Table of Contents:
Symbols and Abbreviations
Introductory Essay
Division I: William Blake
Division II: William Blake’s Circle
Banks, Thomas
Barry, James
Bartolozzi, Francesco
Basire, James, Sr.
Blair, Robert
Boehme, Jacob
Cosway, Maria
Cosway, Richard
Cowper, William
Cromek, Robert Hartley
Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition
Cunningham, Allan
Darwin, Erasmus
Flaxman, John
Fuseli, Henry
Hayley, William
Hope, Thomas
Johnson, Joseph
Kauffman, Angelica
Lavater, Johann Caspar
Lowth, Robert
Mora, José Joaquín de
Morganwg, Iolo
Mortimer, John Hamilton
Reynolds, Joshua
Robinson, Henry Crabb
Royal Academy of Arts
Stedman, John Gabriel
Stothard, Thomas
Swedenborg, Emanuel
Watson, Caroline
Wollstonecraft, Mary
Symbols
| § |
Works preceded by a section mark are reported on secondhand authority |
Abbreviations
| BB |
G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Books (1977) |
| Blake |
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly
<Blake ([year])> indicates the installment of “William Blake and His Circle” published in the year specified |
| BR(2) |
G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Records, 2nd ed. (2004) |
| BSJ |
G. E. Bentley, Jr., with Keiko Aoyama, Blake Studies in Japan (1994) |
| Diss. |
Dissertation |
| E |
David V. Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (rev. ed., 1988) |
| WBHC |
G. E. Bentley, Jr., William Blake and His Circle (2017)
<http://library.vicu.utoronto.ca/collections/special_collections/bentley_blake_collection/blake_circle/2017/William_Blake_and_His_Circle.pdf> |
Introductory Essay
“William Blake and His Circle” is an annual bibliography that records scholarship, bibliographies, and digital sources on William Blake, his wife, Catherine, and members of their circle, as well as facsimiles, reproductions, editions, translations, and catalogues of their works. It is a cooperative humanistic undertaking that depends upon the efforts of scholars from around the globe and that enables sources in English, the Romance languages, Japanese, Turkish, Russian, and Ukrainian to be recorded and shared. Scholars working in language groups not currently represented in the checklist are asked to contact Wayne C. Ripley to inquire about becoming a contributor.
The digital sources recorded in Part V include digitally born materials that do not easily fit into the bibliographic categories established by G. E. Bentley, Jr.’s Blake Books and its sequels. This material comprises blogs, scholarly presentations or author talks (usually posted on a podcast and/or on YouTube), press releases, and news stories. Works of high scholarly caliber, such as Keri Davies’s blog or the conferences, presentations, and postings of the Global Blake Network, are cross-listed in Part VI. No effort has been made to record references to Blake on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, and TikTok.
Discoveries
Mark Crosby has discovered what are highly likely to be Blake’s practice engravings and etchings on the versos of three of the copperplates for Richard Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments. These would be among the earliest surviving engravings by Blake and consist of “incised linear patterns and motifs made with burins, a drypoint needle, and a compass” (Blake 58.3). In addition to reproducing the versos, Crosby positions them in terms of James Basire’s workshop practices, the production of Sepulchral Monuments, and Blake’s apprenticeship. (Many news agencies covered the discovery, and these stories are recorded in Part V, under Crosby.)
At his blog, Keri Davies posted two unpublished papers that are rich with new contextual information. The first considers Andrew, an enslaved child held by George Whitefield. Andrew accompanied Whitefield in the early 1740s, and he was well known to the Moravians of Fetter Lane. He died in 1744 at the age of fourteen, but Davies makes a convincing case that Andrew is depicted in Johann Valentin Haidt’s Moravian painting Erstlingsbild (1747) and that he was discussed by the Moravian congregation during the time of Blake’s mother’s association with it. The second paper has two parts. The first revisits Alexander Gilchrist’s account of Blake’s being highly affected by Mrs. John Linnell’s singing of a “Border Melody” (1: 294 in the 1863 edition). Davies identifies the song and the volume in which the Linnells likely found it. Documenting the Linnells’ relationship with William Home Lizars (who witnessed their wedding), the second part argues that Lizars’s method of relief etching was directly influenced by Blake’s and that Blake’s assertion in The Ghost of Abel that his “Original Stereotype was 1788” is a response to Lizars’s claim of having invented the method.
David Worrall’s new book, William Blake’s Visions: Art, Hallucinations, Synaesthesia, is a major reexamination of Blake’s visions from the perspective of neurology. Worrall combines accounts of Blake’s madness and his eccentricities with careful readings of his visual works to contend that the visions had demonstrable physiological causes. Chief among Blake’s “distinctive neurophysiologies,” in Worrall’s account, are Klüver form-constant hallucinations that create geometric shapes traceable in Blake’s art, and intense synaesthesia that could be “triggered by graphemes in verbal auditory modes” and “would have been seen … outside of his body” (33-34). The book is an important repositioning of Blake’s madness as neurodivergence. Scholars with a similar interest in cognition and neurology but who focus more on Blake’s works than Blake himself include Camille Adnot, who considers the aesthetics of the long prophecies, analyzing “graphic overflow, synaesthesia, and sensory overload, to highlight how Blake uses multiplicity as a creative principle,” and Richard Sha, who uses Blake to warn against “the potentially high costs for an enactive consciousness: cognitive efficiency, a relationality blind to structured hierarchy, and a consciousness that cannot separate itself from ideology.”
Editions and Translations
Mark Crosby has edited the first print facsimile of Songs of Innocence copy L, which is held by the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. It contains an introduction by Crosby and a diplomatic transcription that differs in places from that of the Blake Archive. SP Books issued a limited-edition facsimile of Blake’s Notebook under its old title of the Rossetti Manuscript. Dmitrii Smirnov’s translation of An Island in the Moon, first published in the journal Yazyk. Slovesnost'. Kul'tura, has been published as a book. There is a new edition of André Gide’s translation of Marriage into French.
The Blake Archive has published copy A of For Children: The Gates of Paradise, forty-seven monochrome wash drawings that date from 1786 or earlier, and the eighteen heads of poets executed for William Hayley’s library. The publication of these heads is complemented by Crosby’s exhibition at the archive, which offers “a new hanging arrangement” and suggests “possible sources available in Hayley’s libraries” for the designs. In addition, the archive published several paintings in preview mode: Adam Naming the Beasts, Christ Blessing, Eve Naming the Birds, The Virgin and Child in Egypt, and The Virgin and Child (“ The Black Madonna” ).
Sales and Exhibitions
In June, copy J of Songs of Innocence and of Experience was auctioned at Sotheby’s, New York. It was originally owned by Charles Augustus Tulk, and the auction lot included Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 12 February 1818 letter to Tulk giving his thoughts on the poems. The online catalogue remains available, with select pages from Songs and the complete letter reproduced.
There were two major exhibitions of Blake’s work in 2024. The first, William Blake’s Universe, was held initially at the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge and subsequently moved to the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany. Curated by David Bindman and Esther Chadwick, the exhibition positioned Blake in a European context, highlighting particularly the work of the German artist Philipp Otto Runge. The catalogue, which was published in both English and German, includes essays on Henry Crabb Robinson and on Dionysius Andreas Freher’s illustrations for the works of Jacob Boehme. For the German exhibition, Noëlle Kröger created a graphic novel on Blake’s life and times that was also translated into English. (A comic-book adaptation of Urizen and an excerpt from John Riordan’s graphic-novel biography of Blake are in VALA, and there is a Portuguese comic-book thriller inspired by Marriage.)
The second exhibition, Blake e la sua epoca. Viaggi nel tempo del sogno [In the Age of Blake: Visionary Journeys], was held at the Venaria Reale in Turin, Italy, in partnership with the Tate. The exhibition catalogue, edited by Alice Insley, is in Italian and highlights Blake’s visions, the Gothic, and Satan. Unfortunately, no English translation of this beautiful catalogue is available, but many press releases and reviews feature videos showing the exhibition space.
Major Publications
Mark Crosby and Josephine A. McQuail have edited a collection of essays, William Blake’s Manuscripts: Praxis, Puzzles, and Palimpsests, which is dedicated to G. E. Bentley, Jr., and Morris Eaves. Addressing the letters, the annotations, and the Notebook, the contributors seek to assess Blake’s manuscripts in new ways, many of which are enabled by the digital images available at the Blake Archive and elsewhere. Notably, the volume includes one of Bentley’s last works, his examination of Blake’s different hands and the difficulty that editors face in representing their unique visual aspects in letterpress editions, along with a set of bibliographical appendices on Blake’s different letter forms. In other essays, Crosby considers what Blake’s manuscripts suggest about the discrepancies between his theory and practice of execution; Jennifer Davis Michael reads the Blakes’ practice of bibliomancy as recorded in the Notebook and its palimpsests; Angus Whitehead surveys Blake as a writer of letters; and Elizabeth Potter considers the annotations to Joshua Reynolds. Five essays examine The Four Zoas: Oishani Sengupta et al. discuss the attempts by the British Library, the Blake Archive, and the Lazarus Project at the University of Rochester to use multispectral imaging to reveal new and better details of the words and images of ten manuscript pages (unfortunately, as they concede, the results are rather meager); Michael Fox calls for an entirely new model of editing the poem through graph technology; Silvia Riccardi reads the “layout, calligraphy, and symbols” of the manuscript pages; Peter Otto reexamines the problem of the two Night the Sevenths, not to solve it as much as to consider the work being done by “interruption” in the poem; and McQuail suggests that depictions of “rites of pagan worship documented by the Society of Antiquaries and the Society of Dilettanti” influenced the depiction of Urizen in the poem. The two articles on Island are by Fernando Castanedo, who traces its ekphrastic allusions to works of art, and Joseph Fletcher, who shows that many of the targets of Blake’s satire espouse “natural-philosophic attitudes regarding the nature of matter, the soul’s relationship to the body, and the first principles that enable understanding of the universe.” Outside of manuscripts proper, Tommy Mayberry argues from the contextual evidence of “Molly Houses,” the Chevalier d’Éon, and fashion after the French Revolution for a trans reading of Visions, and Jason Whittaker examines the influence of Blake, Emanuel Swedenborg, and William Butler Yeats on the novelist Sheila Kaye-Smith.
