the nationalist cause and instead gave the copyright to Millicent Fawcett to become the hymn of the Women Voter[s].”
William Blake Archive
Review
Johnson, Wendell G.
College & Research Libraries News 84.1 (2023): 44-45. A description for research librarians.
Chaucer Omnibus (a publication announcement highlighting all the material tied to Blake’s Chaucer projects now available in the archive):
William Blake’s Canterbury Pilgrims. Exhibition.
Notebook, objects 58, 67, 119-21.
The frontispiece (a commercial engraving after Stothard, 1783) to vol. 13 of The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer.
Chaucer. Eighteen Heads of Poets (c. 1800–03).
Sir Jeffery Chaucer and the Nine and Twenty Pilgrims on Their Journey to Canterbury (1808).
A Descriptive Catalogue (1809).
The Canterbury Pilgrims: Sketch for the Engraving (1809).
“Blake’s Chaucer: The Canterbury Pilgrims” (1809). A prospectus for the engraving of his painting.
“Exhibition of Paintings in Fresco” (1809). An advertisement for the 1809 exhibition (recto) and his “Invention of a Portable Fresco” (verso).
“Blake’s Chaucer: An Original Engraving” (1810). An advertisement for and description of his engraving.
“Chaucers Canterbury Pilgrims” (1810).
The Prologue and Characters of Chaucer’s Pilgrims (1812). “A companion and advertisement for Blake's large engraving.”
“William Blake: Between Imagination and Reason.” COCOA: The Journal of Cornwall Contemporary Art (25 Aug. [2023?]). On The Vision of the Last Judgment (Petworth House).
Wilson, Andy. “Mike Westbrook, Phil Minton & the Lo-Fi Improvised Music Ensemble with Sue Lynch: Intimations of a Future for Blake’s Music.” Traveller in the Evening (5 Jan. 2023).
Part VI: Criticism, Biography, and Reviews
A B C D E F G H J K L M N O P R S T V W X Y
A
Ackroyd, Peter. Blake. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995. <WBHC pp. 1459-61> I. Bir Biyografi. Trans. Burcu Alkan. İstanbul: Alfa Yayınları, 2023. ISBN: 9786254497452. In Turkish.
Adam, Edina, with Julian Brooks, and an essay by Matthew Hargraves. William Blake: Visionary. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2020. <Blake (2021, 2022, 2023)> After being delayed by COVID, the exhibition ran from 17 Oct. 2023 to 14 Jan. 2024.
Reviews
Adamek, Pauline. “
William Blake: Visionary at the Getty.”
Arts Beat LA (n.d.).
Cushing, James. “
Illuminations without Limit: ‘William Blake: Visionary’ at the Getty.”
Artillery (2 Jan. 2024).
Friedman, Julia. “
Blake Reconsidered.”
New Criterion (22 Dec. 2023).
Green, Dominic. “
‘William Blake: Visionary’ Review: A Poet and Prophet’s Exhibition.”
Wall Street Journal (18 Nov. 2023).
Herlinger, Chris. “
William Blake LA Art Exhibit Explores the Boundaries of Imagination.”
National Catholic Reporter (30 Dec. 2023). “In depicting a well-known Biblical narrative of a man beset by suffering and despair, Blake’s Job is rendered with a cosmic backdrop—both moving and stirring.”
Heuer, Friderike. “
Surrealism and Subversion at the Getty.”
Oregon Artswatch: Arts & Culture News (24 Nov. 2023). Many pictures of the Blake designs outside of the Getty, of the gallery space, and of the works displayed.
Knight, Christopher. “
William Blake Was Called a ‘Lunatic’ in His Lifetime. The Getty Hails Him as a Visionary Now.”
Los Angeles Times (12 Dec. 2023).
Larman, Hugo. “
William Blake: Visionary.”
blakesociety.org (4 Jan. 2024). “Impressions of the exhibition.”
Lutz, Carson. “
Getty Center Opens ‘William Blake: Visionary.’”
Daily Trojan (20 Oct. 2023).
“
Major William Blake Exhibition Features His America a Prophecy.”
Fine Books & Collections (26 Oct. 2023).
Mimms, Walker. “
William Blake’s Prints Tapped the Power of a Wild Mind.”
New York Times (30 Dec. 2023).
Poznanski, Avery. “
Getty Center Unveils New Exhibition, ‘William Blake: Visionary.’”
Daily Bruin (17 Oct. 2023). A few pictures of the exhibition space itself.
Rebeggiani, Stefano. “
Getty Exhibit Reveals a Christian Visionary Who Saw Art as Prophecy.”
Angelus: Always Forward Newsletter (4 Jan. 2024).
Shepyer, Rob. “
Transgressive Transcendence at the Getty’s Latest Exhibit: William Blake: Visionary.”
Jankysmooth: Music, Art and the Physics of Genre (27 Oct. 2023). Pictures of the exhibition space.
Skelley, Jack. “
Revolutionary Blake-Splaining.”
Los Angeles Review of Books (4 Jan. 2024). “At the risk of Blake-splaining, let’s state that the artist directly experienced the Imagination (capitalization his) as the engine of this creative resistance: an individual/universal resurrection rendered in illuminated books of epic prophecies within a vast mytho-system, which were cryptically codified to elude the authorities. Experiencing them up close in the Getty galleries is emotionally powerful and psychically charging.”
Smee, Sebastian. “
This Fall, There’s a Bounty of Great Art Offerings.”
Washington Post (7 Sept. 2023).
Staff Writer. “
J. Paul Getty Museum Presents ‘William Blake: Visionary’ Exhibition Opening on October 17.”
Santa Monica Mirror (18 Oct. 2023).
Sweeney, Julia. “
Let’s Go to the Getty and See the William Blake Exhibit!” Substack (10 Nov. 2023). Video of the exhibition shot by the actor Julia Sweeney.
Vargas, Alejandro. “
Últimos días para ver la exposición William Blake: Visionary en el Getty Center.”
Sopitas (4 Jan. 2024).
Whittaker, Jason. “
William Blake—Visionary.” See Whittaker,
Zoamorphosis, in Part V.
“
William Blake’s Ghost of a Flea.”
Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (23 Oct. 2023).
“
William Blake’s Visions on Display at the Getty.”
Beverly Press Park Labrea News (18 Oct. 2023).
Curator talks
Green, Tyler. “
Dorothea Lange Portraits, William Blake.”
Modern Art Notes Podcast (14 Dec. 2023). Interview with Julian Brooks. The Blake section begins at 40:25.
Jones, Sarah. “‘Then patient wait a little while’: Blake Comes to the Getty.” See
William Blake Archive in Part V.
§ Albani, Louisa. In Search of Paradise: William Blake at Old Wyldes, Hampstead. London: Night Bird Press, 2023. ISBN: 9781739326814.
Albani, Louisa Amelia, and David Mullin. “In Search of Paradise: William Blake at Old Wyldes.” See VALA.
Alexander, David. A Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Engravers, 1714–1820. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. <Blake (2023)>
Reviews
Clayton, Tim.
Print Quarterly 40.4 (Dec. 2023): 442.
Jeffares, Neil. “
The Essence of Innumerable Biographies ….”
Neil Jeffares: Fairness, Candour & Curiosity—From Finance to Art History (30 Nov. 2021). The review includes a list of entries whose details are contradicted by other sources—“if [those sources are] wrong, D[avid] A[lexander] needs to say why.”
McEvansoneya, Philip.
Irish Arts Review 39.1 (2022): 126.
Alhas, Hüseyin. “The Impact of Newspapers on William Blake’s The French Revolution and ‘Tyger.’” Hacettepe University Journal of Faculty of Letters 40.1 (2023): 262-73. In English (abstract in Turkish and English). Alhas delves into the impact of newspapers on Blake’s perception of the French Revolution, drawing from archival materials. He indicates that the newspapers of the era profoundly influenced Blake’s poetic output during the early stages of the French Revolution, as evidenced in works such as The French Revolution (1791) and “The Tyger” (1792–93).
§ Ankarsjö, Magnus. William Blake and Sex. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2023. ISBN: 9781476692814.
Antonielli, Arianna. “Biografie rivisitate. Il caso Yeats-Ellis.” Lea: Lingue e letterature d’Oriente e d’Occidente 12 (2023): 229-56. In Italian (abstract in English). Antonielli discusses how Yeats’s and Ellis’s stances toward Blake diverged after their joint editorial venture in The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical (1893). The ensuing works produced by them individually “trace the contours of each editor’s unique approach to William Blake’s works, revealing a fascinating tension between mysticism and scholarship” (abstract).
Armstrong, Isobel. “Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song: Three Illustrators, Three Readings of Image and Text.” Victorian Poetry 60.4 (2022): 547-80. “William Blake solved the problem of image and text by attempting to imbricate image and text as nearly as possible so that one becomes the other. [Christina] Rossetti’s solution was Blake-like: tiny images, in soft pencil with dashes of red, heading her handwritten poems and seemingly produced organically from them” (549-50). (The three illustrators of the title are Christina Rossetti, Arthur Hughes, and Alice Boyd.)
B
Baeva, Alla. “Otechestvennaya opera poslednikh desyatiletiy XX veka v svete vagnerovskikh idey: ‘Tiriel’ D. Smirnova/Russian Opera of the Last Decades of the Twentieth Century through Wagner’s Ideas: Tiriel by Dmitriy Smirnov.” Theater. Painting. Movie. Music [Theatre. Fine Arts. Cinema. Music] 4 (2023): 72-81. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). “This work touches upon the issues of music dramaturgy, stylistic solutions, principles of composition, Dmitriy Smirnov’s work on the libretto, which was based on one of the early, prophetic poems by W. Blake, as well as a number of other poems of the English poet and graphic artist” (abstract).
Baker, Samuel, et al. “Romanticism and Consciousness, Revisited : A Roundtable Discussion.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 65.4 (2023): 422-45. Blake is referenced.
Barnat, Dara. “Jewish American Women Poets Respond to Walt Whitman: Adrienne Rich, Alicia Ostriker, and Marge Piercy.” Walt Whitman and the Making of Jewish American Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2023. 108-38. There is also a chapter on Allen Ginsberg, and Blake is mentioned in regard to both Ostriker and Ginsberg.
Beenstock, Zoe. “Jerusalem Moves West: Undoing the Hebrew Bible in Blake’s Milton and Jerusalem.” European Romantic Review 34.5 (2023): 609-27. “In his prophetic poems, he undoes the temporal and spatial organization of the Hebrew Bible, a possibility first explored in Milton and then fully achieved in Jerusalem, where Blake deconstructs the ancient biblical world to rebuild it in modern Britain” (abstract).
Bentley, G. E., Jr. “A Blake Bestiary: Animals, Birds, Fish, Insects, and Supernatural Beings in Blake’s Words and Designs—Part I: Blake’s Acquaintance with Animals.” Notes and Queries 67.1 (2020): 47-57. On Blake’s experience with animals in his life, in the books he owned, and his own depictions of them. It contains a bibliography of scholarly works that address Blake’s representations of animals.
Bentley, G. E., Jr. “A Blake Bestiary—Part II: Blake’s Hybrid Monsters.” Notes and Queries 67.1 (2020): 57-71. Details Blake’s monsters, both animal hybrids and human-animal hybrids.
Bhadra, Pijush. “Myth and Symbol in Yeats and Blake: Traditional to Individual.” Journal of Cultural Research Studies 2.2 (2023): 94-105. “Both Blake and Yeats created a dichotomy between symbols of materiality and spirituality in a society which is torn between ‘mythos’ and ‘logos,’ between beliefs and logical proofs” (103).
Binning, Sean, with illustration by Sally Kindberg. “In Conflict with the Mainstream: William Blake Considered as an Outsider Artist.” See VALA.
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly
Volume 56, number 4 (spring 2023)
Articles
Essick, Robert N. “Blake in the Marketplace, 2022.” 4 pars., plus listings.
Harley, Alexis, Claire Knowles, and Chris Murray. “Prophet against Empire? William Blake in Australia.” 32 pars. “In this essay, we turn to the reception, reproduction, and revisioning of Blake in the settler colonies of Australia, and we find a Blake whose work, mediated through a range of editorial and curatorial lenses, proves unexpectedly amenable to conflicting Australian desires both to affirm cultural fealty to England and empire and to refuse it” (par. 1).
Reviews
Rovira, James. Joseph Fletcher, William Blake as Natural Philosopher, 1788–1795. 14 pars. “I don’t believe that I have invalidated Fletcher’s thesis, just that additional work needs to be done before he can be said to have supported his argument” (par. 12).
Gourlay, Alexander S. John Higgs, William Blake Now; John Higgs, William Blake vs. the World. 8 pars. “Wherever it goes, William Blake vs. the World will make friends for Blake” (par. 8).
Volume 57, number 1 (summer 2023)
Articles
Ripley, Wayne C., with Fernando Castanedo, Hikari Sato, Hüseyin Alhas, and Vera Serdechnaia. “William Blake and His Circle: A Checklist of Scholarship in 2022.” 49 pars., plus listings.
Calè, Luisa. “Blake and Exhibitions, 2022.” 6 pars., plus listings.
Oliveira, Camila, and Jason Whittaker. “Blake and Music, 2022.” 3 pars., plus listings. “If 2021 saw a considerable addition to the corpus of Blake settings and tracks inspired by his poetry, 2022 witnessed something of an explosion, with almost a hundred releases recorded from this year alone” (par. 1).
Volume 57, number 2 (fall 2023)
Interview
Effinger, Elizabeth, and Helen P. Bruder. “A Conversation with Helen Bruder.” On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Bruder’s William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (1997) and its (and feminism’s) impact on Blake studies.
Articles
Sherlock, Lisa. “William Blake’s Annotations to Milton’s Paradise Lost: New Evidence for Attribution.” 17 pars. An important analysis of the handwriting in the Victoria University Library copy of Richard Bentley’s 1732 edition of Paradise Lost that makes a persuasive case that a set of the annotations in the book are by Blake: “As shown here, some of Blake’s letters to Butts written from his cottage at Felpham are in a style of handwriting, and signed with a monogram, that share characteristics, some idiosyncratic, with those of the two annotations signed ‘WB’ in the Backwell copy of Bentley’s edition” (par. 16). For a related article by Mark Crosby, see Blake 57.3.
Rosso, G. A. “Redefining Apocalypse in Blake Studies.” 43 pars. On the confusion between eschatological and apocalyptic in Blake studies, with a survey of the use of “apocalypse” in biblical studies and in Blake criticism between Northrop Frye and Lucy Cogan. There is also a reading of Milton in order “to show how recent biblical studies can help clarify Blake’s treatment of apocalypse and eschatology” (par. 34).
Thomson, Ian. “William Blake’s ‘Introduction’ to Songs of Innocence: The Role of the Pipe.” 21 pars. Focuses on the pipe: “Blake’s piper appears to be holding an eighteenth-century clarinet” (par. 10).
Volume 57, number 3 (winter 2023–24)
News
Eaves, Morris, and Morton D. Paley. “Book Review Editor.” Thanking Sandy Gourlay, the book review editor since 2006, and welcoming Sibylle Erle into the role.
Article
Read, Dennis M. “Blake’s Hervey, Thomas Butts, and Methodism.” 32 pars. On the painting Epitome of James Hervey’s “Meditations among the Tombs,” Hervey, and Butts’s Methodism.
Interview
Calè, Luisa. “William Blake’s Universe: An Interview with David Bindman and Esther Chadwick.” An interview with the curators of the 2024 Fitzwilliam Museum/Hamburger Kunsthalle Blake exhibition.
Discussion
Crosby, Mark. “A Copy of Richard Bentley’s Edition of Paradise Lost in William Hayley’s Library c. 1802.” 14 pars. In addition to recording an allusion to Blake in a previously unpublished 10 Jan. 1802 letter from Hayley to Lady Harriet Hesketh, Crosby distinguishes the provenance of three copies of Richard Bentley’s edition of Paradise Lost. The first, now at Christ’s College, contains Cowper’s bookplate and his annotations; it was never in Hayley’s possession. The second had been annotated by Ashley Cowper (Cowper’s uncle), was obtained by Hayley through John [Johnny] Johnson (Cowper’s cousin), and, at an unknown date, was passed by Hayley to Theodora Jane Cowper (Cowper’s cousin). This is probably the copy recorded by William Barker as being in Cowper’s library in 1800; it is now untraced. The third, now at Victoria University Library (Toronto), has many annotations, including two signed “WB.” It belonged to the banker William Backwell and contains his bookplate. The Backwell family may have loaned this copy to Cowper; after his death it probably went to Hayley, who describes a copy with annotations, supplied to Cowper by friends, in his preface to Cowper’s Latin and Italian Poems of Milton (1808).
Burgess, Miranda. Rev. of Orrin N. C. Wang, Techno-Magism: Media, Mediation, and the Cut of Romanticism. See Wang, Orrin N. C.
Burt, Sean. “Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s Feminist Poetics: Reading Biblical Poetry as Countertheology.” Prooftexts 40.1 (2023): 227-47. “This article argues that Ostriker’s work as a poet and literary scholar informs her engagement with biblical literature, particularly biblical poetry” (abstract).
Bushell, Sally, Julia S. Carlson, and Damian Walford Davies. “Introduction: Romantic Cartographies.” Romantic Cartographies: Mapping, Literature, Culture, 1789–1832. Ed. Sally Bushell, Julia S. Carlson, and Damian Walford Davies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. ISBN: 9781108459419. 1-24. Discusses both Cumberland’s An Attempt to Describe Hafod and Malkin’s Memoir, with references to Blake.
C
Calè, Luisa. “Blake and Exhibitions, 2022.” See Blake 57.1.
Calè, Luisa. “‘Spiritual Form’: Walter Pater’s Encounters with William Blake.” Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies. Ed. Charles Martindale, Elizabeth Prettejohn, and Lene Østermark-Johansen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 198-215. “Blake is a subterranean presence” in Pater (198).
Calè, Luisa. “William Blake’s Universe: An Interview with David Bindman and Esther Chadwick.” See Blake 57.3.
Cazeneuve, Elsa. “De l’œil à l’étoile: poétiques du globe chez William Blake, William Wordsworth et Samuel Taylor Coleridge/ Celestial Eyes: Metaphors of the Globe in the Works of William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.” Études Épistémé. Revue de littérature et de civilisation (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles) 43 (2023): 38 pars. In French (abstract in French and English). “This paper proposes the idea that astronomy contributed to structure the perceptive philosophy and poetics of the first Romantic generation through the figure of the globe. Indeed, celestial spheres came to serve as a metaphor for the eye globe, which in turn symbolized the possibility of renewed or expanded vision” (abstract).
Chamorro, Daniel. “La imaginación y la naturaleza como base sustancial en la poesía del movimiento romántico/ Imagination and Nature as a Substantial Basis in the Poetry of the Romantic Movement [sic].” Revista Hermeneutic 23 (2023): 84-99. In Spanish (abstract in Spanish and English). Reads several Romantic poems, including “The Tyger,” from the standpoint of Maurice Bowra’s The Romantic Imagination.
Christian, Perienne. “‘Choicepoint 2023.’” See VALA.
Clayton, Tim. Rev. of David Alexander, A Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Engravers, 1714–1820. See Alexander.
Cleaver, Laura. “George D. Smith (1870–1920), Bernard Alfred Quaritch (1871–1913), and the Trade in Medieval European Manuscripts in the United States ca. 1890–1920.” Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies 8.1 (2023): 61-94. Compares the lives of Smith and Quaritch and their roles in shaping the holdings of medieval manuscripts in the Huntington, Morgan, and Walters collections. There is only one mention of Blake, though both were major Blake dealers.
Collé, Nathalie. “Author Portraits of Milton, Authorship, and Canonization.” Global Milton and Visual Art. Ed. Angelica Duran and Mario Murgia. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2021. ISBN: 9781793617064. 141-64. In a wider chapter on portraits of Milton, touches on “John Milton and His Two Daughters,” after Romney, as well as Blake’s portrait of Milton for the Eighteen Heads of Poets.
Colls, Robert. Rev. of Jason Whittaker, Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness. See Whittaker, Jerusalem.
Connolly, Tristanne. “Human Grapes in the Wine-Presses: Vegetable Life and the Violence of Cultivation in Blake’s Milton.” Wild Romanticism. Ed. Markus Poetzsch and Cassandra Falke. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. ISBN: 9780367496722. 74-90. “In Milton, Blake purposely leaves unresolved whether the violence of the Vintage leads to the transformation of the human grapes or to tragic disaster; he avoids justifying violence by a redeeming result, and recognizes the contingency of all work of cultivation” (76).
Cooke, Stuart. Rev. of Kate Rigby, Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonization. See Rigby.
Cooper, Andrew M. A Bastard Kind of Reasoning: William Blake and Geometry. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2023.Incorporates “two or three pages” of Cooper’s “Small Room for Judgment” (see next entry) and “material amounting to maybe ten pages” from his William Blake and the Productions of Time (2013). ISBN: 9781438493220. An ambitious study of Blake and Newton that seeks to challenge the relationship expressed in Donald Ault’s Visionary Physics (1974). Cooper reads the Newton print, The Vision of the Last Judgment, and most of the illuminated books in relationship to Joseph Priestley, David Hartley, Henry More, George Berkeley, and many twentieth-century scientists, providing diagrams to illustrate Blake’s cosmological ideas.
Cooper, Andrew M. “Small Room for Judgment: Geometry and Prolepsis in Blake’s ‘Infant Sorrow.’” European Romantic Review 31.2 (2020): 129-55. “The extensive typological allusions in Blake’s ‘Infant Sorrow’ (Songs of Experience) associate swaddling with the establishment of traditional moral-materialist culture based on sacrifice. Blake links his culture’s materialism to three-dimensional perspective, which the accompanying design overthrows in accordance with Berkeley’s contention that distance exists only in the mind. By setting the poem’s aged speaker and the design’s infant at odds, Blake undermines the received relation between these two ‘sister arts’ and enforces a cognitive dissonance that is of apocalyptic intensity. The supercharged political context of 1792–93 adds further immediacy” (abstract).
Cranny-Francis, Anne. Jack Lindsay: Writer, Romantic, Revolutionary. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan-Springer Nature, 2024. ISBN: 9783031396458. Two chapters on Lindsay’s work on Blake: “William Blake, Visionary” (35-51) and “William Blake, Prophet” (297-319).
Crosby, Mark. “A Copy of Richard Bentley’s Edition of Paradise Lost in William Hayley’s Library c. 1802.” See Blake 57.3.
Crossley, James. “A. L. Morton’s English Utopia and the Critical Study of Apocalypticism and Millenarianism.” Religions 14.11 (2023): 14 pp. “This article seeks to re-establish Morton’s place in [the British Marxist] scholarly tradition, using his work The English Utopia as a starting point for understanding the important critical developments taking place in the 1950s” (abstract). Some references to Morton’s work on Blake as well.
D
Davies, Keith G. William Blake, the Single Vision, and Newton’s Sleep: A History of Science, Poetry, and Progress. New York: Routledge, 2024. ISBN: 9781032459172. “By examining the views of William Blake and other poets in the context of twentieth-century philosophers Hannah Arendt, Jacob Bronowski, Martin Heidegger, Bruno Latour and Karl Popper, amongst others, the book takes an eclectic approach drawing on examples from biology, history, literature, philosophy and economics, arguing for the reestablishment of imagination as a central attribute of science” (description).
Review
Erle, Sibylle. See
VALA.
Davies, Keri. “Another Engraver in South Molton Street.” See Davies in Part V.
Davies, Keri. “The Whore Next Door: William Blake’s Neighbours in South Molton Street.” See Davies in Part V.
Davis, Michael. William Blake: A New Kind of Man. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023. UC Press Voices Revived. A reprint of his 1977 biography <BBS p. 449, WBHC pp. 1929-30>.
Dodd, Elizabeth S. “The Voice of the Lord—The Prophetic Spirit in the Lyric ‘I.’” The Lyric Voice in English Theology. London: Bloomsbury, 2023. T & T Clark Studies in English Theology. ISBN: 9780567670304. 95-124. The Songs are discussed in the section “I love: The Prophetic Lyrics of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience [sic]” (99-106).
Donley, Kevin Reed. “William Blake: Relief Etching.” As If by Chance: Sketches of Disruptive Continuity in the Age of Print from Johannes Gutenberg to Steve Jobs. Meadville, PA: Fulton Books, 2023. ISBN: 9798889821526. Despite the grandiose title, a set of superficial biographical sketches.
E
Eckert, Lindsey. Rev. of Orrin N. C. Wang, Techno-Magism: Media, Mediation, and the Cut of Romanticism. See Wang, Orrin N. C.
Edmundson, Mark. The Age of Guilt: The Super-Ego in the Online World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023. ISBN: 9780300265811. The preface likens the superego to Blake’s Nobodaddy, Urizen, and Spectre.
Effinger, Elizabeth, and Helen P. Bruder. “A Conversation with Helen Bruder.” See Blake 57.2.
Eisenman, Stephen F. “What’s the Use of William Blake?” See Eisenman in Part V.
Erle, Sibylle. “‘And I gave it to my foe’: Deadly Games of Creation in Blake’s The [First] Book of Urizen and ‘A Poison Tree.’” Prudent Crossings: From Milton’s Paradise to Canada’s Bush Gardens. Ed. Alessandra Boller et al. Augsburg: Wißner-Verlag, 2023. 21-38. An important consideration of Blake’s depiction of creation and the fall, his use of Milton, and Urizen’s relationship to Satan, with commentary on Marriage and “The Ancient of Days” as well as the poems mentioned in the title.
Erle, Sibylle. “‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time.’” See VALA.
Erle, Sibylle. Rev. of Keith G. Davies, William Blake, the Single Vision, and Newton’s Sleep: A History of Science, Poetry, and Progress. See VALA.
Erle, Sibylle. “William Blake and Tate Britain’s Rehang.” See VALA.
Essick, Robert N. “Blake in the Marketplace, 2022.” See Blake 56.4.
F
Fabian, Claudia, and Béatrice Hernad. “Showcase—Showtime! Künstlerbücher im Mittelpunkt.” Bibliotheksforum Bayern 4 (Nov. 2017): 234-37. Reproduces the frontispiece and title page of The Song of Los copy F in an article about the exhibition of artist books at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek from Sept. 2017 to Jan. 2018.
Fallon, David. “‘A Machine is not a Man nor a Work of Art’: Adventures with Blake and AI.” See VALA.
Fay, Elizabeth A. “Blake’s Mythical Interval.” Romantic Immanence: Interventions in Alterity, 1780–1840. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2023. ISBN: 9781438494746. Considers Marriage, America, Urizen, The Book of Los, Milton, and Jerusalem, and argues “that Blake’s creation story takes place in the interval, a space in which a restless shuttle between egotistical resistance (division, embodied by Urizen) and an opening up to realization (unity, figured by Los) leads to the prophesied, awakened life (Jerusalem).”
Ferrada Aguilar, Andrés. “Imaginación visionaria y crisis modernas: Blake, Emerson y Whitman.” Revista Chilena de Literatura 103 (2021): 455-79. In Spanish (abstract in Spanish and English). The article “intends to articulate correspondences between the visionary imagination and the fissures produced by an industrial and protestant modernity in a selection of poems and referential writings by William Blake, R. W. Emerson, and Walt Whitman” (abstract).
Firestone, Evan R. “Mist and Gothicism in British Painting.” Mist and Fog in British and European Painting: Fuseli, Friedrich, Turner, Monet and Their Contemporaries. London: Lund Humphries, 2023. ISBN: 9781848225732. 19-57. A chapter on mist, obscurity, the supernatural, and the Gothic in the Romantic era reproduces Blake’s The Ghost of Samuel Appearing to Saul, c. 1800 (Butlin #458); The Temptation and Fall of Eve, 1807 (Butlin #536.9); and Milton’s Mysterious Dream, c. 1816–20 (Butlin #543.11) (titled Mysterious Dream in the book). The chapter also discusses many members of Blake’s circle, most prominently Fuseli, but also Mortimer, Stothard, Romney, and Maria Cosway. Blake’s annotations to Reynolds are discussed briefly in “Conclusion: Another Look at the Sublime” (148).
Fletcher, Joseph. William Blake as Natural Philosopher, 1788–1795. London: Anthem Press, 2021. <Blake (2022)>
Review
Rovira, James. See
Blake 56.4.