Esther Chadwick’s The Radical Print is an important new work on the print in relationship to politics in terms of both content and form, with beautiful reproductions. The chapter on Blake develops his connections with millenarian printsellers through “Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion” and Laocoön, with other chapters considering James Barry, John Hamilton Mortimer, James Gillray, and Thomas Bewick. In Blake, Caroline Anjali Ritchie examines the reception of the Stedman designs among contemporary British and American artists, with a thoughtful coda that reflects on the ethical issues of reproducing the engravings.
Sarah Carter reads Henry Fuseli’s translation and Blake’s annotations of Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man to suggest that it is “a composite creation” with implications for the Romantic idea of the self. Joshua Schouten de Jel has an article discussing Blake’s practices of memorialization in Poetical Sketches, Thel, and Urizen, and a book-length study of Visions. He reads the poem through the subjective position of the characters and their different States, connecting Blake’s depictions of Oothoon to religious representations of female sexuality and divine inspiration. In other work on the illuminated books, Annalisa Volpone considers “instances of mental impregnation and parturition” in Blake’s characters; Angela Heagy analyzes the Songs to contend that “Blake’s depictions of nature are no less notable than those of his peers”; and Fernando Glaybson do Nascimento Santos explores Blake’s use of the baroque in For Children.
Blake, Religion, and the Bible
The latest issue of VALA, the annual journal of the Blake Society, has as its theme Blake and religion. Its diverse collection of essays, poems, and art demonstrates Blake’s appeal to an incredibly broad range of religious persuasions and perspectives. This can be seen in other work of the last year as well. Blake is one of the major figures considered in the series The Bible and Western Christian Literature: Books and the Book, which contains useful primary and secondary material on the Bible, religion, and literature. Christopher Rowland’s essay on Blake’s view of the Bible appears in the third volume, Enlightenment to Romanticism, edited by Stephen Prickett, and there is separate commentary on Blake’s direct references to the Bible by Rowland and on Jerusalem by Susanne Sklar. This volume includes major eighteenth-century and Romantic-era writers, movements, and ideas (such as the Great Awakening, hymns, and the rise of rational religion), and would serve as a good introduction to Blake’s religious world. Rowland also takes Blake’s ideas regarding cathedrals in Milton and Jerusalem as a starting point for his own critique of “cathedral culture” in a chapter in a new collection of his essays, Speaking of God in an Inhumane World: Essays on Liberation Theology and Radical Christianity. Blake and the Bible are discussed by Yosefa Raz’s The Poetics of Prophecy: Modern Afterlives of a Biblical Tradition. Raz addresses the influence of the eighteenth-century Hebraist Robert Lowth and reads Milton and Jerusalem to suggest that the Bible’s own instability calls into question its status as the “Great Code of Art” for the post-Frye, “non-systematic Blake.”
Blake certainly serves as the “Great Code” in Timothy Morton’s Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology, an effort to articulate a new mode of Christian ecology and Morton’s own Christian awakening. Blakean in spirit and tone, the book provides insightful readings of many Songs, Marriage, and the “Jerusalem” hymn that reveal their relevance to our ecological crisis and the conditions of modernity that led to it. (Morton’s presentation to the Blake Society can be viewed on YouTube, and they are interviewed in VALA.) More prosaically, Blake is the subject of a very short biographical sketch in Peter Ackroyd, The English Soul: Faith of a Nation, which disappointingly skips over the opportunity to reconcile his biography of Blake with the findings regarding the connections of Blake’s family to Moravianism.
Influences on Blake and the Reception of Blake
There was much written on influence and reception, with the majority of this scholarship in languages other than English. Mariana dos Reis Palieraqui highlights the “textual dialogue” of Blake’s mythology with that of Paradise Lost, while William Weber Wanderlinde and Maria Rita Drumond Viana look at the relationship of the Devil in Marriage with Satan in Paradise Lost. Daniela Paolini and Mario Rucavado Rojas examine José Joaquín de Mora’s Meditaciones poéticas, asking “to what extent they [Mora’s poems] can be considered an ekphrasis of Blake’s designs.” Hikari Sato considers “the old story that [John] Ruskin ‘cut up’ one of the copies of Jerusalem.” Ben Myers explores Thomas Merton’s use of Blake’s proverbs “as a model of social critique,” and Annise Rogers has a chapter in a collection on J. R. R. Tolkien regarding Blake’s and Tolkien’s art. Vera Serdechnaia traces Blake’s influence on the symbolist poets George MacDonald, Edith Sitwell, and Francis Thompson; Svetlana Kolotilina compares Blake and the painter Francis Bacon, with references to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Esin Ozansoy examines Blake’s influence on the Greek poet Odysseas Elytis. Joseph Albernaz’s Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community has two chapters on Blake and community, with the second comparing Blake and Georges Bataille; Bataille’s notion of the sacred is utilized in Kang-Po Chen’s study of the depiction of sacrificial violence in Jerusalem. Paul-Cristian Albu contemplates how a “Romanian literary critic plans to interpret William Blake’s work in a Romanian context.”
Several articles consider the history of Blake scholars and scholarship in Japan. Yoshie Nakajima offers “an introductory essay on Lafcadio Hearn and Blake,” while Nobuo Sakikawa discusses Hearn’s lectures on Blake delivered at Tokyo Imperial University. Toshiro Nakajima and Yuko Nagano place the work of Bunsho Jugaku “in the history of Blake studies after World War II,” and Hikari Sato examines the role that Muneyoshi Yanagi played in editing Jugaku’s Collection of Blake Essays.
Music
The scattered essays on music and Blake at Zoamorphosis, Jason Whittaker’s site, have been collected into their own section at the Global Blake site, as recorded below. On 4 November 2024, Global Blake held a one-day online symposium on Blake and music, “Musical Afterlives.” Topics included Blake’s influence on spirituals, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Bruce Dickinson, new age music, the country musician Don Williams, and recent Russian music. Most of the presentations were recorded and posted to YouTube and embedded at the Global Blake site. The symposium inspired Keri Davies to post a detailed description at his blog of how much the locales of Blake and the composer Franz Joseph Haydn overlapped. In separate Russian articles, Angelina Stepanova and Nikita Volobuev analyze Dmitrii Smirnov’s settings of Blake’s work.
Dissertations and Studies of Translations
Alexandre Tchaykov devotes a section of his Doctor of Music dissertation to Benjamin Britten’s setting of Songs. Katherine Ding’s “A Blakean Guide to Embodied Knowledge” argues that “Blake prophetically anticipates the discoveries of twenty-first century neuroscientists by insisting that the activities of thinking, feeling, and perception … are located in the body.” April Grace Ingraham Savage examines Blake through “proto-Pentecostal theology.” Yunyi Cai explores “the representation of darkness in fine arts,” while Hui Zhao considers Jerusalem through “une heuristique du montage.”
Studies of translations include three Russian articles. Vladislav Bortnikov compares the English and Russian verbs in Jerusalem plate 5 and Dmitrii Smirnov’s translation; Nadezhda Severina examines two versions of “The Clod and the Pebble” by V. Toporov; and Milena Stepanyan analyzes the strategies in G. Dashevsky’s translations of Blake’s poetry.
Notable Digital Sources
In a YouTube video, Doug Nicholls tours Blake’s cottage in Felpham to highlight the extensive damage, and I’ve recorded related news stories on efforts to save the cottage and transform it into a museum. Blake Society events included presentations on Blake and Maurice Sendak by Jason Whittaker and illustrator Tamsin Rosewell, on Blake in relationship to London police reform by Jake Elliot, and on taking Blake’s Christianity seriously by Mark Vernon (who has an essay on the same topic in VALA). Morton Paley’s presentation on Songs at the San Francisco Public Library is available on YouTube.
Global Blake’s “In Conversation” series featured Alexander Regier’s presentation on how the replica of Blake’s press ended up at Rice University; Roger Whitson’s discussion of Donald Ault, actor-network theory, and science; Annise Rogers’s reading of “Samson” in Poetical Sketches as a prototype for Orc and Albion; David Worrall’s distillation of his recent book; Inés Tebourski’s call for seeing Los as a new model of the self; and William Rubel’s study of the reception and influence of “The Fly.”
Zoavision, Global Blake’s YouTube channel, has four playlists on its page. One of these, “Visionary: How William Blake Changed the World,” comprises longer videos on Blake and his reception. Significant postings here include panel discussions on Blake and Tolkien and on Urizen, and Whittaker exploring Blake’s influence on J. G. Ballard and Angela Carter; Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare; and the surrealists.
Passings
Kathryn Freeman, author of Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in “The Four Zoas” (1997) and A Guide to the Cosmology of William Blake (2017), passed away unexpectedly in late 2024.
Blake’s Circle
The Royal Academy’s exhibition Entangled Pasts, 1768–Now: Art, Colonialism and Change featured many members of Blake’s circle. Catalogue essays include Cora Gilroy-Ware’s discussion of the legacy of Thomas Stothard’s The Sable Venus and Esther Chadwick on the Royal Academy in relationship to enslavement. Susanna Avery-Quash and Christian Huemer’s collection, London and the Emergence of a European Art Market, 1780–1820, features Camilla Murgia on exhibiting art privately and publicly in London around 1800; David Alexander on the print market; and Wendy Wassyng Roworth on the acquisition and dispersal of Angelica Kauffman’s collection. Elsewhere, Kauffman’s salon and its music are treated by Rebecca Cypess, while Roworth examines her bedrooms as places of display, and Rachel Harmeyer studies the embroidered pictures done after Kauffman’s paintings.
Kauffman is also considered alongside Maria Cosway and Caroline Watson in Hannah Lyons’s dissertation, “‘Exercising the Art as a Trade’: Professional Women Printmakers in England, c. 1750–c. 1850.” The same trio and many other important women involved in printmaking and selling are discussed in Cristina S. Martinez and Cynthia E. Roman’s new open-source collection, Female Printmakers, Printsellers, and Print Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women, c. 1700–1830. Maria Cosway was the subject of an exhibition in Corsica, and there is a new scholarly edition of her correspondence with Thomas Jefferson, which includes English translations and historical context. Alexandra Zoë Dostal’s dissertation, “Rope, Linen, Thread: Gender, Labor, and the Textile Industry in Eighteenth-Century British Art,” explores “the structure, materiality and hidden histories embedded in linen painting canvas.”
Alexandra Harris has a book on the Sussex landscape with a chapter on Blake and another on Charlotte Smith’s and William Cowper’s relationships to William Hayley. Christopher Stokes examines Cowper and evangelical prayer in Romantic Prayer: Reinventing the Poetics of Devotion, 1773–1832, and Chris Townsend investigates the use of blank verse by abolitionist poets, taking The Task as his case study. Silvia Riccardi considers Blake, Fuseli, Flaxman, and Botticelli and, in another essay, Fuseli’s illustrations for Dante. Frances Van Keuren and Kristen Miller Zohn examine Thomas Hope’s Costume of the Ancients and investigate “why Hope altered his sources by adding patterns from Greek vases.” There is a new edition of John Gabriel Stedman’s Surinam diary, with comparisons of its accounts with those in the Narrative.
Swedenborg is the subject of Friedemann Stengel’s 2009 German thesis, published in 2011 as Aufklärung bis zum Himmel: Emanuel Swedenborg im Kontext der Theologie und Philosophie des 18 Jahrhunderts and now translated into English. A responsible historicization of Swedenborg’s life and thought, it avoids the enthusiasm of Swedenborgian adherents and provides ample evidence for its claims. While Blake is not discussed, Lavater, Moravianism, and Methodism are, and Stengel is particularly concerned with positioning Swedenborg in relationship to the philosophy and science of his day. Similarly useful will be Leah D. Martin’s DMA dissertation on the hymnology of the New Jerusalem Church, which considers Swedenborg’s own writings on songs and hymns, Joseph Proud, and the actual uses of hymns in the church liturgy. A pair of Russian articles analyze Swedenborg’s relationship to Kant (also treated in a long section by Stengel) and to the Gnostics.
There is a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft by Brenda Ayres, who has also published a book-length study on Wollstonecraft and religion. This study employs a broad sense of religion that goes beyond Wollstonecraft’s connections with Protestant Dissent. Her place in advancing human rights is considered by Debra Bergoffen. Emily Dumler-Winckler strongly pushes back against efforts to use Wollstonecraft to further what she describes as “the contemporary antiabortion, anticontraception, and heterosexual family-centered cause.” Catherine Packham’s new book is on Wollstonecraft and political economy. In separate articles, Chelsea Kidd and Deborah Weiss examine women’s insanity in The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, while Elizabeth King treats its “anti-gothic gothic animals.” Liz Wan Yuen-Yuk reads Mary, A Fiction as a “prototypical Gothic novel,” and David Sigler examines necrophilia in Wollstonecraft’s unfinished short story “The Cave of Fancy.”
Division I: William Blake
Part I: Blake’s Writings
Section A: Original Editions, Facsimiles, Reprints, and Translations
For Children: The Gates of Paradise (1793)
For Children: The Gates of Paradise [A]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi. 2024.
§ The Gates of Paradise [copy unknown]. Stockholm: Ellerströms Text & Music, 2024. A photographic reproduction with a translation into Swedish verse.All this information, which I couldn’t verify, comes from an e-mail from Morton Paley.
An Island in the Moon (1786?)
Ostrov na Lune. Trans. Dmitrii Smirnov. Moscow: Ibicus-Press, 2024. 88 pp. ISBN: 9785605224822. In Russian. A book version of Smirnov’s translation, which was originally published in Yazyk. Slovesnost'. Kul'tura [Language. Philology. Culture] no. 1 (2013): 183-207.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93?)
Le mariage du ciel et de l’enfer. Trans. André Gide. Nouvelle revue française no. 107 (1 Aug. 1922): 129-47. B. 1922. C. 1923. <WBHC p. 289> D. § Saint-Denis, France: Éditions Corti, 2023. 56 pp. ISBN: 9782714313041. In French.
Notebook (c. 1787–1818)
The Rossetti Manuscript. Cambremer, France: SP Books, 2024. ISBN: 9791095457244. A limited-edition facsimile of 1000 copies.
Songs of Innocence (1789)
Songs of Innocence [L]. Introduction by Mark Crosby. Oxford: Bodleian Libraries Publishing, 2024. ISBN: 9781851246427. A facsimile edition with a lucid introduction but no notes.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794)
Chants d’innocence et d’expérience. Trans. Marie-Louise Soupault and Philippe Soupault. Paris: Éditions des Cahiers libres, 1927. B. 1947. <WBHC p. 407> C. 2007. D. 2021. <Blake (2022)> E. Prologue by Jean-Yves Masson. Paris: Éditions Points, 2024. 128 pp. ISBN: 9791041411450. In French.
Section B: Collections and Selections
§ “Letter to Anna Flaxman (extract).” [The poem in Catherine’s letter?] So Longeth My Soul: A Reader in Christian Spirituality. Ed. Joanna Collicutt. London: SCM Press, 2024. ISBN: 9780334063100.
§ El matrimonio del cielo y el infierno y otros poemas. Trans., introduction, notes, and an appendix by Mario Rucavado. Colección Colihue Clásica. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Colihue, 2023. 320 pp. ISBN: 9789505631056. In Spanish. The volume includes Marriage and “other works from the ‘Orc Cycle’” [sic].
§ Proverbes de l’enfer/Proverbs of Hell. Ed. and trans. Jean-Pierre Weil. Paris: Harpo & Editions, 2004. 80 pp. ISBN: 9782913886469. In French. Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” from Marriage.
“To the Skylark” [Milton 31 [34].28-38, E 130-31]. The Book of Bird Poems. Ed. Ana Sampson. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2024.
“Vstuplenie: iz tsikla ‘Pesni Nevinnosti i Opyta’ [Introduction: From the Songs of Innocence and of Experience].” Vokal'nye sochineniya saratovskikh kompozitorov: uchebnoe posobie [Vocal Compositions of Saratov Composers: A Study Guide]. Saratov: Saratov State Conservatory named after L. V. Sobinov, 2024. ISMN: 9790706465326. 104-12. In Russian. A musical notation for a setting of the “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence (trans. Marshak) by the Saratov composer Yuri Massin (b. 1941), published in a collection of vocal works written by Saratov composers from the mid-twentieth century to the present day.
William Blake: Selected Works. Ed. Peter Otto. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. <Blake (2019, 2021, 2022)>
Review
Townsend, Chris.
Romanticism 30.3 (2024): 309-14. With Sarah Haggarty,
William Blake in Context, and Linda Freedman,
William Blake and the Myth of America: From the Abolitionists to the Counterculture.
Part II: Reproductions of Drawings and Paintings
Section A: Illustrations of Individual Authors
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 (2024)> B. 2nd ed., 2024.
Section B: Collections and Selections
Adam Naming the Beasts (1810) [preview mode]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi. 2024.
Christ Blessing (1810) [preview mode]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi. 2024.
Eighteen Heads of Poets (c. 1800–03). William Blake Archive. Ed. Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi. 2024.
Eve Naming the Birds (1810) [preview mode]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi. 2024.
[Forty-Seven] Monochrome Wash Drawings (c. 1774–86). William Blake Archive. Ed. Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi. 2024.
The Virgin and Child (“The
Black Madonna” ) (c. 1810–20) [preview mode]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi. 2024.
The Virgin and Child in
Egypt (1810) [preview mode]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi. 2024.
Part III: Commercial Engravings
Section A: Illustrations of Individual Authors
Stedman, John Gabriel
See Hardesty under Stedman in Division II.
Part IV: Bibliographies and Catalogues
Section A: Bibliographies
[cross-listing articles with substantial bibliographical content]
Calè, Luisa. “Blake and Exhibitions, 2023.” See Blake 58.1 in Part VI.
Oliveira, Camila, and Jason Whittaker. “Blake and Music, 2023.” See Blake 58.1 in Part VI.
Ripley, Wayne C. “A List of Morris Eaves’s Publications.” See Blake 57.4 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 2023.” See Blake 58.1 in Part VI.
Section B: Catalogues
Bindman, David, and Esther Chadwick, eds. William Blake’s Universe. See Bindman and Chadwick in Part VI.
Insley, Alice, ed. Blake e la sua epoca. Viaggi nel tempo del sogno. See Insley in Part VI.
Sotheby’s, New York. “William Blake | ‘Poems with very wild and interesting pictures.’” Three Poets: William Blake, A. E. Housman, Robert Frost. 26 June 2024. Lot 1. Digital reproductions of the front cover, Bentley plates 1-5, 8, 15, 18-19, 22-24, 28-30, 33, 37, 39-40, 42, 46, 48-49, and Coleridge’s 12 Feb. 1818 letter to Charles Augustus Tulk on the Songs. The catalogue entry is silently by Essick and gives a list of the plates in order, with brief descriptions of the coloring.
News coverage
Dziemianowicz, Joe. “
‘Extraordinary’ Poetry Book by William Blake Sold by Sotheby’s for Record $4.3M.”
Penta (28 June 2024).
Mosheim, Tash. “
Copy of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience Sells at Auction for a Stunning £3.4 Million.”
Daily Mail (28 June 2024).
Part V: Digital Resources
The Allen Ginsberg Project
Blackstock, Joel. “William Blake and the Visionary Imagination.” Taproot Therapy (7 Apr. 2024).
Blake Cottage Trust
Blake Society (see also VALA in Part VI)
“AGM and In Search of Paradise.” 17 Jan. 2024. David Mullin, who collaborated with Louisa Albani on her pamphlet In Search of Paradise: William Blake at Old Wyldes, Hampstead <Blake (2024)>, discusses the Ancients, particularly Samuel Palmer.
“Blake’s Illustrations for the Book of Job: A Healing Journey.” 7 Feb. 2024. Jason Wright discusses his book Blake’s Job: Adventures in Becoming <Blake (2024)>.
“Ah! Sunflower!: Linda Landers in Conversation with Keri Davies.” 6 Mar. 2024. “Celebrating the launch of her new Blake-inspired artist’s book and series of prints, Ah! Sunflower!, this evening will see artist and printmaker Linda Landers in conversation with leading independent Blake scholar Keri Davies.”
“Timothy Morton—The Marriage of Religion and the Biosphere.” 17 Apr. 2024. Morton on their new book, Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology.
“‘In the Deserts Wild’: William Blake and Maurice Sendak.” 8 May 2024. “On the anniversary of Sendak’s death in 2012, this conversation between writer and academic Jason Whittaker and illustrator Tamsin Rosewell will explore some of the ways in which Sendak drew inspiration from Blake up until his final work.”
“Soul Writing with Dr. Sarah Walton.” 12 June 2024. “In this workshop, we will activate Blake’s use of the Gothic arch as a symbol of stepping from one realm into another, to embrace rejuvenation and personal truth. In guided meditations designed to support you to write from your intuition, you will be enabled to take a journey led by your own poetic imagination.”