Freedman, Linda. Rev. of William Blake: Modernity and Disaster, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Joel Faflak. See Rajan and Faflak.
Fry, Paul H. Rev. of Chris Townsend, George Berkeley and Romanticism: Ghostly Language. See Townsend.
G
Galperin, William. Rev. of The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts, ed. Maureen McCue and Sophie Thomas. See McCue and Thomas.
Giardina, Elizabeth. “The Book of Nature: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Poetry and the Poetics of Earth System Design.” PhD diss., UC Davis, 2023. According to the abstract, there are chapters on Erasmus Darwin, Charlotte Smith, Blake, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Giorgio, Simone. “Tradurre la visione: Celati, Blake, Michaux.” Griseldaonline 22.1 (2023): 27-40. In Italian (abstract in Italian and English). The essay explores “Gianni Celati’s relationship with … William Blake and Henri Michaux. Starting from the reproposal of some excerpts of their works on ‘Il semplice,’ it is exposed how Celati’s interest in these writers is linked to themes such as vision and liberation from social constraints—two topics variously treated by Celati in his works” (abstract).
Gopalkrishnan, Carl. “Australia a Prophecy.” See Blake Society in Part V.
Gopalkrishnan, Carl. “A Field Manual for a Lost Soldier.” See VALA.
Gourlay, Alexander S. Rev. of John Higgs, William Blake Now and William Blake vs. the World. See Blake 56.4.
Graham, Brian Russell. Speech Acts in Blake’s “Milton.” New York: Routledge, 2023. ISBN: 9781032379180. “A study of Blake’s Milton, informed by [J. L.] Austin, which addresses Blake’s poem and speech acts.”
Günçel, Fatma Büşra. “William Blake’in Cennet ile Cehennemin Evliliği Eseri ve Coincidentia Oppositorum [Coincidentia Oppositorum in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell].” Belgü 141 (2023): 141-52. In Turkish.
H
Hagberg, Garry L. “Visual Metaphors: On the Linguistic Structure of Hybrid Creatures in Art.” Poetics Today 44.4 (2023): 571-88. A section examines The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun and The Ghost of a Flea.
Harley, Alexis, Claire Knowles, and Chris Murray. “Prophet against Empire? William Blake in Australia.” See Blake 56.4.
Hasegawa, Akira. Den’en Toshi to Sennen Okoku: Shukyo kaikaku kara Bruno Taut e [Garden City and the Millennium: From Religious Reformation to Bruno Taut]. Tokyo: Kosakusha, 2021. 613 pp. 1 plate by Blake. ISBN: 9784875025252. In Japanese. Chapter 4, “Igirisu seikimatsu to sinrei shugi [British fin de siècle and Spiritualism],” mentions Blake and Neoplatonism (98).
Hensher, Philip. Rev. of Jason Whittaker, Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness. See Whittaker, Jerusalem.
Heringman, Noah. “William Blake, the Ballad Revival, and the Deep Past of Poetry.” Deep Time: A Literary History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023. ISBN: 9780691235790. 120-75. Considers Blake’s notion of deep time in relationship to the eighteenth-century ballad revival and especially to Joseph Ritson’s A Select Collection of English Songs (1783), with a focus on the “Introduction” and “Earth’s Answer” from the Songs of Experience and on the “contact zone between geology and prehistory” (169) in Milton and Jerusalem. There are also comparisons between Blake and Herder.
Higgs, John. William Blake vs. the World. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2021. <Blake (2022, 2023)>
Reviews
Ayjay. “
Blake Domesticated.”
Homebound Symphony (11 Feb. 2023). “John Higgs’s
William Blake vs. the World is a real disappointment. Higgs writes vividly and is a fine storyteller, but like most people who write about Blake, he’s simply not willing to take Blake seriously. He wants to like Blake, and so he has to make him
safe.”
Chatterjee, Tayana. “
Poet, Mystic, Madman.”
Telegraph Online (2 Sept. 2022). “Higgs manages to neatly place what was thought to be the frenzy of a madman into the realms of modern science and comparative religion.”
Gourlay, Alexander S. See
Blake 56.4.
Scharper, Diane. “
What Sort of Visionary Was William Blake?”
Washington Examiner (29 Apr. 2022). A summary of the book and a short biography of Blake.
Spinozablue. “
William Blake vs. the World, by John Higgs.”
Spinozablue (13 Jan. 2023).
Higuchi, Hiroyuki. Kyofu no Bigaku: Naze hito wa zokuzoku shitainoka [Aesthetics of Horror: Why Do People Want to Be Frightened?]. Tokyo: Atelier Third, 2022. 311 pp. 3 plates by Blake. ISBN: 9784883754823. In Japanese. Blake is briefly discussed in the context of Gothic revivals in chapter 6, “Kyofu no bijutsukan [A Museum of Horror]” (143-49).
Hindrichsen, Lorenz. “‘When I’m 73 and in Constant Good Tumour’: Poetic Responses to Ageing from Jenny Joseph to Fleur Adcock.” Polish Journal of English Studies 9.2 (2023): 108-27. Includes a section on “The Ecchoing Green” (110-13): “Text and image, then, promote a collective ‘laughing away’ of old age through echoes of spring associated with the young” (112).
Hinds, Rasheed Martin. “Towards Regeneration: William Blake’s Prophetic Visions of Black Atlantic.” “Kingdoms Becoming: Dialectic of Black Romanticism.” PhD diss., City University of New York, 2023. 135-205. Considers representations of Africans and revolution in Blake’s works.
Howard-Saunders, Josh. “Building William Blake’s Printing Press.” Christ Church Library Newsletter 11.1-3 (2019–20): 11-14. An account of the construction of the replica of Blake’s star-wheel rolling press, now at Rice University, Houston. See also Michael Phillips’s “William Blake’s Rolling Press at Christ Church” for how the designs were created, and Alexander Regier’s Global Blake presentation for why and how the press was moved to Rice.
Hristova, Rumyana, with illustration by Emanuela Kovach. “Blake’s Divine Vision and the Mental Fight.” See VALA.
Hudson, Jake. “Augury of Innocence.” See VALA.
J
Jeffares, Neil. Rev. of David Alexander, A Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Engravers, 1714–1820. See Alexander.
Jones, Mark. Rev. of Jason Whittaker, Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness. See Whittaker, Jerusalem.
K
Karakuzu, Melih, and Özlem Sayar. “A Comparative Analysis of the Conditions in the Romantic and Victorian Ages and Their Reflection in the Poems, ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ (1789, 1794), by William Blake, and ‘The Cry of the Children’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” Cogito 8.4 (2016): 105-09. “Aims to compare the stated poems of these poets in terms of child labor, social and family relationships, and religion” (abstract).
Kim, Joey S. “Disorienting Romanticism: William Blake’s Orientalist Poetics.” Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. ISBN: 9781399511254.
Author talk
Sangster, Matthew. “Five Questions: Joey S. Kim on
Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation.” See
British Association for Romantic Studies in Part V.
Kim, Joey S. “A Series of Digital Research Discoveries.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 33.1 (fall 2020): 107-09. Describes encountering the Blake Archive as an undergraduate and how her experiences with it and digital resources like it affected teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic.
L
La Berge, Leigh Claire. “Intermezzo 2. The Tiger-Tyger Dialectic.” Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary. Durham: Duke University Press, 2023. Considers Romantic-era tigers through a Marxist lens.
Lachman, Gary. Dark Muse: Occult Star Retsuden [A Dark Muse: The Lives of Occultists]. Trans. Kazu Tanigawa. Tokyo: Kokusho Kankokai, 2023. 483 pp. ISBN: 9784336075161. In Japanese. A translation of The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse (Sawtry: Dedalus, 2003). Blake is discussed in the first section, “Keimo jidai no occultism [Occultism in the Age of Enlightenment]” (94-102).
Lahikainen, Amanda. Rev. of Joseph Monteyne, Media Critique in the Age of Gillray: Scratches, Scraps, and Spectres. See Monteyne.
Lam, Collin D. “The Melancholic Collective: Rousseau, Blake, and the Romantic Community.” “Sorrow Worlds: Romantic Melancholy and the Condition of History.” PhD diss., State University of New York at Binghamton, 2023. Reads Blake’s Los and Albion in relationship to Rousseau’s Social Contract.
Larman, Hugo. “Drawing from William Blake in a Time of War.” See VALA.
Lee, Tara. “Vital Heat and the Organized Body: Burke, Blake, The French Revolution and The [First] Book of Urizen.” European Romantic Review 34.5 (2023): 527-48. “This article puts Blake in intimate dialogue with Burke, Sieyès, and other revolutionary and reactionary writers who evocatively updated the body politic metaphor to describe a radically changing political landscape” (abstract).
Leporati, Matthew. “Emanuel Swedenborg’s Conjugial Love and the Erotic Politics of William Blake’s Epics.” European Romantic Review 34.4 (2023): 397-421. “Situating Milton and Jerusalem in the epic revival of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the article argues that Blake’s incorporation and revision of Swedenborgian ideas help him to challenge some forms of misogynistic, militaristic politics that writers of Blake’s day were supporting with appeals to the classical and Miltonic epic traditions” (abstract).
Leporati, Matthew. “‘Mark Well My Words! They Are of Your Eternal Salvation’: William Blake’s Milton as Missionary against Empire.” Romantic Epics and the Mission of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. ISBN: 9781009285186. 183-224. “In exploring the power of art to promote a freedom from Selfhood, Blake is subverting the tendency of Christian evangelism, along with the secular civilizing mission, to reify the dichotomy between self and Other upon which imperialism is largely predicated” (219).
Leporati, Matthew. “There’s Lots of Blake in Finnegans Wake: James Joyce’s Adaptation of Jerusalem.” See Global Blake in Part V.
Lerner, Edwin John. Jerusalem: The Story of a Song. Alresford: Chronos Books-John Hunt Publishing, 2022. ISBN: 9781803411040. An account of “Jerusalem” and its reception.
Review
Murray-White, James. See
Murray-White in Part V.
Lindsann, Olchar E. Two Cities: On Carcosa and Golgonooza. Monocle-Lash Anti-Press, 2018. A rhapsodic comparison of Blake’s Golgonooza and Carcosa, an ancient city in Ambrose Bierce’s story “An Inhabitant of Carcosa.”
Linkin, Harriet Kramer. “The Destabilizing Materiality of the Autograph for Blake, Coleridge, and Tighe.” Material Transgressions: Beyond Romantic Bodies, Genders, Things. Ed. Kate Singer, Ashley Cross, and Suzanne L. Barnett. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020. 31-52. “Blake, Coleridge, and Tighe deliberately disrupt the potential erasures effected by commercial print through the destabilizing materiality of their hand-imprinted signatures” (33).
Löchle, Dieter. “Warships into Friendships.” See VALA.
§ Luckow, Almuth. Die Gottesbilder des William Blake: Kunst und Philosophie. Darmstadt: wbg Academic, 2021. ISBN: 9783534405701. In German. On Blake’s representation of God, according to the publisher’s description.
Lussier, Mark. “A Return to William Blake’s Visionary Physics: or What Defines ‘Sweet Science’?” See Global Blake in Part V.
M
Makdisi, Saree. “Afterword: Palestine Is Everywhere.” Studies in Romanticism 62.2 (2023): 311-16. “Blake’s vision of building Jerusalem in England—in lines that are repeated in song to this very day—may be the best known of these references to Palestine in Romanticism, but they are in a sense the exception that proves the rule. For if most gestures to Palestine at the time and through the nineteenth century see it as a blank space that could simply be appropriated, Blake’s interests actually lie in England, not in Palestine itself ” (312).
Mann, Annika. Rev. of Rosalind Powell, Perception and Analogy: Poetry, Science, and Religion in the Eighteenth Century. See Powell.
Manwaring, Kevan. “Drawing Blake.” See VALA.
Marchetto Santorun, M. Cecilia. “William Blake in Spanish Popular Culture and Literature.” Weaving Tales: Anglo-Iberian Encounters on Literatures in English. Ed. Paula García-Ramírez, Beatriz Valverde, Angélica Varandas, and Jason Whittaker. New York: Routledge, 2023. ISBN: 9781032447681. 18-31. An important overview of Blake’s reception in different regions of Spain.
Marks, Rebecca. “‘Organs of Embodied Sentiment’: Contextualising William Blake’s Sistine Studies c. 1770–1790.” See Global Blake in Part V.
Marland, Pippa. Rev. of Kate Rigby, Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonization. See Rigby.
Marley, Jodie Lorna. “The Mystic Communities of William Blake and W. B. Yeats: Shared Spiritual Influences and Legacies.” PhD diss., University of Nottingham, 2023. “Both William Blake’s and W. B. Yeats’ work is indebted to and driven by their spiritual convictions. Their engagement with the mystic and the esoteric within their social circles is mirrored across time. My thesis aims to make the case that the sources of these authors’ mysticisms, and their engagement with mystic spirituality in a community context impacted both Blake’s, and Yeats’ critical and cultural reception” (abstract). There are also chapters on Dorothy Gott and Joanna Southcott.
Marley, Jodie, with illustration by Richard Hemmings. “Vegetable Eyes.” See VALA.
Mauger, Matthew. William Blake and the Visionary Law: Prophecy, Legislation and Constitution. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan-Springer Nature, 2023. ISBN: 9783031377228. A study of Blake’s notion of law in Eternity that seeks to temper antinomian readings of Blake. Examines most of Blake’s prophetic poetry, as well as Marriage and the Songs.
McCue, Maureen, and Sophie Thomas, eds. The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. ISBN: 9781474484176. A collection of essays examining British Romanticism and the visual arts. Only the chapters that address Blake directly are listed below. Other essays related to Blake’s circle or exhibition practices are listed in Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition in Division II.
Garner, Katie. “The Gothic Aesthetic: Word and Image.” 40-57. Touches on Blake’s illustrations to Blair (52-54) in a discussion of the visual in the Gothic.
Myrone, Martin. “Exhibitions Culture, Consumerism and the Romantic Artist.” 184-200. “I would propose that the phenomenon of exhibitions culture helped institute a structurally precarious, inherently competitive and individualist artistic field, revealing a still larger set of transformations accompanying social, economic and political modernization” (189). Positions Blake in this context (197-98), with references to the Royal Academy, Reynolds, Fuseli, Boydell, Macklin, Bowyer, Romney, and Barry.