“Jesus the Imagination: On Taking Blake’s Christianity Seriously.” 3 July 2024. “Mark Vernon will talk about Blake’s Christianity and explore the role of Jesus as the imagination in Blake’s works and thinking.”
“Meeting at Blake’s Grave.” 11 Aug. 2024. No video is available.
“Blake’s ‘Watchman’: Los and the London Police.” 18 Sept. 2024. “Jake Elliot discusses Blake’s depiction of Los as ‘Albion’s Watchman’ in the context of the changing face of policing in London in the late 18th and early 19th century.”
“Songs of Innocence and of Experience.” 2 Oct. 2024. “Internationally acclaimed singer and musician, Katy Carr joins with the Secretary of the Blake Society, Stephen Pritchard, to explore Blake’s deceptively simple poems and exquisite artwork, some copies of which were hand-coloured by Catherine Blake. These unique works of art will be projected, sung and their beauty and profundity celebrated in words and song.” The event was held at St. Bartholomew the Great. No video is available.
“Blake’s Birthday Bash and Launch of VALA 5.” 28 Nov. 2024.
Larman, Hugo. “William Blake: Visionary.” 4 Jan. 2024. “Impressions of the exhibition at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.”
Digby, Joan, and Tamsin Rosewell. “Bringing Catherine out of the Shadows.” 25 Jan. 2024. On the project to honor Catherine with a grave marker at Bunhill Fields.
Erle, Sibylle. “Open Letter to the Guardian.” 4 Mar. 2024. “An open letter to the Guardian in response to Jonathan Jones’ review of William Blake’s Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.” “Jones’ review doesn’t question how people might have navigated the racialised assumptions of the 18th century. His ‘modern standards’ claim misses that some might describe Blake as an ally of oppressed social groups at a time of extreme repression. Racism has a historical as well as an artistic context.”
“In Memory of Morris Eaves.” 5 Mar. 2024. “Trustees and friends of The Blake Society pay tribute to the late, great Morris Eaves.”
Riordan, John. “Printing Blake in Houston.” 23 Apr. 2024. “Trustee of the Blake Society John Riordan writes about his experience printing with the replica Blake press at Rice University, Houston.”
Pacitti, Diane. “Sacred Visions: Blake and First Nations Peoples.” 22 July 2024. “As part of St. James’s Piccadilly’s Changing Our Minds initiative, Diane Pacitti explores the similarities between the visions of indigenous peoples and William Blake.”
Erle, Sibylle. “‘The Little Black Boy’—Taking Stock: Blake, Race and Racism.” 31 July 2024. “After the recent exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Chair of the Blake Society, Dr. Sibylle Erle, explores the poem ‘The Little Black Boy’ and its implications for our understanding of race and racism in the work and world of William Blake.”
Pritchard, Stephen. “Nobodaddy—An Interview with Michael Keegan-Dolan.” 18 Nov. 2024. “Nobodaddy is a brand-new work by multi-award-winning choreographer and Sadler’s Wells Associate artist Michael Keegan-Dolan and his dance and theatre company Teaċ Daṁsa—a must-see for Blake lovers.
Secretary of the Blake Society, Stephen Pritchard, talked to Michael about the production.”
Erle, Sibylle. “VALA #5: Divine Humanity; or, God Appears When We Appear Godly.” 26 Nov. 2024. An introduction to issue 5 of VALA, on the theme of God, which will be launched on 28 Nov. (see “Blake’s Birthday Bash and Launch of VALA 5,” above).
“Blake Society Trustees.” 17 Dec. 2024. An introduction to the current trustees prior to the society’s AGM in Jan. 2025.
Crosby, Mark. News articles and press releases on Crosby’s discovery of incised marks on the versos of copperplates for Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments (see Blake 58.3 in Part VI):
Davies, Keri. Index Rerum: A Blog about Books, Book-Collecting, William Blake, and Lots of Other Things.
“George Whitefield, the Moravians, and ‘Andrew the Negro boy.’”“A version of this paper was presented to the Bethlehem Conference on Moravian History & Music in Bethlehem PA in October 2010.” 18 Jan. 2024. “The paper explores Whitefield’s motives in entrusting ‘Andrew the Negro Boy’ to Moravian care, expands on previous accounts, and shows how this relates to other episodes in Whitefield’s relationship with the Moravian Church before the decisive violent break following the publication of his Expostulatory Letter of 1753. In addition to my text presented in Bethlehem PA, I have added comments (Scholia) not explored on that occasion and a biographical listing (Prosopography) of persons mentioned in the text.” These persons include Catherine Blake, Blake’s mother.
“‘O Nancy’s hair is yellow as gowd’: Blake, Border Ballads, and the Reinvention of Relief Etching.”“A version of this paper was read at ‘Romanticism’s Debatable Lands’: the British Association for Romantic Studies Biennial Conference, 28-31 July 2005, Newcastle upon Tyne.” 26 Mar. 2024. An essay with two parts. The first focuses on Blake’s ideas of music and identifies the probable source of the “Border Melody” sung by Mrs. Linnell, which, according to Alexander Gilchrist, affected Blake emotionally. The second considers William Home Lizars,As Davies points out, “Home” was Lizars’s
middle name, not “Hone” as Bentley has it in BR(2). and suggests that Lizars’s relief invention may have been modeled on knowledge of Blake’s method of illuminated printing.
“Good Morning, Doctor Haydn.” 29 Nov. 2024. Sketches the many overlapping locales and circles of Blake and Haydn without suggesting “a direct link between the poet and the composer.” Among the figures mentioned are the Swedenborgian composer François-Hippolyte Barthélemon and John and Anne Hunter.
Gev, David. “Exclusive Interview with Visionary William Blake.” Medium (13 May 2024). A reflection and fictional interview with Blake, inspired by the Getty exhibition.
Gioia, Ted. “Are Visionary Artists Just Mentally Ill?” The Honest Broker (6 Oct. 2024). “To write like that is a gift. But perhaps not always pleasant or easy for the gifted.”
Global Blake Network
Articles on Blake and music (as of Jan. 2025, this section collects articles previously posted at Zoamorphosis):
Connolly, Tristanne. “How Much Did Jim Morrison Know about William Blake?” 6 Mar. 2024. Originally posted at Zoamorphosis on 20 Mar. 2011; not previously recorded in the Blake checklist.
Whittaker, Jason. “Sweet Roaming: William Blake and the Fugs.” 20 Mar. 2024. Originally posted at Zoamorphosis on 14 July 2010; not previously recorded in the Blake checklist.
Whittaker, Jason. “The Divine Essence of Things—Nick Cave and William Blake.” 20 Apr. 2024. Originally posted at Zoamorphosis on 5 Oct. 2019 <Blake (2020)>.
Whittaker, Jason. “Heaven in a Wild Flower: Nick Drake and William Blake.” 25 May 2024. Originally posted at Zoamorphosis on 19 June 2023 <Blake (2024)>.
Hagen, Katharina. “Alchemy, Rosicrucianism, and the Grail—Bruce Dickinson’s Take on ‘Jerusalem.’” 27 May 2024. Originally posted at Zoamorphosis on 9 Sept. 2019 <Blake (2020)>.
Connolly, Tristanne. “L. A. Woman, a City Yet a Woman: Blake, Jim Morrison, and Prophecy.” 29 May 2024. Originally posted at Zoamorphosis on 20 Feb. 2011; not previously recorded in the Blake checklist.
Hagen, Katharina. “What If Thel Was Male?” 8 June 2024. Originally posted at Zoamorphosis on 17 Nov. 2019 <Blake (2020)>.
Erle, Sibylle. “Blake’s Job: Adventures in Becoming by Jason Wright.” 7 Mar. 2024. “Wright does more than contribute to Blake scholarship. By aligning his thinking with theories of wholeness (David Bohm and A. N. Whit[e]head) and brain functioning (Ian McGilchrist and Mark Solms), he shows why Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job is the story of our time.”
Whittaker, Jason. “William Blake’s Universe.” 4 Apr. 2024. On the catalogue and exhibition (see also the podcast review, below).
Whittaker, Jason. “A Bastard Kind of Reasoning by Andrew M. Cooper.” 13 June 2024. “While I have a deep-seated suspicion of any title which too blithely claims that Blake was a precursor of later modes of thinking or ordering knowledge, the final quotation from Niels Bohr above demonstrates a connection to Blake’s time which is often neglected by more superficial historians of ideas, that the simple progress of science has frequently been complicated by its own systems of ordering knowledge.”
Rogers, Annise. “Weaving Tales: Anglo-Iberian Encounters on Literatures in English, an Edited Collection.” 25 July 2024. “Together, both chapters [on Blake] demonstrate the importance of international participation with Blake’s works, and how the poet-painter continues to be an important figure throughout time and space.”
Oliveira, Camila. “Britten’s Donne, Hardy and Blake Songs by Gordon Cameron Sly.” 5 Sept. 2024. “Sly never seems to neglect the literary dimension when he discusses at length the minutest details of the scores. He skillfully explores the underlying and unifying themes of the poems and proverbs and is able to establish convincing correlations and parallels between the structure of Britten’s music and Blake’s poetry within a cyclic dynamic. His book, however, may come across as too dense and inscrutable for an audience not particularly versed in bars and cro[t]chets, which I imagine is the case for the vast majority of literature scholars.”
Choe, Sharon. “Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies, an Edited Collection.” 11 Dec. 2024. “In this short chapter, [Luisa] Calè covers the roots of Pater’s embodied aesthetics and how he rethinks the boundaries between art and literature via Blake. By drawing on the Swinburnian critical account of Blake and Pater’s reception of Swinburne, Calè situates Blake’s significance in the development of literary and artistic aesthetics during the nineteenth century.”
Regier, Alexander. “Printing Blake in Texas.” 12 Mar. 2024. On the replica of Blake’s printing press now held by Rice University, Houston, Texas.
Whittaker, Jason. “Mapping Hell: Alasdair Gray and William Blake.” 11 Apr. 2024. On
Blake’s influence on Gray.
Whitson, Roger. “Reassembling Visionary Physics: Donald Ault, Bruno Latour, and William Blake’s Mathematical Scenographies.” 23 May 2024. “Ault’s Blake anticipates later developments in Latourian lab sociology, actor-network theory (ANT), and media archaeology.”