Grande, James. “Sound and Vision in Blake’s London.” 237-54. Considers “the relationship between the arts” (238) in Blake’s works, highlighting depictions of music and musical instruments in his work and in biographical sketches of him.
Matthews, Susan. “Illustrated Poetry in the Romantic Period.” 356-73. On the relative novelty of the idea of “illustrations” in the Romantic period, with references to Blake’s illustrations to Gray and Young, as well as Stothard, Fuseli, Boydell, and Charlotte Malkin.
Engel, Laura. “Fashioning the Female Artist: Allegory and Celebrity in Lady Diana Beauclerk’s Watercolours of The Faerie Queene.” 374-90. In addition to analyzing Beauclerk’s watercolors (c. 1781) and Bartolozzi’s engraving of her Portrait of the Artist’s Daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, Reading a Book (c. 1780), looks at the comparison by the British Critic between Beauclerk’s and Blake’s illustrations for Bürger’s Leonora.
Whittaker, Jason. “Romantic Caricature and Comics.” 471-85. On Romantic caricature’s contribution to modern comics, closing on Blake’s depiction in comics (479-85).
Review
Galperin, William.
Review 19 (19 May 2023).
Author talk
“State of the Arts: Reframing the Visual in Romantic Period Studies.” See
British Association for Romantic Studies in Part V.
McEvansoneya, Philip. Rev. of David Alexander, A Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Engravers, 1714–1820. See Alexander.
McGann, Jerome. “Byron, Blake, and the Adversity of Poetics.” Byron and the Poetics of Adversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 119-53. “Oddly but, as we shall see, truly, while each worked from a different English lexicon—Blake’s religious and even theological, Byron’s secular and Enlightened—they shared certain important ideas that skewed them from what their age demanded” (119).
McLaughlin, Jeff. “The Crooked Roads of Genius: William Blake and Educational Psychology.” Literary Imagination and Professional Knowledge: Using Literature in Teacher Education. Ed. Jeff McLaughlin. Gorham, ME: Myers Education Press, 2023. ISBN: 9781975505301. “The writings of William Blake contain many examples of poetry and prose that could be connected to concepts of educational psychology.”
Mezquita Fernández, María Antonia. “Análisis de los contrarios en la poesía de William Blake y Claudio Rodríguez/Analysing Contraries in the Works of William Blake and Claudio Rodríguez.” Ogigia: Revista electrónica de estudios hispánicos 34 (2023): 77-97. In Spanish (abstract in Spanish and English).
Milnes, Timothy. Rev. of Chris Townsend, George Berkeley and Romanticism: Ghostly Language. See Townsend.
Moloney, Francis J. Rev. of Christopher Rowland, “By an Immediate Revelation”: Studies in Apocalypticism, Its Origins and Effects. See Rowland.
Monteyne, Joseph. Media Critique in the Age of Gillray: Scratches, Scraps, and Spectres. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. <Blake (2023)>
Review
Lahikainen, Amanda.
Art Bulletin 104 (2022): 123-26. “In his close reading of William Blake’s
The First Book of Urizen (1794), especially the end of the first chapter, Monteyne argues that embedded media in two depictions of open books reclaim materiality and visual exploration, interpolating in a scholarly consensus largely dominated by investigations of word/image relationships and spirituality” (125).
Morley, Simon. Modern Painting: A Concise History. London: Thames & Hudson, 2023. ISBN: 9780500204894. Considers “Albion rose,” with some comparison to Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son.
Mugleston, Charles. “Unity.” See VALA.
Murray-White, James. Rev. of Jason Whittaker, Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness, and Edwin John Lerner, Jerusalem: The Story of a Song. See Murray-White in Part V.
N
Ness, Richard. “Vibrant Meter: Periods, Pulsations, and Prosody in Blake’s Milton.” European Romantic Review 34.6 (2023): 711-33. “This article argues that Milton’s metrical experiments are essential for understanding the poem’s strange temporal frameworks” (abstract).
Newton, A. Edward. “Works of William Blake.” The Uncollected A. Edward Newton. Ed. Joseph Rosenblum. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2017. 50-52. Rpt. of Newton’s review of the 1926 Philadelphia exhibition in the Pennsylvania Museum Bulletin vol. 21, no. 103: 162-65 <BB #2284, WBHC p. 1099>.
O
Onodera, Reiko. Kaiga wa Shosetsu yorimo Ki nari: 18 seiki to 19 seiki no igirisu kaiga wo yomu [Paintings Are Stranger Than Fiction: A Reading of British Paintings in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries]. Tokyo: Arina Shobo, 2022. 322 pp. 14 plates by Blake. ISBN: 9784756622822. In Japanese. The author gives it another title, “Pictura novior est quam fabula: Legere picturas Britannicas in saeculis XVIII et XIX.” Chapter 2, “Soshoku no yorokobi: William Blake to chusei saishoku shahon [Decorative Joy: William Blake and Illuminated Manuscripts in the Middle Ages],” discusses Songs of Innocence, illustrations to Night Thoughts, illuminated manuscripts, and the Kelmscott Press (43-80).
P
Pacitti, Diane, and Antonio Pacitti. “Auguries of War and Peace.” See VALA.
Peh, Li Qi. “Stedman’s Horror, Blake’s Indifference.” ELH 90.2 (2023): 367-91. Argues that “Stedman’s Narrative both dramatizes and complicates” “readerly experiences of horror,” and that Blake “dampens these emotions, making it such that the reader does not experience horror too intensely” so that “the reader retains the emotional space necessary to plot out future courses of political action.”
Perris, Jonathan. “God Lives in the Sun: The Critique of Evangelical Abolitionism in William Blake’s ‘The Little Black Boy.’” European Romantic Review 34.6 (2023): 629-45. “The essay argues that Blake’s poem speaks not with conventional abolitionist rhetoric, nor with oft-suggested ambiguity, inconsistency, or racism, but rather with intense criticism of the Eurocentric evangelical discourse that came to inform abolitionist campaigns and of the resultant African-European voice constructed in texts such as The Interesting Narrative [of Olaudah Equiano]” (abstract).
Phillips, Michael. “William Blake’s Rolling Press at Christ Church.” Christ Church Library Newsletter 11.1-3 (2019–20): 8-11. An account of how the design for the replica of Blake’s printing press was created. The press is now at Rice University, Houston. See also Josh Howard-Saunders’s “Building William Blake’s Printing Press” for an account of its construction, and Alexander Regier’s Global Blake presentation for why and how the press was moved to Rice.
Pinheiro de Sousa, Alcinda, and Jason Whittaker. “Urizen Now: Reading Anew William Blake’s Response to His Times.” Weaving Tales: Anglo-Iberian Encounters on Literatures in English. Ed. Paula García-Ramírez, Beatriz Valverde, Angélica Varandas, and Jason Whittaker. New York: Routledge, 2023. ISBN: 9781032447681. 1-17. On how to read Blake’s works: “Blake himself seems very strongly as an author to invite engaged and dialectical readings of his works” (13).
Powell, Rosalind. “Perception and the Body.” Perception and Analogy: Poetry, Science, and Religion in the Eighteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. <Blake (2022)>
Review
Mann, Annika.
Eighteenth-Century Fiction 35.3 (2023): 428-31.
Pritchard, Stephen, with illustration by John Riordan. “Just War?” See VALA.
R
Rajan, Tilottama, and Joel Faflak, eds. William Blake: Modernity and Disaster. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. <Blake (2021, 2022, 2023)>
Review
Freedman, Linda.
University of Toronto Quarterly 92.3 (2023): 338-40. “The reader might not agree with everything they find here, but this volume is provocative, wide ranging, and interesting: an intellectually curious and critically ambitious contribution to Blake studies” (339-40).
Rauser, Amelia. The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. In a book reading the white muslin dress of the 1790s as an embodiment of neoclassicism, there is discussion of Blake’s engraving of George Cumberland’s design of Cupid and Psyche in Thoughts on Outline (81-82); Flaxman’s and Cumberland’s neoclassical aesthetics (109-10); and many of Romney’s portraits.
Read, Dennis M. “Blake’s Hervey, Thomas Butts, and Methodism.” See Blake 57.3.
Regier, Alexander. Exorbitant Enlightenment: Blake, Hamann, and Anglo-German Constellations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. <Blake (2019, 2020, 2023)>
Review
Spalovszky, Csaba József.
AnaChronisT 21.2 (2023): 277-84.
Regier, Alexander. “Printing Blake in Texas: The Story of a Replica of William Blake’s Printing Press.” See Global Blake in Part V.
Reid, Joshua. “Gender, Nature, and Desire in Dalí’s Paradise Lost.” Global Milton and Visual Art. Ed. Angelica Duran and Mario Murgia. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2021. ISBN: 9781793617064. 199-223. Some comparison of Dalí’s illustrations of Paradise Lost with Blake’s.
Richman, Jared S. “Blake’s Visionary Temporalities: Disability and Form in Milton a Poem.” See Global Blake in Part V.
Rigby, Kate. “‘the wrong dream’: Prophetic Ecopoetics.” Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonization. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. <Blake (2023)>
Reviews
Cooke, Stuart.
Australian Literary Studies 36.1 (2021): 1-5.
Marland, Pippa.
Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology 26.3 (2022): 281-84. “What makes Rigby’s book so boldly original is the way in which she puts poetry from the late 18th and early 19th centuries into dialogue with 20th and 21st century works, the latter written in a post-colonial consciousness and in a time of increasing environmental crisis” (282).
Somervell, Tess.
European Romantic Review 33.1 (2022): 67-72.
Riordan, John. “Blake/Morrison.” See VALA.
Ripley, Wayne C. “‘How dye do Neighbour?’: Stephen Horncastle in Relationship to Blake’s Family, Neighbours, and Circle.” See Global Blake in Part V.
Ripley, Wayne C. Rev. of Jason Whittaker, Divine Images: The Life and Work of William Blake. See Whittaker, Divine.
Ripley, Wayne C., with Fernando Castanedo, Hikari Sato, Hüseyin Alhas, and Vera Serdechnaia. “William Blake and His Circle: A Checklist of Scholarship in 2022.” See Blake 57.1.
Rocco, Emilia di. “‘Homer has nothing so sublime!’: Ugolino tra Illuminismo e Romanticismo.” Strumenti critici 38.1 (2023): 73-90. In Italian (online abstract in English). “This article explores the reception history of the story of Ugolino in Dante’s Inferno from the Enlightenment to Romanticism. The analysis focuses on the relationship between literature and the arts in the works of Jonathan Richardson, Joshua Reynolds, Johann Jakob Bodmer, Lord Byron, and William Blake” (abstract).
Rogers, Annise. “The Edge of Human Experience: Blake and Tolkien’s Art.” See Blake Society in Part V.
Rose, Aimee. “Augury of Innocence.” See VALA.
Rosso, G. A. “Redefining Apocalypse in Blake Studies.” See Blake 57.2.
Rovira, James. Rev. of Joseph Fletcher, William Blake as Natural Philosopher, 1788–1795. See Blake 56.4.
Rowland, Christopher. “William Blake, Apocalyptic Poet and Painter.” “By an Immediate Revelation”: Studies in Apocalypticism, Its Origins and Effects. Tübingen [Germany]: Mohr Siebeck, 2022. <Blake (2023)>
Review
Moloney, Francis J.
Catholic Biblical Quarterly 85.2 (2023): 374-77. “The wide availability of this collection from a leading authority on the origins and effects of apocalypticism is a significant contribution to our understanding of early Christianity, and a reminder to all who preach the Gospel to listen to its call for the suffering and marginalized” (377).
Rubel, William Ilan. “‘The Eye Altering Alters All’: Optics, Haptics, and Ecological Modernity in Alfred North Whitehead and Romanticism.” Process Studies 52.1 (2023): 9-27. “Blake, more than Shelley, strikes me as the poet who resonates with the idea everywhere implicit in Whitehead’s writings: that social transformation is only possible in poiesis, or in a mode of attention that undoes the perceptual chains and ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ (Blake, ‘London’) of modern epistemic regimes” (10).
S
Sánchez Tierraseca, Mónica. “Evocando Golgonooza: Representaciones contemporáneas de la ciudad mítica de William Blake/Re-enacting Golgonooza: Contemporary Representations of William Blake’s Mythical City.” AusArt 10.2 (2022): 173-87. In Spanish (abstract in Spanish and English). “In contrast to the supposed objectivity that topographers try to determine, artistic cartography is a useful way to come closer to understanding the mythical universe of William Blake and his archetypal city” (abstract).
Saral, Ramazan. “Mythopoeia as a Means of Reevaluating Human History in the Works of William Blake.” PhD diss., Ege University, 2023. In English (abstract in English and Turkish). “In this doctoral dissertation, the works called Minor Prophecies by William Blake, one of the most important poets of the English Romantic Period, who left his mark on 18th and 19th Century English Literature will be read as a means to re-evaluate the perception of history through mythopoeia” (abstract).
Saral, Ramazan. “Self-Doubt.” See VALA.
Sato, Hikari. “Jugaku Bunsho, ‘Sotsugyo ronbun William Blake no Jerusalem kenkyu’ no haikei: Naze Blake wo Bukkyo no kotoba de katattanoka [On the Background of Bunsho Jugaku, ‘Graduation Thesis: A Study of Jerusalem by William Blake’: Why Did He Discuss Blake in Buddhist Terms?]” Kojitsuan [Sunward Cottage] 6 (2023): 1-9. In Japanese. Bunsho Jugaku (1900–92), a Blake scholar, made a comparative study of Blake and Buddhism in his graduation thesis in 1923, inspired by Muneyoshi Yanagi and Pierre Berger.
Sato, Hikari. “Oe Kenzaburo ‘Atarashii hito yo mezameyo’ nioite saisozo sareru William Blake/William Blake Re-created in Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age by Kenzaburo Oe.” Hikaku Bungaku/Journal of Comparative Literature 65 (2023): 7-21. In Japanese, with English synopsis. 1 plate by Blake. The narrator (“I”) in Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!, an enthusiastic reader of Blake and the father of a brain-damaged son, discusses the sorrow of birth, referring to The Book of Thel and the third stanza from “To Tirzah.” He also introduces the reader to the design on plate 76 of Jerusalem, giving the text on plate 96 as though it were a dialogue between Jesus and Albion drawn on plate 76. Comparing himself to the aged Jesus and his son to young Albion, the narrator reads Blake, not in Blake’s context but in the context of his own personal life. Oe re-creates Blake for his profound story of a father, his disabled son, family, and society.