Rogers, Annise. “‘thy young hands tore human limbs, and gorged human flesh!’: Poetical Sketches and Blake’s Development of Samson.” 15 June 2024. “This talk focuses on the poetical-prose piece of ‘Samson’ from Poetical Sketches, examining how Blake amalgamated his views on the Bible, Samson Agonistes, and other Miltonic works, to present the start of an individual which he would continue to grapple with for the rest of his life. A fallen human hero that would help him in the creation of two of his most famous characters—Orc and Albion.”
Worrall, David. “William Blake’s Visions.” 24 Sept. 2024. “Worrall discusses his latest book—William Blake’s Visions: Art, Hallucinations, Synaesthesia.”
Tebourski, Inés. “Los’s Healthy Narcissism.” 16 Oct. 2024.
Rubel, William. “‘A fly like thee.’” 18 Dec. 2024. On “The Fly,” its
influence on musicians, and Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died.”
Visionary (videos analyzing or discussing Blake):
Whittaker, Jason, Sharon Choe, William Sherwood, and Annise Rogers. “Blake and Tolkien’s Mythmaking.” 7 Mar. 2024.
McAuliffe, Hannah, Jon Mee, and Sharon Choe. “William Blake and the Idea of the Body.” 8 Mar. 2024. Originally posted at Zoamorphosis on 16 June 2023 <Blake (2024)>.
Whittaker, Jason, Sharon Choe, and Annise Rogers. “William Blake’s Universe—Review of the Fitzwilliam Museum Exhibition.” 27 Mar. 2024.
Whittaker, Jason. “William Blake’s Influence on J. G. Ballard and Angela Carter.” 12 May 2024.
Whittaker, Jason, Sharon Choe, Annise Rogers, and Hannah McAuliffe. “William Blake and The Book of Urizen.” 19 May 2024.
Whittaker, Jason. “Blake and the Left Hand Path: William Blake, Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare.” 2 Aug. 2024.
Whittaker, Jason. “William Blake’s Guide on How to Be a Visionary.” 12 Aug. 2024.
Whittaker, Jason. “‘Jerusalem’: From William Blake to Hubert Parry.” 14 Aug. 2024.
Whittaker, Jason. “Dark Angels: William Blake and Ridley Scott.” 3 Sept. 2024.
Whittaker, Jason. “William Blake and the Surrealists.” 31 Oct. 2024.
Global Blake Symposium: Musical Afterlives. An online conference held 4 Nov. 2024. (Presentations are arranged according to their order in the program. I have also listed the title of the presentation given by the presenter, which, in some cases, differs from that on YouTube. The date is the day of the YouTube posting. Note that not all papers are available online as of 26 Mar.
2025.)At the YouTube page for Zoavision, the presentations delivered at the symposium are listed under the “Global Blake” playlist. I have separated the presentations for Musical Afterlives here so that their context isn’t lost.
Keery, James, and Steve Clark. “‘And the Song they sung was this / Composed by an African Black’: Blakean Spirituals.” 5 Nov. 2024.
Walker, Luke. “‘Relationships of ownership / They whisper in the wings’: Bob Dylan and William Blake.” 6 Nov. 2024.
Oliveira, Camila. “William Blake and Visionary Cover Arts.” 12 Nov. 2024.
Miles, Barry. “Ginsberg’s Blake Recordings.” 19 Nov. 2024.
Serdechnaia, Vera. “William Blake in Russian Music in 2010s–2020s.” 22 Nov. 2024.
Ogunbayo, Sola. “William Blake’s Poetic Rhythm in Selected Country Music by Don Williams.” Not posted on YouTube.
dos Santos, Andrio J. R. “‘In Satan’s Mire’: Bruce Dickinson’s Chemical Wedding to William Blake.” 9 Feb. 2025.
Smith, Jacob. “Blake and New Age Music.” 15 Feb. 2025.
Walker, Luke. “Some Spiritual, Political and Academic Contexts of Allen Ginsberg’s Blake Recordings.” 16 Feb. 2025.
David, Cleopatra. “Contemporary Musical Settings of William Blake’s Poetry.” Not posted on YouTube.
Harris, Gareth. “The Enigmatic Influence of William Blake.” Sotheby’s (12 June 2024). A description of the roundtable “William Blake: Artist, Poet and Visionary” with Andrew Graham-Dixon and John Higgs, which was made into a podcast.
Miller, Catriona. “Masterpiece Story: The Ancient of Days by William Blake.” DailyArt Magazine (3 Jan. 2024). A popular account of the frontispiece to Europe.
Morgan Library and Museum. “Naudline Pierre on William Blake and the Importance of the Imagination | Collection in Focus.” YouTube. 16 Dec. 2024. “Watch artist Naudline Pierre discuss her creative inspirations and connection to artist and poet William Blake. Pierre takes us through her favorite works and Blake’s connection to the unseen.”
Rejected Religion. “Dr. Luke Walker—Allen Ginsberg and His Blakean Revival.” YouTube. 22 Dec. 2022. An episode of a podcast.
San Francisco Public Library. “Morton Paley Presents William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience.” YouTube. 2 May 2024.
Vernon, Mark. “‘Enemies of the Human Race.’ William Blake on How to Know God.” Mark Vernon (29 Nov. 2024). There is both a video and a transcription at Vernon’s eponymous blog.
Weldon, Amy E. “Writing with Fire: Printmaking, Welding, and William Blake.” Amy E. Weldon (24 Oct. 2024). “This year I’ve tried two ways—printmaking and welding—to get under the dirty, stubborn skin of William Blake.”
William Blake Archive
Exhibition:
Crosby, Mark. “‘Absorbed by the poets’: The Sources and Hanging Arrangement for Blake’s Eighteen Heads of Poets.” Apr. 2024. “Using evidence from the restored paintings, the original architectural plans for Turret House, and Hayley’s correspondence, this exhibit offers an updated hanging arrangement for Blake’s eighteen portrait heads. Comprising two galleries, the exhibition traces the construction of Hayley’s Turret House and its upper library before providing a new hanging arrangement and possible sources available in Hayley’s libraries for the portrait heads, including the identification of new sources for Blake’s portraits of Homer, Demosthenes, and Tasso.”
“Remembering Morris.” 13 Mar. 2024. “Recollections and appreciations of Morris Eaves from colleagues, friends, and the Blake community.”
Jones, Sarah. “Our Sales Review Editor.” 17 Mar. 2024. A history and appreciation of Robert N. Essick’s “Marketplace” articles.
“Roundtable for Morris at ASECS 2025.” 23 Aug. 2024. A call for abstracts for a roundtable, “The Legacies of Morris Eaves,” chaired by Wayne Ripley and Tom Hothem, to be held online as part of the ASECS meeting in Mar. 2025.
Part VI: Criticism, Biography, and Reviews
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T V W Z
A
Ackroyd, Peter. “Religion as Individual: William Blake (1757–1827).” The English Soul: Faith of a Nation. London: Reaktion Books, 2024. ISBN: 9781789148459. A short biographical sketch.
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, 2024)>
Reviews
Aghajanian, Arthur. “
Why We Need William Blake.”
Plough (30 Jan. 2024).
Larman, Hugo. See
Blake Society in Part V.
Adnot, Camille. “‘Enough! or Too much’: William Blake’s Intermedial Aesthetics of Excess.” Études anglaises 76.4 (2024): 404-23. (Abstract in English and French.) “Drawing on vitalism and image-text studies, this article explores William Blake’s aesthetics of excess in his long ‘Prophecies’ (The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem). Blake’s conception of excess combines notions of energy, vitality, and power, informed by 18th-century scientific investigations into life forms and taxonomy. With his ‘bounding line,’ Blake pushes the boundaries of semiotic as well as biological categorization. I analyze cases of graphic overflow, synaesthesia, and sensory overload, to highlight how Blake uses multiplicity as a creative principle” (abstract).
Albernaz, Joseph. “Nonsovereign Circulations: William Blake” and “Sunray of the Negative: Blake and Bataille.” Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9781503639720. 139-87 and 188-202. On community in Jerusalem: “Community must circulate among us, among the spilled excess of fragile attachments, in the everyday” (186). The comparison of Blake and Bataille focuses on their conceptions of energy, with references to Marriage, Jerusalem, A Descriptive Catalogue, and The Ancient Britons.
Albu, Paul-Cristian. “The Reception of William Blake’s Work by the Eyes of a Romanian Post-1989 Literary Critic.” Journal of Romanian Literary Studies 38 (2024): 571-75. In Romanian (abstract in English). “Through this short article, we are interested in observing how Romanian literary critic plans to interpret William Blake’s work in a Romanian context. This writer manages to express his objectivity when speaking of the reception of William Blake’s work in the current Romanian context. We are astonished to see this writer’s analytical thinking, mathematical precision, and how this writer compounds his structural work. By reading his book, we can observe the differences in interpretation in a heteroclite literary context, Romanian vs
English” (abstract).
B
Bailes, Melissa. Rev. of Noah Heringman, Deep Time: A Literary History. See Heringman.
Bailey, Quentin. Rev. of Madeleine Callaghan, Eternity in British Romantic Poetry. See Callaghan.
Barbeau, Jeffrey W., ed. The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. <Blake (2022)>
Review
McQueen, Joseph.
Wordsworth Circle 54.4 (2023): 492-500.
Battersby, David. “The Comic Book of Urizen.” See VALA.
Becker, Artur. Schwarze Servietten auf meinem Herzen: Aus den Leben der Kosmopolen: Essays, 2013–2024. Wuppertal: Arco, 2024. In German. According to WorldCat, Blake appears in the work. Becker is a contemporary Polish-German writer (b. 1968).
Bєlіns'ka, Іrina, and Tetyana Panichok. “Tvorchiy dorobok Vіl'yama Bleyka v arealі komparativіstiki [William Blake’s Creative Heritage in the Range of Comparative Studies].” Vіsnik nauki ta osvіti [Bulletin of Science and Education] 12.18 (2023, published online 2024): 42-52. In Ukrainian (abstract in Ukrainian and English). The authors show a wide range of comparative contexts for Blake’s heritage (in literature, graphics, music, cinema, and so on), using modern Ukrainian translations.
Bentley, G. E., Jr. “Blake and ‘the Wondrous Art of Writing’: Letter Faces, Letter Formation, Capitalization.” See Crosby and McQuail.
Bindman, David, and Esther Chadwick, eds. William Blake’s Universe. Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum in association with Philip Wilson Publishers, 2024. ISBN: 9781781301272.