Sato, Hikari. “Oe Kenzaburo no William Blake: Manabi hogushi no katei wo saguru [William Blake in Kenzaburo Oe: A Process of Unlearning].” Yuriika: Shi to Hihyo: Sotokushu Oe Kenzaburo 1935–2023/Eureka: Poetry and Criticism: Kenzaburo Oe 1935–2023 Special Issue 55.10 (2023): 594-603. In Japanese. Oe read Blake under the guidance of the books by Mona Wilson, Geoffrey Keynes, Kathleen Raine, David V. Erdman, E. P. Thompson, and Donald Ault in the 1980s, although he did not have sufficient knowledge of Blake in the 1960s. The argument on forgiveness in “‘Tsumi no yurushi’ no aokusa [Green Grass for ‘Forgiveness of Sin’]” (1984), one of his short stories, is hinted at not only by Blake’s text but also by the phrase “the indestructibility of human existence as epiphany,” which Mircea Eliade wrote in his diary and which Oe says left a deep impression on him. Oe learns and unlearns Blake according to his own interpretation.
Saunders, Clare Broome. “‘A larger vision’: William Blake, Phoebe Anna Traquair, and the Visual Imagination in EBB’s Sonnets from the Portuguese.” Victorian Poetry 60.4 (2022): 521-45. “Traquair’s illustrations for Sonnets from the Portuguese expose striking connections between Blake’s work and [Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s] sonnet sequence, illuminating the ways in which EBB develops and refines Blake’s celebration of excess and the visual imagination” (522).
Schäfer, Wiebke Katharina. “Text and Picture in Three Pairs of William Blake’s Companion Pieces in The Song [sic] of Innocence and of Experience (Copy T).” Refractions. Göttinger Schriften zur Englischen Philologie. Ed. Frauke Reitemeier. Vol. 15. Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen, 2022. 183-250. Comparisons of the two “Chimney Sweeper” poems, the two “Holy Thursday” poems, and “Infant Joy” and “Infant Sorrow.”
Schierenbeck, Daniel D. Rev. of Jason Whittaker, Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness. See Whittaker, Jerusalem.
Schuchard, Marsha Keith. “The Peculiar Alchemical Research of John Flaxman, Charles Augustus Tulk, and Fabian Wrede Ekenstam (1776–1818).” Heredom: The Transactions of the Scottish Rite Research Society 29 (2021): 96-132. Argues that “though Flaxman’s biographers have been unaware of his alchemical involvement, evidence for his collaboration and that of his wife Nancy survives in the unpublished correspondence and book marginalia of Tulk and [Fabian Wrede] Ekenstam” (96). In addition to these figures, there are references to Blake, Moravianism, Swedenborg and later Swedenborgians (particularly Augustus Nordenskjöld), and Thomas Taylor.
Schuchard, Marsha Keith. “Text Books for Innocence: Moravian-Swedenborg Infant Education and William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience [sic].” Studies in Romanticism 62.3 (fall 2023): 405-34. “In the 1780s and 90s, William Blake and his wife Catherine shared the radical, often esoteric theories of Moravian-Swedenborgian pedagogy with an international network of mystical Freemasons, and he produced illustrated (illuminated) songs and poems to express their notions of infant education” (406).
Şentürk Uzun, Neslihan. “Negative Theology, Random Profanity, and Subversive Semiotics in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” World Language Studies 3.2 (2023): 131-49. In English (abstract in English and Turkish). Examines The Marriage of Heaven and Hell within the context of its exploration of language and semiotic paradigms during the Romantic period. It highlights Blake’s deliberate subversion of traditional linguistic and religious norms, particularly through techniques such as “negative theology” and “random profanity,” which challenge conventional semiotic frameworks. Drawing parallels with the semiotic theories of St. Augustine and C. S. Peirce, the paper emphasizes Blake’s departure from fixed sign methodologies and his alignment with Peirce’s dynamic triadic model of signification, ultimately demonstrating how Blake’s disruptive linguistic position fosters interpretations that are profound and subversive.
Sherlock, Lisa. “William Blake’s Annotations to Milton’s Paradise Lost: New Evidence for Attribution.” See Blake 57.2.
Shuting, Sun. “William Blake’s ‘The Little Vagabond’ and Organized Religion.” International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences 5.2 (2020): 478-84. “An analysis of William Blake’s poem ‘The Little Vagabond’ from the angle of Blake’s views on organized religion” (abstract).
§ Sly, Gordon Cameron. “Songs and Proverbs of William Blake.” Britten’s Donne, Hardy and Blake Songs: Cyclic Design and Meaning. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2023. ISBN: 9781783277711.
Solecki, Sam. “William Blake: What Is an ‘Etruscan’ Doing in ‘An Island in the Moon’ (1784–85)?” The Etruscans in the Modern Imagination. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9780228014638. 61-66. In a book on the reception of Etruscans, the short chapter on Blake highlights his work for Josiah Wedgwood’s Etruria Hall, Etruscan Column in Island, and the “Hetrurians” in A Descriptive Catalogue. There are also chapters on Winckelmann’s discussion of the Etruscans in his History of the Art of Antiquity (1764) and on William Hamilton’s Collection of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman Antiquities (1766–77), Wedgwood’s Etruscan pottery, and Erasmus Darwin’s references to Wedgwood’s Etruria and the Etruscans in The Botanic Garden.
Somervell, Tess. Rev. of Kate Rigby, Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonization. See Rigby.
Spalovszky, Csaba József. Rev. of Alexander Regier, Exorbitant Enlightenment: Blake, Hamann, and Anglo-German Constellations. See Regier.
Spooner, Catherine. “My Friend the Devil: Gothic Comics, the Whimsical Macabre and Rewriting William Blake in Vehlmann and Kerascoët’s Satania.” Gothic Studies 25.3 (2023): 318-34. “I propose that Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoët’s graphic novel Satania (2016) extends the whimsical macabre in new directions, by drawing on the work of Romantic poet and artist William Blake, whose illustrated books are often cited as forerunners of modern comics” (abstract).
Stead, Evanghelia. “First Steps in Britain.” Goethe’s “Faust I” Outlined: Moritz Retzsch’s Prints in Circulation. Leiden: Brill, 2023. ISBN: 9789004518551. On the British reception of Friedrich August Moritz Retzsch’s illustrations to Faust. The first section of the chapter highlights the role of Henry Crabb Robinson in their dissemination (having been given the work by Friedrich Christoph Perthes, the publisher of Robinson’s German biographical sketch of Blake), Robinson’s comparison of the designs to John Flaxman’s work, and Flaxman’s own reaction to the designs, with references to Blake.
Stepanova, Angelina. “Rodnye dushi: D. N. Smirnov i U. Bleyk (pamyati D. N. Smirnova) [Soul Mates: D. N. Smirnov and W. Blake (in Memory of D. N. Smirnov)].” Muzyka i vremya [Music and Time] 9 (2023): 37-41. In Russian. The author considers the reception of Blake by Dmitri Smirnov (1948–2020), a translator and musician who created his first two operas based on Blake’s poems and translated Blake’s works into Russian; Smirnov created his own view of the works.
Stepanyan, Milena. “Perevody na russkiy yazyk stikhotvoreniy Uil'yama Bleyka ‘The Little Boy Found,’ ‘The Little Boy Lost’/ Translations of William Blake’s Verses ‘The Little Boy Found’ and ‘The Little Boy Lost’ into Russian.” Problemy yazyka i perevoda v trudakh molodykh uchenykh [Language and Translation Issues in the Works of Young Scientists] 22 (2023): 217-23. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). The author considers strategies of such translators as S. Marshak, V. Toporov, and G. Dashevsky, and comes to the conclusion that Dashevsky’s translation is the most accurate one.
Sugimata, Mihoko. Irasuto de Yomu Kiso no Gaka tachi [Artists of Fancy with Illustrations]. 2014. B. New ed. Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2023. 127 pp. 13 plates by Blake. In Japanese. Chapter 2, “Kiso no gaka tachi [Artists of Fancy],” gives a short introduction to Blake (82-91).
Szwydky, Lissette Lopez. “Visual and Textual Adaptations in Literature and Fine Art Forms.” Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020. ISBN: 9780814214237. 97-137. Discusses Blake’s engravings for Stedman and his illustrations of other authors (Young, Gray, Milton, and Dante). Also addresses the literary galleries of Boydell and Macklin, with a few comments on Fuseli’s illustrations of Shakespeare.
T
Tanaka, Minne. “Copy de original wo seisaku suru gijutsu: Chohanshi William Blake no kakushinteki romanshugi [The Arts of Creating the Original by Copying: Revolutionary Romanticism of William Blake Engraver].” Igirisu Romanha Kenkyu/Essays in English Romanticism 46 (2022): 41-45. In Japanese.
Tarabanova, Dar'ya. “‘Kniga Urizena’ U. Bleyka kak videnie: traditsiya i novatorstvo/William Blake’s The Book of Urizen as a Vision: Tradition and Innovation.” Stephanos 2.58 (2023): 177-84. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). “The article studies William Blake’s approach to the genre of vision and its conventions, viewing Blake as a romantic poet and the creator of his own mythopoetic universe. … Blake rejects the traditional didactic pathos of visions …. In his poem Blake rather condemns and warns,” turning instead to “the prophetic books of the Old Testament” (abstract).
Tebourski, Ines. “Symmetry/Assymetry in William Blake’s Companion Poems.” See Global Blake in Part V.
Thomson, Ian. “William Blake’s ‘Introduction’ to Songs of Innocence: The Role of the Pipe.” See Blake 57.2.
Townsend, Chris. “Spiritual Bodies and Mental Reality in Blake.” George Berkeley and Romanticism: Ghostly Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. <Blake (2023)>
Reviews
Fry, Paul H.
Wordsworth Circle 54.4 (2023): 446-52.
Milnes, Timothy.
Review of English Studies 74 (2023): 575-77. “Occasionally a monograph comes along that so adroitly fills a gap in our knowledge of Romanticism that one’s first reaction is surprise that the gap was not noticed earlier. Chris Townsend’s fine study,
George Berkeley and Romanticism: Ghostly Language, is such a book” (575).
Trucco, Marco. “La idea de naturaleza en William Blake.” Saga. Revista de Letras 16 (2022): 22-51. In Spanish (abstract in Spanish and English).
V
VALA: The Journal of the Blake Society
Issue 4 (Nov. 2023)
Articles
Erle, Sibylle. “‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time.’” 4-7. On moments in Blake’s life and art tied to war and peace.
Larman, Hugo. “Drawing from William Blake in a Time of War.” 8-13. Larman’s drawings and his reflections on them.
Gopalkrishnan, Carl. “A Field Manual for a Lost Soldier.” 14-27. A “visual essay” inspired by The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Fallon, David. “‘A Machine is not a Man nor a Work of Art’: Adventures with Blake and AI.” 28-33. Experiments in getting AI to produce Blakean poetry and images.
Albani, Louisa Amelia, and David Mullin. “In Search of Paradise: William Blake at Old Wyldes.” 34-39. About the new book In Search of Paradise: William Blake at Old Wyldes, Hampstead.
Worrall, David, with illustration by Rob Davis. “Spying for Blake: Anthony Blunt, War and Cold War.” 40-47. On Blunt’s activities as a Soviet spy.
Löchle, Dieter. “Warships into Friendships.” 48-53. On his drawings of battleships.
Manwaring, Kevan. “Drawing Blake.” 54-58. On his Blake comic.
Rose, Aimee. “Augury of Innocence.” 59. Artwork.
Vernon, Mark. “‘Wars of Love’: William Blake, Christian Idealism, and the Way from Despair to Life.” 60-66. Considers Blake’s ideas of forgiveness, selfhood, and divinity.
Marley, Jodie, with illustration by Richard Hemmings. “Vegetable Eyes.” 67. Poem.
Christian, Perienne. “‘Choicepoint 2023.’” 68-69. “The drawing ‘Choicepoint 2023’ describes a visionary state I entered into on a train journey up to London. I was shown two distinct ways forward for humanity. One organic and one AI” (69).
Saral, Ramazan. “Self-Doubt.” 70-71. Poem.
Hristova, Rumyana, with illustration by Emanuela Kovach. “Blake’s Divine Vision and the Mental Fight.” 72-74. “Today, the main war we are confronted with is the invisible war for human consciousness” (74).
Hudson, Jake. “Augury of Innocence.” 75. Artwork.
Whittaker, Jason, with illustration by Tamsin Rosewell. “Ascend from Felpham’s Vale: Blake, ‘Jerusalem,’ and Felpham.” 76-85. Excerpted from Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness (Oxford University Press, 2022).
Mugleston, Charles. “Unity.” 86-87. A tribute to Peter Brook (1925–2022).
Riordan, John. “Blake/Morrison.” 88-96. On Blake in the work of comic book writer Grant Morrison.
Binning, Sean, with illustration by Sally Kindberg. “In Conflict with the Mainstream: William Blake Considered as an Outsider Artist.” 97-99. “So my suggestion is, that Blake was not always an outsider artist but that profound creative conflict forced him to become one” (99).
Whitson, Roger. “Blake Reprinted.” 100-04. His experience of printing Michael Phillips’s replicas of Blake’s copperplates on the press at Rice University.
Whitehead, Angus, and Catherine Kelly. “William Blake’s Last Surviving London Residence.” 105-09. A concise history of 17 South Molton Street and its present state.
Pacitti, Diane, and Antonio Pacitti. “Auguries of War and Peace.” 110-15. Poems and art.
Pritchard, Stephen, with illustration by John Riordan. “Just War?” 116-19.
Reviews
Wilson, Andy. “Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead.” 120-22. On Simon McBurney’s play based on the novel, which ran at the Barbican Theatre in Mar. 2023.
Erle, Sibylle. “William Blake and Tate Britain’s Rehang.” 122-24.
Erle, Sibylle. “Blake and Newton’s Sleep.” 125. Rev. of Keith G. Davies, William Blake, the Single Vision, and Newton’s Sleep: A History of Science, Poetry, and Progress.