Stolzenburg, Andreas, ed., in collaboration with David Bindman and Esther Chadwick. William Blakes Universum. Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2024. ISBN: 9783775758017. In German.
The English and German versions of the catalogue for the exhibition held at the Fitzwilliam Museum, 23 Feb.–19 May 2024, and at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, 14 June–8 Sept. 2024. The exhibition and catalogue highlight Blake in a European and, especially, German context, pairing his works with those of the German artist Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810). There are also significant discussions of John Flaxman, Henry Fuseli, Dante, Henry Crabb Robinson, Jacob Boehme, and Dionysius Andreas Freher. The German exhibition also included gratis a graphic novel, William Blakes Universum, by Noëlle Kröger (see Kröger).
Chadwick, Esther. “Introduction: Blake, Runge and Visionary Art in Europe, c. 1800.” 10-17. On Blake and Runge, with references to Robinson, Blake’s Anglo-German connections, and Edward Armitage’s painting The Vanguard of the Age (1870–71).
Haggarty, Sarah. “Blake, Time and the Present Moment.” 18-25. On Blake and kairos.
Catalogue: “Blake and His Artist Contemporaries.” 26-35. Portraits of Blake, including James S. Deville’s Life Mask of William Blake (1823), and of his contemporaries.
I: The Past: Antiquity and the Gothic
Catalogue: “Learning from the Past” (38-55); “John Flaxman” (56-67); “Blake and Fuseli” (68-71); “Blake and Dante” (72-75); “Classics vs. Gothic” (76-81).
II: The Present: Europe in Flames
Bindman, David. “Blake’s Continental Prophecies: Apocalypse and Revolution.” 84-89. On Blake’s Lambeth books in the millenarian 1790s.
Catalogue: “‘Mind-forg’d manacles’: Slavery and Freedom” (90-103), including reproductions of “The Little Black Boy” and select plates from America copy O, Visions copy P, and The Song of Los copy A; “French Revolution and Apocalypse” (104-19), including reproductions of all of Europe copy K; “The World as Prison” (120-21); “Images of Redemption” (122-23), including a reproduction of impression 1A of “Albion Rose.”
III: The Future: Spiritual Renewal
Catalogue: “Blake’s New Religious Style” (126-39); “Jacob Böhme” (140-45).
Muratori, Cecilia. “‘Michael Angelo could not have done better’: Dionysius Andreas Freher and the Visual Transmission of German Mysticism in Eighteenth-Century England.” 146-52. On Freher and his designs for the Law edition of The Works of Jacob Behmen (1764–81).
Vigus, James. “Henry Crabb Robinson, William Blake and Anglo-German Cultural Relations.” 153-55. On Robinson’s Blake article for Vaterländisches Museum.
Catalogue: “Philipp Otto Runge: Times of Day.” 156-77.
Koerner, Joseph Leo. “Runge’s Times.” 178-85.
Catalogue: “Romantic Nationalism.” 186-203.
Vaughan, William. “Romantic Nationalism in Germany and Britain.” 204-11.
Promotional materials (arranged chronologically)
Fitzwilliam Museum. “
William Blake’s Universe.” YouTube. 22 Feb. 2024.
Avon, Laurie, and Peter Chownsmith. “
William Blake’s Universe by Laurie Avon and Peter Chownsmith.” Vimeo. 18 Mar. 2024. An animation created for the exhibition.
Fitzwilliam Museum. “
Catherine Blake: Artist, Colourist, Printmaker.” YouTube. 21 Mar. 2024. Highlights Catherine’s portrait of William.
Fitzwilliam Museum. “
Life Mask of William Blake.” YouTube. 26 Mar. 2024.
Fitzwilliam Museum. “
Achilles and Scamander.” YouTube. 27 Mar. 2024. By Runge.
Fitzwilliam Museum. “
Caspar David Friedrich.” YouTube. 27 Mar. 2024.
Godden, Salena. “
New Films: ‘Tyger Tyger’ + ‘Cathedrals’ | ‘William Blake’s Universe’ Fitzwilliam Museum.”
Waiting for Godden (18 Apr. 2024). A blog post with photos of the exhibition and with links to a Fitzwilliam Museum
YouTube video (10 Apr. 2024) of Godden reciting “The Tyger” and reflecting on Blake and
another (17 Apr. 2024) of her reciting her own poem “Cathedrals” in the exhibition space.
Fitzwilliam Museum. “
Death on a Pale Horse.” YouTube. 10 May 2024.
Fitzwilliam Museum. “
The Large Morning.” YouTube. 10 May 2024. By Runge.
Fitzwilliam Museum. “
Discover ‘William Blake’s Universe.’” YouTube. 15 May 2024.
Reviews
Calè, Luisa. See
Blake 58.3.
Cranfield, Nicholas. “
Art Review: William Blake’s Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.”
Church Times (8 Mar. 2024).
Erle, Sibylle. “Blake in Hamburg.” See
VALA.
Garvey, Anne. “
William Blake’s Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum.”
The Cambridge Critique (23 Feb. 2024).
Glover, Michael. “
The Secret Universe of William Blake’s Art.”
Hyperallergic (20 Mar. 2024). “One of the delight[s] of this show is to read the captions, and discover how the very learned scholars have smoothed away the difficulties of understanding how the myriad of gods and spirit-beings that Blake invoked with such passion and insouciance made any kind of coherent and comprehensible sense. They do not.”
Haggarty, Sarah. “
William Blake’s Universe: Making a European out of the Poet and Artist Who Never Left England.”
The Conversation (22 Mar. 2024). “The question of Blake’s Europeanness is posed everywhere in this exhibition, but never overtly. The working title ‘Blake in Europe,’ was lost along the way. Never quite asked are further questions about the limits of the shared European Romantic culture that the exhibition promotes. Which culture, or cultures, you could ask, and whose?”
Jones, Jonathan. “
William Blake’s Universe Review—Polymath’s Paintings Are Outclassed by the Germans.”
Guardian (23 Feb. 2024). “Having recently reread him I can confirm that while he often returns to enslavement in his writings (‘Enslaved’ is the first word in
Visions of the Daughters of Albion), he is clearly a racist by modern standards. He also lived more than two centuries
ago.”This comment elicited an open letter from the Blake Society chair, Sibylle Erle (see Blake Society in Part V).
Lloyd, Joe. “
William Blake’s Universe.”
Studio International (21 Mar. 2024). “Runge has often been considered Blake’s closest German analogue. Yet as esoteric as his vision is, his work retains a formal kinship with the art of his time. The same cannot be said of Blake, whose prophetic books intermingle image, text and design to convey an often-shifting personal theology, mythopoeia and political theory.”
McCormick, Neil. “
The Original Punk? How William Blake Became Rock’s Favourite Poet.”
Telegraph (18 Feb. 2024). Highlights Blake’s influence on rock musicians (Bob Dylan, Bruce Dickinson, and Patti Smith).
Sooke, Alastair. “
William Blake’s Universe: Think Art’s Great Oddball Couldn’t Possibly Seem Any Odder? Think Again.”
Telegraph (22 Feb. 2024).
Steele, Pippa. “
William Blake’s Calligraphy: An Exhibition Review.”
The Views Project (28 Mar. 2024).
Tsai, Li Hui. “Blake’s Universe and Runge’s Cosmos.” See
VALA.
White, David. “
William Blake’s Universe.”
Artmag (31 Jan. 2024).
Whittaker, Jason. “William Blake’s Universe.” See
Global Blake in Part V (and also the
podcast review with Whittaker et al. at Global Blake).
“
William Blake’s Universe.”
Apollo (9 June 2024).
Williamson, Gillian. “
William Blake’s Universe.”
British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Criticks (20 Mar. 2024). “May I put in a word for an important contributor to Blake’s life and world almost entirely overlooked: his wife Catherine?”
Wilson, Andy. “
William Blake’s Universe: Blake at the Fitzwilliam.”
The Traveller in the Evening (8 Mar. 2024).
Wroe, Nicholas. “
William Blake Was the Emblem of Englishness—But His Art Was Intrinsically European.”
Guardian (19 Feb. 2024).
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly
Volume 57, number 4 (spring 2024)
Remembrance
Paley, Morton D. “Morris Eaves, 1944–2024.”
Ripley, Wayne C. “A List of Morris Eaves’s Publications.”
Article
Crosby, Mark. “Blake in the Marketplace, 2023.” 7 pars., plus listings. Crosby’s first “Marketplace” article.
Review
Erle, Sibylle. “Seen through the Visions of Young and Old Germans: William Blake’s The Ancient Britons: A Book and a Website (Now Vanished) Reviewed.” 15 pars. “The artworks created by the Ancient Britons team are the result of critically informed readings and imaginings of the painting as it is described by Blake in A Descriptive Catalogue” (par. 4).
Minute Particular
Gourlay, Alexander S. “Construing ‘Har’: Blake’s Polyglot Roots.” 5 pars.
Cartoon
Riordan, John, and Sarah Jones. “The Ancient Britons.”
Volume 58, number 1 (summer 2024)
Articles
Ripley, Wayne C., with Fernando Castanedo, Hikari Sato, Hüseyin Alhas, and Vera Serdechnaia. “William Blake and His Circle: A Checklist of Scholarship in 2023.” 56 pars., plus listings. Dedicated to Morris Eaves.
Calè, Luisa. “Blake and Exhibitions, 2023.” 5 pars., plus listings. Includes a description of William Blake: Visionary at the Getty, which was held after being postponed because of COVID-19, and of the exhibition of Blake with Chris Ofili in the Blake room at Tate Britain.
Oliveira, Camila, and Jason Whittaker. “Blake and Music, 2023.” 3 pars., plus listings.
Volume 58, number 2 (fall 2024)
Article
Carter, Sarah. “The Ambiguities of Translation: Fuseli, Blake, and the Making of Aphorisms on Man.” 32 pars. “Aphorisms on Man emerges from my analysis a composite creation—one that registers the competing visions of its several authors and constitutes the idea of self emerging in tandem with Romanticism” (par. 3).
Reviews
Choe, Sharon. Andrew M. Cooper, A Bastard Kind of Reasoning: William Blake and Geometry. 6 pars. “The depth of knowledge that it demands may make it a challenging read for those who are not theoretically inclined, so it is perhaps not an introductory text to Blake and science. Nevertheless, A Bastard Kind of Reasoning is an engaging read and a surprisingly succinct exploration of how Enlightenment science and geometry contribute to Blake’s vision of the universe” (par. 6).