Vernon, Mark. “‘Wars of Love’: William Blake, Christian Idealism, and the Way from Despair to Life.” See VALA.
W
Wang, Fuson. “Blake’s Revolutionary Metaphor.” The Smallpox Report: Vaccination and the Romantic Illness Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023. ISBN: 9781487546595. 86-119. In a wider book on Romantic-era inoculation, Wang reads “the medico-botanical metaphor” (88) of inoculation in Thel, Visions, and “The Sick Rose,” building on his previous chapter on Erasmus Darwin (see Darwin in Division II).
Wang, Orrin N. C. “Two Pipers and the Cliché of Romanticism.” Techno-Magism: Media, Mediation, and the Cut of Romanticism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2022. <Blake (2023)>
Reviews
Burgess, Miranda.
Studies in Romanticism 62.4 (2023): 544-48.
Eckert, Lindsey.
Eighteenth-Century Fiction 36.1 (2024): 190-92.
Whitehead, Angus, and Catherine Kelly. “William Blake’s Last Surviving London Residence.” See VALA.
Whitson, Roger. “Blake Reprinted.” See VALA.
Whittaker, Jason. Divine Images: The Life and Work of William Blake. London: Reaktion Books, 2021. <Blake (2022, 2023)>
Review
Ripley, Wayne C.
Journal of British Studies 62.3 (2023): 813-14. “A solid overview of Blake’s life and works” (813).
Whittaker, Jason. Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. <Blake (2023)>
Reviews, excerpts, etc.
Colls, Robert. “
O Clouds Unfold!”
Literary Review (Aug. 2022).
Hensher, Philip. “
‘Jerusalem’ Is a Rousing Anthem—But Who Knows What the Words Mean?”
Spectator (9 July 2022).
Jones, Mark.
Albion 19.1 (autumn 2022).
Murray-White, James. See
Murray-White in Part V.
Schierenbeck, Daniel D.
Choice 60.10 (June 2023).
Whittaker, Jason. “
Anti-empire, Anti-fascist, Pro-suffragist: The Stunning Secret Life of Proms Staple ‘Jerusalem.’”
Guardian (5 Sept. 2022).
Whittaker, Jason, with illustration by Tamsin Rosewell. “Ascend from Felpham’s Vale: Blake, ‘Jerusalem,’ and Felpham.” See
VALA.
Wolf, Benjamin.
Musica Judaica Online Reviews (25 July 2023). “Though Whittaker may have felt that two hundred pages was sufficient length for a discussion of one poem and one song, these gaps mean that he has written a good and very useful work of cultural history, but he has not done as much as he could have to integrate ‘Jerusalem’ into the wider sociology of music or musical culture.”
Williams, Duane. “Prisons of Law and Brothels of Religion: William Blake’s Christian Anarchism.” Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume II. Ed. Alexandre Christoyannopoulos and Matthew S. Adams. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2018. 232-77. “My aim in this essay is to show how Blake can be understood as a Christian anarchist,” which “is different from saying that he identified himself as one” (233).
Wilson, Andy. “Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead.” See VALA.
Wittreich, Joseph. “‘More Worlds … Other Worlds … New Worlds’: Translation/Illustration/Paradise Lost.” Global Milton and Visual Art. Ed. Angelica Duran and Mario Murgia. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2021. ISBN: 9781793617064. 21-71. On eighteenth-century illustrations of Paradise Lost, with references to Blake’s illustrations and Milton and to Hayley’s Life of Milton.
Wolf, Benjamin. Rev. of Jason Whittaker, Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness. See Whittaker, Jerusalem.
Wolff, Tristram. “Voices of the Ground: Blake’s Language in Deep Time.” Against the Uprooted Word: Giving Language Time in Transatlantic Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022. <Blake (2023)>
Review
Yousef, Nancy.
European Romantic Review 34.4 (2023): 468-70.
Worrall, David. “‘Enlarged & Numerous Senses’: The Neurobiology of Auras and Visions.” Aura 2: Exhibition of Works by Contemporary Visionary Artists Degard and Melissa Alley. London: Degard, 2021. 86-92. Argues that Blake’s visions were rooted in his experience of migraine auras and synesthesia. (The online version of the catalogue requires that its pages be flipped through, but there is a print version as well.)
Wright, Jason. Blake’s Job: Adventures in Becoming. Abingdon: Routledge, 2023. ISBN: 9781032389868. “In this book, I will use Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job (1825) to describe what I see as a move from a consciousness of exploitation to a consciousness of resonance.”
X
Xu, Gillian. “The Metamorphosis of Blood: William Blake’s Chemical, Circulatory Poetics.” See Global Blake in Part V.
Y
Yamada, Goro. Kaibutsu: Yami no seiyo kaigashi 3 [Monster: A Dark History of Western Paintings 3]. Osaka: Sogensha, 2021. 63 pp. 4 plates by Blake. ISBN: 9784422701332. In Japanese. Blake is briefly discussed in “III Gaka ga genshi shita kaibutsu [Monsters of Artists’ Visions]” (54-55).
Yousef, Nancy. Rev. of Tristram Wolff, Against the Uprooted Word: Giving Language Time in Transatlantic Romanticism. See Wolff.
Division II: William Blake’s Circle
Astley, Philip (1742–1814)
Circus owner, Blake’s neighbor in Lambeth
Mayer, Cassie, Lise Mayer, and David Mayer. “Astley before Astley’s.” Essays in Romanticism 30.2 (2023): 147-63. An account of the young Philip Astley.
Banks, Thomas (1735–1805)
Sculptor
Bryant, Julius. “‘The sister arts’: Modern Sculpture and Its Settings in Britain, c. 1725–1895.” PhD diss., Oxford Brookes University, 2019. Argues that Banks was “a key link” in the “continuity between sculpture, furniture and interior design” (abstract).
Barry, James (1741–1806)
History painter
Myrone, Martin. “Exhibitions Culture, Consumerism and the Romantic Artist.” See McCue and Thomas in Division I, Part VI.
Basire, James, Sr. (1730–1802)
Engraver, Blake’s master
Boehm, Katharina. “‘The happiest vehicles of antiquarian knowledge’: The Visual Arts and Romantic Antiquarianism.” See McCue and Thomas under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Boehme, Jacob [Jakob Böhme] (1575–1624)
Mystic
Dmitriev, Nikita. “Predstavlenie ob angel'skom mire u Yakoba Beme i Emmanuila Svedenborga [The Image of the Angel World in Jacob Böhme’s and Emmanuel Swedenborg’s Works].” Aktual'nye voprosy tserkovnoy nauki [Current Issues of Religious Studies] 1 (2023): 197-200. In Russian. The author describes similarities and differences between Böhme’s and Swedenborg’s views of angels.
Bowyer, Robert (1758–1834)
Print impresario
Myrone, Martin. “Exhibitions Culture, Consumerism and the Romantic Artist.” See McCue and Thomas in Division I, Part VI.
Boydell, John (1720–1804)
Engraver, printseller
Boyce, Charlotte. “Commemoration, Domestic Display and the Decorative Arts: Romantic Nelsonia.” See McCue and Thomas under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Brylowe, Thora. “Angelica Kauffman and the Sister Arts.” See McCue and Thomas under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Matthews, Susan. “Illustrated Poetry in the Romantic Period.” See McCue and Thomas in Division I, Part VI.
Myrone, Martin. “Exhibitions Culture, Consumerism and the Romantic Artist.” See McCue and Thomas in Division I, Part VI.
Szwydky, Lissette Lopez. “Visual and Textual Adaptations in Literature and Fine Art Forms.” See Szwydky in Division I, Part VI.
Calvert, Edward (1799–1883)
Painter, printmaker
Martindale, Natalie T. “The Art of Edward Calvert and Neoplatonism in the Nineteenth Century.” PhD diss., Anglia Ruskin University, 2019.
Cosway, Maria (1760–1838)
Painter, acquaintance of Blake
Faraoni, Monja, Laura Facchin, Massimiliano Ferrario, and Maria Cristina Loi, eds. Maria Hadfield Cosway. Lodi: Fondazione Maria Cosway, 2022. 444 pp. ISBN: 9791280950208. In Italian and English. The catalogue for the exhibition at the Fondazione Maria Cosway in Lodi, Italy, from 23 Sept. to 27 Nov. 2022. Essays in the catalogue include:
Riberi, Mario. “L’educazione in età napoleonica.”
Lloyd, Stephen. “Maria Cosway in London, 1780–1790 and 1794–1801.”
Ferrario, Massimiliano. “‘I am susceptible and everything that surrounds me has great power to magnetise me’: Maria Cosway e l’ambiente romantico.”
Facchin, Laura. “Maria Cosway et l’ambiente artistico-letterario femminile fra la fine dell’Antico Regime e la Restaurazione.”
Antonelli, Rosalba. “Maria Cosway, Leonardo e Giuseppe Bossi: fra teorie artistiche e appunti figurativi.”
Fiorio, Patrizia. “La musica nella vita e nel progetto educativo di Maria Cosway.”
Laghezza, Francesco, and Beatrice Porchera. “Una storia ancora da raccontare: la biblioteca della Fondazione Maria Cosway.”
Mira, Silvia. “La moda nella Parigi et nella Milano di Maria Cosway.”
Facchin, Laura, and Massimiliano Ferrario. “La vita di Blevio.”
Marcarini, Luca. “Un titolo nobitare per Maria Cosway.”
Bolandrini, Beatrice. “Gaetano Manfredini: ‘volente scultore pei quale l’ingiusta sorte non ha benigni sorris!’ e l’eterno volto di Maria Cosway.”
Loi, Maria Cristina. “‘But that immense sea, makes it a great distance’: note sui carteggio Maria Cosway-Thomas Jefferson.”
Stein, Susan. “Thomas Jefferson and Maria Cosway in Paris: Art and Affection.”
Amoriello, Elena, et al. “L’allestimento della mostra Maria Hadfield Cosway.”
Reviews
Leis, Arlene. “
Shining a Light on Maria Hadfield Cosway.” “Criticks Reviews: Fine and Decorative Art.”
British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2 Dec. 2022).
Lloyd, Stephen. “
The Maria Hadfield Cosway Exhibition at the Fondazione Maria Cosway, Lodi.” YouTube. 11 Nov. 2022.
Firestone, Evan R. “Mist and Gothicism in British Painting.” See Firestone in Division I, Part VI.
Spies-Gans, Paris A. A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830. See Spies-Gans under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Cosway, Richard (1742–1821)
Miniaturist, Blake’s acquaintance
Coutu, Joan. “Collecting and the Country House, 1750–1840.” See McCue and Thomas under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Cowper, William (1731–1800)
Poet, hymnist
Crosby, Mark. “A Copy of Richard Bentley’s Edition of Paradise Lost in William Hayley’s Library c. 1802.” See Blake 57.3 in Division I, Part VI.
Sherlock, Lisa. “William Blake’s Annotations to Milton’s Paradise Lost: New Evidence for Attribution.” See Blake 57.2 in Division I, Part VI.
Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition
McCue, Maureen, and Sophie Thomas, eds. The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. ISBN: 9781474484176. An important set of essays on Romantic-era visual culture. Those that directly address Blake are listed under McCue and Thomas in Division I, Part VI.
Boehm, Katharina. “‘The happiest vehicles of antiquarian knowledge’: The Visual Arts and Romantic Antiquarianism.” 23-39. Considers engraving’s importance for the work of the Society of Antiquaries, highlighting Basire and George Vertue.
Wills, Kacie L. “Visualising the Indigenous Pacific.” 77-94. Highlights Reynolds’s Portrait of Omai (1776) among different representations of Mai and other Pacific Islanders.
Coutu, Joan. “Collecting and the Country House, 1750–1840.” 113-29. Highlights mostly Charles Townley’s collecting and display of statues at his country house, with passing references to Canova, Flaxman, and Richard Cosway.
Boyce, Charlotte. “Commemoration, Domestic Display and the Decorative Arts: Romantic Nelsonia.” 146-64. “Like the fine-art culture it emulated and adapted, Nelsonia deployed a variety of representational modes, enabling consumers to articulate their personal, social and cultural identities through their aesthetic choices” (162).
Avery-Quash, Susanna. “Building(s) for Art: The Evolution of Public Art Galleries in England, 1780–1840.” 165-83. Charts how “Britain’s cultural landscape … became increasingly populated with built spaces where art could be enjoyed ever-more publicly, by more diverse sections of society and on a permanent basis” (166).
Funnell, Peter. “Portraiture: Commerce and Celebrity.” 201-19. In an essay on portraits and celebrity, considers works by Reynolds, Lawrence, Nollekens, and Romney.
McPherson, Heather. “Convergence and Dissonance: Romantic Theatre and the Visual Arts.” 220-36. Examines representations of the stage in paintings by Fuseli, Lawrence, and Romney.
Zimmerman, Sarah. “Taken by Storm: Multisensory Learning in the Lecture Room.” 255-71. On the spaces of the public lecture, referencing the Royal Academy and other institutions.
Otto, Peter. “Romanticism, ‘Real’ Illusions and the Transformation of Experience in Modernity.” 272-92. On “three developments” “which help shape the exchanges between the real, the actual and fiction/illusion”: “the emergence of modern technologies of illusion; the proliferation and diversification of viewing/exhibition spaces; and the multiplication, democratisation and commercialisation of spectacle” (272).
McCue, Maureen. “‘A Point to Aim at in a Morning’s Walk’: Encounters at the Print Shop.” 335-55. No reference to Blake and Parker’s short-lived shop, but a good examination of the spaces, practices, and social significance of London print shops.
Brylowe, Thora. “Angelica Kauffman and the Sister Arts.” 391-407. An overview of Kauffman’s life, stressing the misogyny she faced and how her self-portraits invoked the themes of the sister arts. Considers her relationship to the Royal Academy, the engraving of her designs by William Wynne Ryland and Thomas Burke, and her relationship to the Boydell and Macklin galleries.
Batchelor, Jennie. “Illustrated Magazines and Periodicals: Visual Genres and Gendered Aspirations.” 408-26. On the Lady’s Magazine, arguing that “illustrations could be powerful navigation aids for those who made use of them and fashion could prompt and orient readers’ critical faculties much more effectively than we have allowed” (424).
Matthews, Samantha. “Album Culture: Begging for Scraps.” 429-49. “This chapter explores the valences of the ‘scrap’ in later Romantic print and manuscript culture through the gendered construction and reception of albums and scrapbooks during 1820s and early 1830s ‘albo-mania’” (429-30).