Whittaker, Jason. Matthew Leporati, Romantic Epics and the Mission of Empire. 7 pars.
Worrall, David. Matthew Mauger, William Blake and the Visionary Law: Prophecy, Legislation and Constitution. 10 pars. “An invigorating exploration of a significant subject viewed from an entirely unfamiliar perspective” (par. 10).
Volume 58, number 3 (winter 2024–25)
Articles
Ritchie, Caroline Anjali. “‘Symbols of embodied agency’: The Reception of William Blake’s Engravings for John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative (1796) in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture.” 30 pars. Considers the reception of the designs “in the works of the British and American contemporary artists Sokari Douglas Camp, Jazzmen Lee-Johnson, and Hew Locke” (par. 6). There is also a thoughtful coda, “On Reproduction,” addressing issues associated with reproducing the engravings (pars. 26-30).
Crosby, Mark. “‘Unentangled in the intricate windings of modern practice’: William Blake’s Apprentice Copperplates and Engravings.” 20 pars. On the discovery of incised marks and designs on the versos of copperplates for Richard Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments. “The evidence presented above encourages the tentative attribution of the markings on the versos to Blake” (par. 19). There is much on James Basire’s engraving studio and Blake’s time there as an apprentice. See also Crosby in Part V for news articles on the find.
Reviews
Rogers, Annise. Brian Russell Graham, Speech Acts in Blake’s “Milton.” 6 pars. “Readers who are interested in either Milton or performative speech acts will find it a perfect example of how to do a very thorough analysis of Blake’s poem, whether or not they fully agree with everything that Graham argues” (par. 6).
Calè, Luisa. William Blake’s Universe, Fitzwilliam Museum, 23 Feb.–19 May 2024; William Blake’s Universe, ed. David Bindman and Esther Chadwick. 23 pars.
Blessin, Joseph. “Vegetable Pornography: The ‘Moral’ (Scientific) Debate Surrounding Francesco Bartolozzi’s ‘Stipple Gardens’ and William Blake’s ‘Vegetable Earth’ in John Gabriel Stedman’s Surinam Travelogue.” Rethinking the Erotic: Eroticism in Literature, Film, Art and Society. Ed. Katarzyna Popak-Bernat and Sara D’Arcy. Freeland, Oxfordshire: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2014. 87-99. Criticizes Marcus Wood’s reading of the Stedman illustrations: “Conflating Blake and Bartolozzi, as Wood does, [is] highly problematic” (96).See Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Bortnikov, Vladislav. “K osobennostyam peredachi glagolov kak nositeley energetiki teksta v perevode poemy U. Bleyka ‘Ierusalim’ D. Smirnovym-Sadovskim (list 5) [On the Peculiar Features of Rendering Verbs as Text Energy Bearers in the Russian Translation of W. Blake’s Poem Jerusalem by D. Smirnov-Sadovsky (Plate 5)].” Slovo v zerkale istorii yazyka. Sbornik statey VIII Vserossiyskikh nauchnykh chteniy [Word in the Mirror of Language History. Collection of Articles of the VIII All-Russian Scientific Readings]. Naberezhnye Chelny: Naberezhnye Chelny State Pedagogical University, 2024. 42-52. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). The author “writes out a chain of verbs from the English source text and the Russian translation of the poem by D. Smirnov-Sadovsky, and makes a quantitative and qualitative comparison of these variants. As a result of the research, there are obtained raw data on equivalence and on the ‘energy intensity index’” (abstract).
Boydaş, Okan. “William Blake, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Arnold Böcklin, Ernst Fuchs ve H. R. Giger’in Çalışmalarının Ezoterik Semboller Açısından İncelemesi [Examination of William Blake, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Arnold Böcklin, Ernst Fuchs and H. R. Giger’s Works in Terms of Esoteric Symbols].” Cumhuriyet Üniversitesi Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi 48.1 (2024): 27-34. In Turkish (abstract in Turkish and English). This study explores how the concept of esotericism and its symbolic language is reflected in the works of artists such as William Blake, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Arnold Böcklin, Ernst Fuchs, and H. R. Giger. Using a qualitative case study approach, it examines how individual artistic expression and cultural influences intersect in their esoteric artworks.
Bucklow, Christopher. “Imaging Inner Gods.” See VALA.
C
Cai, Yunyi. “Bukimina mono kara no izanai, Mienai mono wo kaima miru: William Blake no sakuhin ni okeru ‘Yami no kotei’ kara jisaku no seisatsu e [The Obsession with the Uncanny: A Glimpse of the Invisible: From ‘Affirming the Darkness’ in William Blake’s Work to Reflecting on the Author’s Own Work].” PhD diss., Musashino Bijutsu Daigaku [Musashino Art University], 2023. 103 pp. In Japanese. The representation of darkness in fine arts is discussed on the basis of Sigmund Freud, Blake, Dante, and the author’s own experiences as an artist.
Calè, Luisa. “Blake and Exhibitions, 2023.” See Blake 58.1.
Calè, Luisa. Rev. of David Bindman and Esther Chadwick, eds., William Blake’s Universe. See Blake 58.3.
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. <Blake (2024)>
Review
Choe, Sharon. See
Global Blake in Part V.
Callaghan, Madeleine. “‘All is done as I have told’: Blake’s Eternal Prophecy.” Eternity in British Romantic Poetry. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022. <Blake (2023)>
Reviews
Bailey, Quentin.
Wordsworth Circle 55.3 (2024): 291-95.
Jesse, Jennifer G.
Romanticism 30.1 (2024): 95-97.
Canuel, Mark. “Introduction: Rouzing the Faculties.” The Fate of Progress in British Romanticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9780192895301. 1-17. Blake is discussed on 1-6, where Canuel takes Blake as his point of departure for his claim that the “revision of progressive impulses [is] distinctively Romantic” (6). He reads “The Little Girl Lost,” “The Little Girl Found,” and America.
Carter, Sarah. “The Ambiguities of Translation: Fuseli, Blake, and the Making of Aphorisms on Man.” See Blake 58.2.
Castanedo, Fernando. “‘O what a scene is here’: Visual References in Blake’s An Island in the Moon.” See Crosby and McQuail.
Chadwick, Esther. “Blake’s Millennium.” The Radical Print. London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2024. ISBN: 9781913107437. 161-92. A book on prints and radical politics. “This chapter will focus on the way in which Blake brought an explicit indictment of money as a form of mediation into the open.” “Blake’s critique [of commercialism] emerged from a distinctly millenarian culture of prints and printmaking” (164). Considers Laocoön and the two versions of “Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion.” The chapters on Barry and Mortimer are listed in Division II, below, and there are also chapters on James Gillray and Thomas Bewick.
Chen, Kang-Po. “‘The Knife of flint passes over the howling Victim’: Rethinking Sacrificial Violence in William Blake’s Jerusalem.” Tamkang Review 54.2 (2024): 47-75. “Engaging with Georges Bataille’s conception of the sacred, I would propose that ritualistic violence and bodily consumption proffer an alternative route to Romantic artistic imagination, challenging the critical consensus that Blake leans towards the spiritual and renounces the corporeal in his late works” (abstract).
Choe, Sharon. Rev. of Andrew M. Cooper, A Bastard Kind of Reasoning: William Blake and Geometry. See Blake 58.2.
Cogan, Lucy. Blake and the Failure of Prophecy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan-Springer Nature, 2021. <Blake (2022, 2023)>
Review
Mahmoud, Jude.
Romanticism 30.1 (2024): 97-99.
Collier, Brian. “‘The Lamb,’ Revolution and the Divine.” See VALA.
Collyer, Edward, et al. “Responding to Pupil Led Tangential Thinking: A Case Study of Teaching Romantic Poetry in a Post-16 Setting.” English in Education 56.1 (2022): 47-58. “This paper considers alternative ways of teaching Romantic poetry to post-sixteen English Literature pupils in England. It explores how practitioners can value tangents developed by pupils’ independent thinking when pupils are given the freedom to develop their own ideas. It reflects on a lesson planned to respond to a tangent developed by the class in a previous session; that William Blake’s ‘The Tyger,’ to a contemporary reader, explores the 21st century preoccupation of climate change” (abstract).
Cooper, Andrew M. A Bastard Kind of Reasoning: William Blake and Geometry. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2023. <Blake (2024)>
Reviews
Choe, Sharon. See
Blake 58.2.
Whittaker, Jason. See
Global Blake in Part V.
Cranfield, Nicholas. Rev. of David Bindman and Esther Chadwick, eds., William Blake’s Universe. See Bindman and Chadwick.
Crosby, Mark. “‘Absorbed by the Poets’: The Sources and Hanging Arrangement for Blake’s Eighteen Heads of Poets.” See William Blake Archive in Part V.
Crosby, Mark. “‘minutely Appropriate Execution’: Variation and Pentimento in Blake’s Title Pages.” See Crosby and McQuail.
Crosby, Mark. “‘Unentangled in the intricate windings of modern practice’: William Blake’s Apprentice Copperplates and Engravings.” See Blake 58.3.
Crosby, Mark, and Josephine A. McQuail. “Introduction: ‘Writing Is the Divine Revelation.’” See Crosby and McQuail.
Crosby, Mark, and Josephine A. McQuail, eds. William Blake’s Manuscripts: Praxis, Puzzles, and Palimpsests. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan-Springer Nature, 2024. A collection of essays on Blake’s handwriting, his letter writing, his annotations, An Island in the Moon, and The Four Zoas. It is dedicated to G. E. Bentley, Jr., and Morris Eaves.
Crosby, Mark, and Josephine A. McQuail. “Introduction: ‘Writing Is the Divine Revelation.’” 1-17. “This chapter reviews early studies of Blake’s manuscripts before previewing the chapters in this volume which offer new research made possible by greater access to Blake’s manuscripts, particularly digitized versions” (abstract).
Scribal Praxis
Bentley, G. E., Jr. “Blake and ‘the Wondrous Art of Writing’: Letter Faces, Letter Formation, Capitalization.” 21-46. “This chapter documents and examines Blake’s myriad ‘hands’ evident across his works, from manuscripts to illuminated printing, showing there to be considerable variety in letter formations, capitalizations, and extra-textual features such as catchwords, colophons, and letter sizes. Such differences in writing are difficult to represent typographically, even if facsimiles were included in letterpress editions of Blake’s works” (abstract).