Chapman, Alison. “Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Poetry: Mise-en-Page and the Visual Rhythms of Seriality.” 450-70. On the intersection of word and image, referencing Stothard’s vignette in Samuel Rogers’s Italy, a Poem (1830) in addition to many other examples.
Shachar, Hila. “Cultural Manifestations of Romanticism on the Contemporary Screen.” 486-501. Includes discussion of Mary Shelley (2017) and The Nightmare.
§ Myrone, Martin. Making the Modern Artist: Culture, Class and Art-Educational Opportunity in Romantic Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.
Spies-Gans, Paris A. A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830.Incorporates Spies-Gans’s article “Exceptional, but Not Exceptions: Public Exhibitions and the Rise of the Woman Artist in London and Paris, 1760–1830,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 51.4 (2018): 393-416. <Blake (2022)> New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9781913107291. An important discussion of women artists in Blake’s period, with quantitative analyses of their work, their presence in exhibitions, and the genres in which they worked. The female artists considered who were in or near Blake’s circle include Maria Cosway, Angelica Kauffman, Mary Moser, Mary Ann Flaxman, Maria Denman, Mary Hoare, Maria Spilsbury, Anne Seymour Damer, Anne Mee, and Frances Reynolds. The Royal Academy, the Free Society of Artists, and the Society of Artists of Great Britain are also referenced, as are male artists such as Henry Fuseli, Richard Cosway, John Flaxman, George Romney, and Joshua Reynolds.
Spies-Gans, Paris A. “Why Do We Think There Have Been No Great Women Artists? Revisiting Linda Nochlin and the Archive.” Art Bulletin 104.4 (2022): 70-94. Engages with Nochlin’s influential feminist essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” ARTnews 69.9 (Jan. 1971): 22-39, 67-71. Spies-Gans records other scholarly engagement with Nochlin’s essay, including Nochlin’s own, which was published in Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2021). and considers the response of feminist art historians since, before highlighting the impediments women artists faced and overcame in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Touches on Maria Cosway, Angelica Kauffman, Mary Moser, Maria Denman, and Mary Ann Flaxman.
Cumberland, George (1754–1848)
Dilettante, polymath, friend of Blake
Bushell, Sally, Julia S. Carlson, and Damian Walford Davies. “Introduction: Romantic Cartographies.” See Bushell et al. in Division I, Part VI.
Rauser, Amelia. The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s. See Rauser in Division I, Part VI.
Darwin, Erasmus (1731–1802)
Scientist, poet
Bailes, Melissa. Regenerating Romanticism: Botany, Sensibility, and Originality in British Literature, 1750–1830. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2023. ISBN: 9780813949406. Darwin figures in chapters 2 and 6. There is passing mention of Blake and Fuseli.
Giardina, Elizabeth. “The Book of Nature: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Poetry and the Poetics of Earth System Design.” See Giardina in Division I, Part VI.
Hernández-Avilez, Eva Guadalupe, and Rosaura Ruiz-Gutiérrez. “From One Darwin to Another: Charles Darwin’s Annotations to Erasmus Darwin’s ‘The Temple of Nature.’” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 10 (2023): 11 pp. Notes the markings of Charles Darwin in his copy of The Temple of Nature to suggest that his “annotations indicate his and his grandfather’s shared interest in the competition for reproduction (sexual selection) and point to a more remarkable resemblance between Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature and Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) rather than to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection (The Origin of Species), to which Erasmus’s ideas are more often compared” (abstract).
Leach, Stephen. The Adventures and Speculations of the Ingenious Peter Perez Burdett. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023. ISBN: 9781527592179. Burdett was a cartographer, artist, and a member of the Lunar Society.
Solecki, Sam. “Sir William Hamilton and Josiah Wedgwood: The Indispensable Connoisseur and the Potter Who Made the Etruscans Visible, Fashionable, and Popular.” The Etruscans in the Modern Imagination. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022. 51-60. See also Solecki in Division I, Part VI.
Wang, Fuson. “Darwin’s Evolutionary Metaphor.” The Smallpox Report: Vaccination and the Romantic Illness Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023. ISBN: 9781487546595. 59-85. “Darwin discovers strange metaphorical, political, philosophical, and scientific uses of the medico-botanical figures of inoculation” (61-62). This chapter leads to the one on Blake (see Wang, Fuson, in Division I, Part VI).
Denman, Maria (1776–1861)
Artist
Spies-Gans, Paris A. A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830. See Spies-Gans under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
d’Éon, Chevalier (1728–1810)
Spy
Ftacek, Julia. “Egg Hatching; Or, Letting the Eighteenth Century Be Trans.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 33.4 (2021): 577-80. “In this essay, I offer examples [of a transgender eighteenth century], from the Chevalier d’Eon to Lord Byron, that foreground the transgender qualities present in many materials of that time” (abstract).
Vicente, Marta V. “Trans Visual Narratives: Representing Gender and Nature in Early Modern Europe.” Journal of Women’s History 35.4 (2023): 57-75. “This article studies the portraits of two gender-ambiguous individuals, the seventeenth-century Spanish soldier Antonio (née Catalina) de Erauso and the eighteenth-century French diplomat the Chevalier (Chevalière) d’Eon, as they offer a window into early modern debates on the representation of nature through its wonders” (abstract).
Flaxman, John (1755–1826)
Sculptor, friend of Blake
Coutu, Joan. “Collecting and the Country House, 1750–1840.” See McCue and Thomas under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Night Thoughts: Romantic Drawings from the Brandt Collection. See Night Thoughts in Division I, Part IV, Section B.
Rauser, Amelia. The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s. See Rauser in Division I, Part VI.
Schuchard, Marsha Keith. “The Peculiar Alchemical Research of John Flaxman, Charles Augustus Tulk, and Fabian Wrede Ekenstam (1776–1818).” See Schuchard, “The Peculiar,” in Division I, Part VI.
Smith, Amy C. “Winckelmann’s Elegant Simplicity: From Three to Two Dimensions and Back Again.” Drawing the Greek Vase. Ed. Caspar Meyer and Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. ISBN: 9780192856128. 57-83. On Flaxman’s drawings, with slight reference to George Cumberland.
Stead, Evanghelia. “First Steps in Britain.” See Stead in Division I, Part VI.
Flaxman, Mary Ann (1768–1833)
Artist
Spies-Gans, Paris A. A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830. See Spies-Gans under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Fuseli, Henry [Johann Heinrich Füssli] (1741–1825)
Painter, friend of Blake
Antal, Frederick. Fuseli Studies. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022. Routledge Revivals. A reprint of a work first published in 1956. It is a good, albeit now dated, overview of Fuseli’s career, with many references to Blake and his circle and earlier artists who inspired both Fuseli and Blake.
Avery-Quash, Susanna. “Building(s) for Art: The Evolution of Public Art Galleries in England, 1780–1840.” See McCue and Thomas under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Baker, Christopher, Andreas Beyer, and Pierre Curie. Füssli, entre rêve et fantastique [Fuseli, the Realm of Dreams and the Fantastic]. Paris: Musée Jacquemart-André, 2022. In French. The catalogue for the 2022–23 Paris exhibition. <Blake (2023)>
Reviews
Capton, Emma. “
‘Füssli, entre rêve et fantastique,’ des œuvres envoûtantes à découvrir au musée Jacquemart-André.”
Artistikrezo.com (7 Nov. 2022): 11 pars. In French.
de Rouffignac, Christian, and Léa Berroche. “
Füssli, entre rêve et fantastique/exposition.”
Arts Culture Évasions (10 Oct. 2022): 9 pars. In French.
Mathieu, Méghane. “
Delightful Horror: Füssli à couper le souffle.”
Zone Critique (7 Oct. 2022): 10 pars. In French.
Sauvage, Olivier. “
Compte rendu de l’exposition ‘Füssli, entre rêve et fantastique’ au musée Jacquemart-André, 16 septembre 2022–23 janvier 2023.”
Miranda 27 (2023): 10 pars. In French.
Carter, Sarah. “The Art of Thinking through Collaboration: Fuseli, Blake and Darwin.” See the Courtauld in Division I, Part V.
Firestone, Evan R. “Mist and Gothicism in British Painting.” See Firestone in Division I, Part VI.
Furman-Adams, Wendy. “‘Delectable to Behold’: Milton’s Eve in the Artist’s Gaze.” Global Milton and Visual Art. Ed. Angelica Duran and Mario Murgia. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2021. ISBN: 9781793617064.
Marks, Rebecca. “‘Organs of Embodied Sentiment’: Contextualising William Blake’s Sistine Studies c. 1770–1790.” See Global Blake in Division I, Part V.
Matthews, Susan. “Illustrated Poetry in the Romantic Period.” See McCue and Thomas in Division I, Part VI.
McPherson, Heather. “Convergence and Dissonance: Romantic Theatre and the Visual Arts.” See McCue and Thomas under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Metzger, Christof, and Julia Zaunbauer, eds. Götter, Helden und Verräter: Das Historienbild um 1800. Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2023. ISBN: 9783775754521. The catalogue for the exhibition at the Albertina Museum, Vienna, from 2 June to 22 Aug. 2023. Includes work by Fuseli and Angelica Kauffman.
Night Thoughts: Romantic Drawings from the Brandt Collection. See Night Thoughts in Division I, Part IV, Section B.
Myrone, Martin. “Exhibitions Culture, Consumerism and the Romantic Artist.” See McCue and Thomas in Division I, Part VI.
Myrone, Martin. “Fuseli’s Mutable Bodies.” See the Courtauld in Division I, Part V.
O’Rourke, Stephanie. “Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions.” Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9781316519028. 60-103. “Despite referring to physiognomy as ‘the mother of correctness,’ Fuseli often represented bodies that could not be read according to the criteria of Lavater’s system” (20).
Salatino, Kevin. “‘Female Trouble’: Vamps, Vixens and Viragoes in the Art of Henry Fuseli.” See the Courtauld in Division I, Part V.
Shachar, Hila. “Cultural Manifestations of Romanticism on the Contemporary Screen.” See McCue and Thomas under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Smith, Camilla. “Fools, Heroes and Whores: Henry Fuseli’s Switzerland.” See the Courtauld in Division I, Part V.
Solkin, David H., with Jonas Beyer, Mechthild Fend, and Ketty Gottardo. Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism. London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2022. The catalogue for the 2022–23 exhibition at the Courtauld, London, and the Kunsthaus Zürich.
Review
O’Rourke, Stephanie.
European Romantic Review 34.4 (2023): 475-78. “An indispensable resource” (476).
Szwydky, Lissette Lopez. “Visual and Textual Adaptations in Literature and Fine Art Forms.” See Szwydky in Division I, Part VI.
Gibson, John (1786–1866)
Sculptor
Frasca-Rath, Anna. John Gibson und Antonio Canova: Rezeption, Transfer, Inszenierung. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2018. ISBN: 9783205202967. In German.
Hayley, William (1745–1820)
Man of letters, patron of Blake
Crosby, Mark. “A Copy of Richard Bentley’s Edition of Paradise Lost in William Hayley’s Library c. 1802.” See Blake 57.3 in Division I, Part VI.
Sherlock, Lisa. “William Blake’s Annotations to Milton’s Paradise Lost: New Evidence for Attribution.” See Blake 57.2 in Division I, Part VI.
Hoare, Prince (1755–1834)
Painter
Night Thoughts: Romantic Drawings from the Brandt Collection. See Night Thoughts in Division I, Part IV, Section B.
Hope, Thomas (1769–1831)
Collector, connoisseur
Petsalis-Diomidis, Alexia. “The Graphic Medium and Artistic Style: Thomas Hope (1769–1831) and Two-Dimensional Encounters with Greek Vases.” Drawing the Greek Vase. Ed. Caspar Meyer and Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. ISBN: 9780192856128. 84-111. “The chapter investigates how [Hope’s] graphic encounters with Greek vases actively mediated between original artefacts and further two- or three-dimensional artwork” (84).
Johnson, Joseph (1738–1809)
Bookseller, employer of Blake
Hay, Daisy. Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022. <Blake (2023)>
Reviews
New Yorker (16 Jan. 2023). Briefly noted.
Patey, D. L.
Choice 61.4 (2023): 446.
Seymour, Miranda. “
Consider the Publisher.”
New York Review of Books 70.7 (20 Apr. 2023): 37-39.
Kauffman, Angelica [Angelika Kauffmann] (1741–1807)
Painter
Brylowe, Thora. “Angelica Kauffman and the Sister Arts.” See McCue and Thomas under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Metzger, Christof, and Julia Zaunbauer, eds. Götter, Helden und Verräter: Das Historienbild um 1800. See Metzger and Zaunbauer under Fuseli.
O’Rourke, Stephanie. “Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions.” See O’Rourke under Fuseli.
Spies-Gans, Paris A. A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830. See Spies-Gans under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Lowth, Robert (1710–87)
Bible scholar
Raz, Yosefa. “Imagining the Hebrew Ode: On Robert Lowth’s Biblical Species.” Prooftexts 40.1 (2023): 85-109. “I argue that the seemingly neutral presentations of the genres of biblical poetry in the twentieth century, which we have learned to take for granted in our reading of the Bible as a literature, are rooted in an eighteenth-century encounter: the English exegete Robert Lowth’s dramatic attempt to fit Greek and Roman generic models to the Hebrew text” (86).
Macklin, Thomas (1752/53–1800)
Publisher
Brylowe, Thora. “Angelica Kauffman and the Sister Arts.” See McCue and Thomas under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Myrone, Martin. “Exhibitions Culture, Consumerism and the Romantic Artist.” See McCue and Thomas in Division I, Part VI.
Szwydky, Lissette Lopez. “Visual and Textual Adaptations in Literature and Fine Art Forms.” See Szwydky in Division I, Part VI.
Macpherson, James (1736–96)
Writer
Buesking, Renee K. “‘Do ye Sweep the Lyre?’: Romantic Resonances in The Poems of Ossian.” European Romantic Review 34.5 (2023): 589-607. “My reading of The Poems of Ossian as a polyphonic text in which the elegiac voices join the songs of the epic bard helps us to reimagine texts influenced by Ossian, and thus Romanticism itself, as a kind of resonant echo chamber in which elegiac mourners emerge and simultaneously speak to the past and to the future” (abstract).
Malkin, Benjamin (1769–1842)
Writer
Bushell, Sally, Julia S. Carlson, and Damian Walford Davies. “Introduction: Romantic Cartographies.” See Bushell et al. in Division I, Part VI.
Malkin, Charlotte (1772–1859)
Artist, diarist
Matthews, Susan. “Illustrated Poetry in the Romantic Period.” See McCue and Thomas in Division I, Part VI.
Moravianism
Schuchard, Marsha Keith. “Text Books for Innocence: Moravian-Swedenborg Infant Education and William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.” See Schuchard, “Text,” in Division I, Part VI.
Morganwg, Iolo [Edward Williams] (1747–1826)
Welsh antiquarian
Domrachev, Denis. “Ivar Osen i Edvard Uil'yams: sravnitel'nyy analiz proektov formirovaniya natsional'noy identichnosti Norvegii i Uel'sa/Ivar Aasen and Edward Williams: A Comparative Analysis of the Norwegian and Welsh National Identity Construction Projects.” Kunstkamera 4.22 (2023): 213–28. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). The author considers “some similarities between the processes of identity construction in Norway and Wales in the second half of the 18th-early 19th centuries” (abstract).
Mortimer, John Hamilton (1740–79)
Painter
Firestone, Evan R. “Mist and Gothicism in British Painting.” See Firestone in Division I, Part VI.
Night Thoughts: Romantic Drawings from the Brandt Collection. See Night Thoughts in Division I, Part IV, Section B.
Ottley, William Young (1771–1836)
Painter
Night Thoughts: Romantic Drawings from the Brandt Collection. See Night Thoughts in Division I, Part IV, Section B.
Reynolds, Joshua (1723–92)
Painter
Al Jamil, Miriam. “Printed Afterlives: Joshua Reynolds’ ‘Johnson Arguing’ Portrait, 1769.” Romantic Illustration Network (23 Feb. 2022). In addition to Reynolds, also discusses an etching of [Samuel] Johnson after Ozias Humphry by Mary Dawson Turner, the wife of Dawson Turner, George Cumberland’s friend and Blake’s would-be patron.
Ditkovskaya, D. V., and Elena Kotlyar. “Osobennosti paradnogo portreta v angliyskoy zhivopisi XVIII veka/Peculiarities of the Court Portrait in English Painting of the 18th Century.” Bonum Initium 18.26 (2023): 29-35. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). The authors consider the works of the main representatives of the English painting school, such as Hogarth, Reynolds, and Gainsborough, in the genre of the formal ceremonial portrait.
Esposito, Donato. “The Artist as Collector: Sir Joshua Reynolds and His Collection of Art.” See Friends of Kenwood Sunday Lecture in Division I, Part V.
Firestone, Evan R. “Mist and Gothicism in British Painting.” See Firestone in Division I, Part VI.
Funnell, Peter. “Portraiture: Commerce and Celebrity.” See McCue and Thomas under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Hunter, Matthew C. Painting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography, and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. <Blake (2020, 2022)>
Review
Marks, Rebecca.
Eighteenth-Century Studies 57.1 (2023): 134-36.
Myrone, Martin. “Exhibitions Culture, Consumerism and the Romantic Artist.” See McCue and Thomas in Division I, Part VI.
Postle, Martin. “Joshua Reynolds at 300: 1723–2023.” See Friends of Kenwood Sunday Lecture in Division I, Part V.
Postle, Martin. “Reynolds 300: Martin Postle Talk.” See the Box, Plymouth, in Division I, Part V.
Reframing Reynolds: A Celebration. The Box, Plymouth.
An exhibition to mark the 300th anniversary of Reynolds’s birth, from 24 June to 29 Oct. 2023. There was no catalogue produced, but a video is available.
Review
Cannon-Brookes, Caroline. “
Reframing Reynolds: A Celebration.” “Criticks Reviews: Fine and Decorative Art.”
British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (12 Oct. 2023).
Spotlight on Reynolds. Kenwood House.
An exhibition from 13 July to 19 Nov. 2023. The website includes “17 Paintings at Kenwood” by Louise Cooling, curator of collections and interiors.
Reviews
Jones, Jonathan. “
Spotlight on Reynolds Review—Superficial Portraits by a Well-Connected Hack.”
Guardian (13 July 2023). “As Blake recognised, something in the bones of British culture is committed to the respectability of this minor talent.”
Norman, Max. “
‘Spotlight on Reynolds’ Review: Portraits of the Roving Mind.”
Wall Street Journal (19 Aug. 2023): A13.
Wullschläger, Jackie. “
Reynolds at Kenwood—How the Chronicler of Georgian England Captured a Changing Country.”
Financial Times (1 Aug. 2023).
Wills, Kacie L. “Visualising the Indigenous Pacific.” See McCue and Thomas under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Romney, George (1734–1802)
Painter
Collé, Nathalie. “Author Portraits of Milton, Authorship, and Canonization.” See Collé in Division I, Part VI.
Firestone, Evan R. “Mist and Gothicism in British Painting.” See Firestone in Division I, Part VI.
Funnell, Peter. “Portraiture: Commerce and Celebrity.” See McCue and Thomas under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
McPherson, Heather. “Convergence and Dissonance: Romantic Theatre and the Visual Arts.” See McCue and Thomas under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Myrone, Martin. “Exhibitions Culture, Consumerism and the Romantic Artist.” See McCue and Thomas in Division I, Part VI.
Night Thoughts: Romantic Drawings from the Brandt Collection. See Night Thoughts in Division I, Part IV, Section B.
Rauser, Amelia. The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s. See Rauser in Division I, Part VI.
Society of Antiquaries
Boehm, Katharina. “‘The happiest vehicles of antiquarian knowledge’: The Visual Arts and Romantic Antiquarianism.” See McCue and Thomas under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Stedman, John Gabriel (1744–97)
Soldier, writer, friend of Blake
Peh, Li Qi. “Stedman’s Horror, Blake’s Indifference.” See Peh in Division I, Part VI.
Sinanan, Kerry. “Beryl Gilroy, Sylvia Wynter, and Unmaking Romantic Humanism.” Keats-Shelley Journal 71 (2022): 169-87. Includes a discussion of Stedman’s Narrative in relationship to Gilroy’s novel Stedman and Joanna: A Love in Bondage (1991).
Szwydky, Lissette Lopez. “Visual and Textual Adaptations in Literature and Fine Art Forms.” See Szwydky in Division I, Part VI.
Stothard, Thomas (1755–1834)
Painter, illustrator, Blake’s friend/enemy
Chapman, Alison. “Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Poetry: Mise-en-Page and the Visual Rhythms of Seriality.” See McCue and Thomas under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Firestone, Evan R. “Mist and Gothicism in British Painting.” See Firestone in Division I, Part VI.
Lipski, Jakub. “Re-visioning Robinson’s Island: Thomas Stothard’s Rousseauvian Crusoe.” Re-reading the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Studies in Reception. New York: Routledge, 2021.
Matthews, Susan. “Illustrated Poetry in the Romantic Period.” See McCue and Thomas in Division I, Part VI.
Swedenborg, Emanuel (1688–1772)
Mystic
Dmitriev, Nikita. “Predstavlenie ob angel'skom mire u Yakoba Beme i Emmanuila Svedenborga [The Image of the Angel World in Jacob Böhme’s and Emmanuel Swedenborg’s Works].” See Dmitriev under Boehme.
Leporati, Matthew. “Emanuel Swedenborg’s Conjugial Love and the Erotic Politics of William Blake’s Epics.” See Leporati, “Conjugial Love,” in Division I, Part VI.
Schuchard, Marsha Keith. “The Peculiar Alchemical Research of John Flaxman, Charles Augustus Tulk, and Fabian Wrede Ekenstam (1776–1818).” See Schuchard, “The Peculiar,” in Division I, Part VI.
Schuchard, Marsha Keith. “Text Books for Innocence: Moravian-Swedenborg Infant Education and William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.” See Schuchard, “Text,” in Division I, Part VI.
Ustimov, Oleg. “Dostoevskiy i spiritizm: k postanovke problemy/Dostoevsky and Spiritualism: On the Setting of the Problem.” Otechestvennaya filologiya [Russian Philology] 4 (2023): 103-09. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). The author traces “the influence of Swedenborgian and spiritualist ideas on certain characters of Dostoevsky (Svidrigailov), on the messages of entire works (Bobok) and on poetics (epistemic doubt)” (abstract).
Tulk, Charles Augustus (1786–1849)
Swedenborgian, politician
Schuchard, Marsha Keith. “The Peculiar Alchemical Research of John Flaxman, Charles Augustus Tulk, and Fabian Wrede Ekenstam (1776–1818).” See Schuchard, “The Peculiar,” in Division I, Part VI.
Turner, Dawson (1775–1858)
Banker, collector
Al Jamil, Miriam. “Printed Afterlives: Joshua Reynolds’ ‘Johnson Arguing’ Portrait, 1769.” See Al Jamil under Reynolds.
Wedgwood, Josiah (1730–95)
Blake’s employer
Solecki, Sam. “Sir William Hamilton and Josiah Wedgwood: The Indispensable Connoisseur and the Potter Who Made the Etruscans Visible, Fashionable, and Popular.” See Solecki under Darwin.
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim (1717–68)
Aesthetic theorist
Solecki, Sam. “Johann Joachim Winckelmann: The Etruscan Chapter in The History of the Art of Antiquity (1764).” The Etruscans in the Modern Imagination. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022. 41-50. See also Solecki in Division I, Part VI.
Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759–97)
Author, radical, known in Blake’s circle
Biggs, Joanna. “Mary.” A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; New York: Ecco, 2023.Excerpted as “On Mary Wollstonecraft” in the blog of the Paris Review (3 Apr. 2023). A biographical sketch of Wollstonecraft interspersed with personal reflections as the writer starts her life over.
Dumler-Winckler, Emily. Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. <Blake (2023)>
Reviews
Davis, James Calvin.
Journal of Theological Studies 74.2 (2023): 826-28.
Fairclough, Mary.
Political Theology 25.1 (2024): 81-82.
Reuter, Martina.
JAAR: Journal of the American Academy of Religion 91.1 (2023): 246-48.
Strandlund, Daniel P.
Anglican Theological Review 105.4 (2023): 539-41. “The book … is no doubt a major step in carving out for Mary Wollstonecraft a place in the canon of Christian theological ethics” (541).
Ursic, Elizabeth.
CrossCurrents 73.2 (2023): 241-43.
Grenby, M. O. “‘Godwin versus Godwin’: Negotiating the War of Ideas in Charles Lloyd’s Isabel, A Tale.” Romanticism 29.3 (2023): 239-52. Argues that Lloyd’s novel Isabel, published in 1820 but written in the late 1790s, was a response to Wollstonecraft’s writing, noting that manuscripts of the novel have the subtitle “Godwin versus Godwin.”
Hunt, Eileen M., ed. Portraits of Wollstonecraft: The Making of a Feminist Icon, 1785 to 2020. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. ISBN: 9781350378711. Documents with scholarly notes both visual portraits and verbal descriptions of Wollstonecraft.
Kopajtic, Lauren. “Mary Wollstonecraft and Adam Smith on Gender and Self-Control.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 61.4 (2023): 627-48. “This paper revisits the scholarly debate over gender essentialism in Smith [Theory of Moral Sentiments], arguing that Smith’s view of virtue is not gender essentialist, and that Wollstonecraft saw this and did not target Smith with her critique” (abstract).
Makarova, Elena. “Anglichanki v Parizhe v gody frantsuzskoy revolyutsii: Khelena Mariya Uil'yams i Meri Uolstonkraft/English Women in Paris during the French Revolution: Helen Maria Williams and Mary Wollstonecraft.” Politicheskaya zhizn' zapadnoy Evropy: antichnost', srednie veka, novoe i noveyshee vremya [Political Life of Western Europe: Antique, Middle Ages, Modern and Contemporary Times]. Arzamas: Lobachevsky University, Arzamas Branch, 2023. ISBN: 9785604949702. 108-16. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). “The article attempts to examine the life and work of English women-writers Helen Maria Williams and Mary Wollstonecraft during their stay in France at the course of the Revolution. In Letters Written in France Williams created a chronicle of the revolution, addressed to the English reader. Wollstonecraft’s book An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution reveals its causes” (abstract).
Makarova, Elena. “Obraz severnoy Evropy v ‘Pis'makh, napisannykh vo vremya kratkogo prebyvaniya v Shvetsii, Norvegii i Danii’ (1796) Meri Uolstonkraft/The Image of Northern Europe in Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) by Mary Wollstonecraft.” Sankt-Peterburg i strany severnoy Evropy [St. Petersburg and Northern European Countries] 24.1-2 (2023): 97-105. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). “The author analyzes how this work characterizes the nature and society of the Scandinavian countries” (abstract).
“Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie.” National Portrait Gallery, Schools Hub (5 Sept. 2023). An educational lesson on the portrait and Wollstonecraft.
Penaluna, Regan. How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind. New York: Grove Press, 2023. ISBN: 9780802158802.
Péter, Ágnes. “Who is at the helm? Mary Wollstonecraft’s Contribution to the Romantic Construct of the Imagination.” Neohelicon [Budapest] 50.2 (2023): 613-34.
Wolfson, Susan J. On Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”: The First of a New Genus. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. ISBN: 9780231206242.
Reviews, author talks, etc.
DeLucia, JoEllen.
Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 42.2 (2023): 386-88. “Filled with dazzling close readings and offering an innovative reception history of Wollstonecraft’s work, Susan J. Wolfson’s
On Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’: The First of a New Genus proves to be an exciting supplement to the ever-growing list of books on Wollstonecraft and her work” (386).
“
Faculty Author Q&A: Susan Wolfson on On Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.’ ”
Princeton University Humanities Council Faculty Bookshelf (15 Apr. 2023).
Letters and Politics. “
Mary Wollstonecraft, the French Revolution and the Tyranny of Men.” YouTube. 20 Apr. 2023.
Lost Ladies of Lit. “
Mary Wollstonecraft—A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Susan J. Wolfson.”
Showalter, Elaine. “
‘A hyena in petticoats’: Feminist Writers Who Fought against the Masculine Assumptions of Their Times.”
TLS (9 June 2023).