Whitehead, Angus. “‘My Fingers Emit Sparks of Fire’: William Blake, Letter Writer.” 47-69. “This chapter reviews the business, as well as the homosocial sympathy, affection, and enthusiasms spiritual and otherwise of these seemingly rapidly composed letters stretching from the final days at Hercules Buildings to the equally busy last days at Fountain Court. Consulting manuscripts, considering the considerably wider body of letters (punctuated by considerable silences) with a nuanced biographical, historicist lens, Blake as letter-writer emerges in unprecedentedly sharper focus” (abstract).
Potter, Elizabeth. “‘on Every one of these Books I wrote my Opinions’: Re-assessing Blake’s Marginalia.” 71-88. Focuses on the context of the annotations to Reynolds.
Michael, Jennifer Davis. “Behn, Bysshe, and the Blakes: Bibliomancy and the Joys of Unbinding.” 89-109. Considers Catherine Blake’s practice of bibliomancy recorded in the Notebook in order to examine it as a “space containing several genres” and as “thus record[ing] a palimpsest of acts of excision which are also acts of pleasure” (abstract).
Crosby, Mark. “‘minutely Appropriate Execution’: Variation and Pentimento in Blake’s Title Pages.” 111-32. “This chapter argues that despite Blake’s strictures on the significant differences in theory and practice between what he considered true ‘inspiration and imagination’ pictorially rendered via the ‘bounding outline’ and an inferior aesthetic predicated on memory executed via ‘blotting and blurring,’ there was some leeway in his creative process for variation and artistic second thoughts” (abstract).
Palimpsest
Riccardi, Silvia. “The Page Embodied in The Four Zoas.” 135-47. The chapter “examine[s] Blake’s practice in selected pages of the manuscript, focusing on the way layout, calligraphy, and symbols are embedded in his style as well as the extent to which the boundaries between paper and copperplate become permeable” (abstract).
McQuail, Josephine A. “Blake and the Antiquarians: The Manuscript of The Four Zoas and the ‘Monumental Folios’ of the Dilettanti and the Antiquarians.” 149-77. “Antiquarian influences on Blake from the neoclassical underpinnings of the classical revival of the eighteenth century to more esoteric and suppressed aspects of the rites of pagan worship documented by the Society of Antiquaries and the Society of Dilettanti illuminate aspects of Blake’s most voluminous, but unpublished poem in manuscript, Vala, or The Four Zoas” (abstract).
Otto, Peter. “Catastrophe, Sublimity, and Digital Thinking in Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas.” 179-204. Rather than engage the question of what Blake intended to do with the two seventh Nights in The Four Zoas, “this chapter recounts the history of transcendence narrated by the poem, in order to ask what work interruption (of numerical sequence and narrative continuity) is doing at this point in the manuscript” (abstract).
Fox, Michael. “Graphing VALA, or The Four Zoas: Toward a Dynamic Edition.” 205-30. Offers a model of editing The Four Zoas and other literary texts using graph technology.
Sengupta, Oishani, Helen Davies, Alexander J. Zawacki, Christina Duffy, Eric Loy, and Samuel Allen. “‘All that we See is Vision’: William Blake’s Four Zoas Manuscript and Multispectral Imaging (MSI).” 231-54. “This chapter offers a case study of the Blake Archive’s recent collaborative enterprise in multispectral imaging with the British Library and the Lazarus Project. … Our discussion ultimately focuses on the methods of our project and the potential of spectral imaging for the editorial field as a whole” (abstract).
Puzzles
Castanedo, Fernando. “‘O what a scene is here’: Visual References in Blake’s An Island in the Moon.” 257-78. Suggests that in Island Blake alludes “to several works of art, mostly by using very short, at times almost epigrammatic, parodical ekphrases” (abstract).
Fletcher, Joseph. “‘Hang Philosophy’: Blake’s Metaphysical Forays in An Island in the Moon.” 279-300. “This chapter elaborates on the philosophical topics in Island that will pervade Blake’s early illuminated work. Several of the targets of his satirical barbs are natural-philosophic attitudes regarding the nature of matter, the soul’s relationship to the body, and the first principles that enable understanding of the universe” (abstract).
Mayberry, Tommy. “‘Composite Gender’ as the Book of Oothoon: Dress, Drag, and the Transgender Marygold Flower-Nymph.” 301-28. “Examining the historically documented transgender phenomenon of ‘Molly Houses’ and the cross-dressing Chevalier D’Éon as well as fashion styles post-French Revolution, I establish a background that supports a drag/trans- reading of Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion” (abstract).
Whittaker, Jason. “‘By the Voice of the Servant of the Lord’: Blake’s New Jerusalem and Swedenborgianism in the Work of Sheila Kaye-Smith.” 329-46. Examines the engagement with Blake by the twentieth-century novelist Sheila Kaye-Smith (1887–1956), with references to the influence of Yeats.
D
Davies, Keith G. “William Blake vs. Richard Dawkins and The God Delusion.” See VALA.
Davies, Keri. “George Whitefield, the Moravians, and ‘Andrew the Negro boy.’” See Davies in Part V.
Davies, Keri. “Good Morning, Doctor Haydn.” See Davies in Part V.
Davies, Keri. “‘O Nancy’s hair is yellow as gowd’: Blake, Border Ballads, and the Reinvention of Relief Etching.” See Davies in Part V.
Demin, Mihail. “Leksiko-kompozitsionnye osobennosti verbalizatsii orficheskoy kartiny mira (na materiale sopostavleniya teksta stikhotvoreniy V. A. Zhukovskogo, U. Bleyka i L. Kh'yuza) [Lexical and Compositional Features of Verbalization of the Orphic Picture of the World (Based on the Comparison of the Texts of the Poems Written by V. A. Zhukovsky, W. Blake, and L[angston]. Hughes)].” Vestnik filologicheskikh nauk [Philological Sciences Bulletin] 4.7 (2024): 186-95. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). “The paper presents formalized data on the correlation of the plot-semantic fields of the Orphic theme of poetic texts
with quantitative indicators of lexical units and their nominations, which in a discursive context change their connotation and represent the semantic and compositional code of the linguistic orphic picture of the world” (abstract). The author considers “The Sick Rose,” comparing it with Hughes’s “Passing
Love” and Zhukovsky’s “Tsvetok [A Flower].”
Ding, Katherine. “A Blakean Guide to Embodied Knowledge.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2024. “My dissertation blends creative non-fiction with critical analysis to explore how Blake prophetically anticipates the discoveries of twenty-first century neuroscientists by insisting that the activities of thinking, feeling, and perception which assembles knowledge occur neither in some disembodied mental sphere, nor in the insular interiority of authentic selfhood. Rather, they are located in the body: in the nerves, the brain, the digestive system, in each ‘pulsation of the artery’” (abstract).
E
Eagles, Diane. “God Is Light.” See VALA.
Elliot, Jake. “Blake’s ‘Watchman’: Los and the London Police.” See Blake Society in Part V.
Erle, Sibylle. “Blake in Hamburg.” See VALA.
Erle, Sibylle. “Divine Humanity; or, God Appears When We Appear Godly.” See VALA.
Erle, Sibylle. Rev. of Jason Wright, Blake’s Job: Adventures in Becoming. See Global Blake in Part V.
Evseeva, Tat'yana. “‘Glaza moi byli zakryty …’: Eskhatologicheskie syuzhety v tvorchestve Filippa de Louterburga, Ioganna Genrikha Fyussli, Uil'yama Bleyka i Dzhona Martina. Put' k simvolizmu [‘My eyes were closed …’: The Eschatological Theme on the Creativity by Philip de Loutherbourg, Henry Fuseli, William Blake, and John Martin. The Way to Symbolism].” Angliyskiy simvolizm: svoeobrazie i evropeyskiy radius [English Symbolism: Peculiarity and European Radius]. Saint Petersburg: Aletheia, 2024. ISBN: 9785001657026. 90-113. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). The author considers religious subjects in the poetry of the painters named, positioning the impact hypothesis of the secret symbolism on the interpretation of the eschatological themes.
F
Fletcher, Joseph. “‘Hang Philosophy’: Blake’s Metaphysical Forays in An Island in the Moon.” See Crosby and McQuail.
Fletcher, Joseph. William Blake as Natural Philosopher, 1788–1795. London: Anthem Press, 2021. <Blake (2022, 2024)>
Review
Leporati, Matthew.
European Romantic Review 35.3 (2024): 571-76. With Jason Whittaker,
Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness. “I hesitate to see poetry, and especially Blake’s composite art, as merely encoding and/or promoting philosophical positions” (576).
Fox, Michael. “Graphing VALA, or The Four Zoas: Toward a Dynamic Edition.” See Crosby and McQuail.
Freedman, Linda. William Blake and the Myth of America: From the Abolitionists to the Counterculture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. <Blake (2019, 2020, 2023)>
Review
Townsend, Chris. See
William Blake: Selected Works in Part I, Section B.
G
Garvey, Anne. Rev. of David Bindman and Esther Chadwick, eds., William Blake’s Universe. See Bindman and Chadwick.
Gerasina, S. Yu. “Izuchenie obraza strannika v lirike N. Gumileva i U. Bleyka v 11 klasse [Studying the Image of the Wanderer in the Lyrics of N. Gumilyov and W. Blake in the Eleventh Grade].” Buslaevskie chteniya. Materialy XII Vserossiyskoy nauchno-prakticheskoy konferentsii [Buslaev Readings. Materials of the XII All-Russian Scientific and Practical Conference]. Penza: Penza State University, 2024. 67-69. In Russian. The author offers poems by Gumilyov, such as “Pamyat [Memory],” “Zabludivshiysya tramvay [The Lost Tram],” and others, for comparative analysis with Blake’s.
Glover, Michael. Rev. of David Bindman and Esther Chadwick, eds., William Blake’s Universe. See Bindman and Chadwick.
Gopalkrishnan, Carl. “‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time.’” See VALA.
Graham, Brian Russell. Speech Acts in Blake’s “Milton.” New York: Routledge, 2023. <Blake (2024)>
Review
Rogers, Annise. See
Blake 58.3.
H
Haggarty, Sarah, ed. William Blake in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. <Blake (2020, 2021, 2022)>
Review
Townsend, Chris. See
William Blake: Selected Works in Part I, Section B.
Haggarty, Sarah. Rev. of David Bindman and Esther Chadwick, eds., William Blake’s Universe. See Bindman and Chadwick.
Harding, George. “What Does God Look Like? ” See VALA.
Harris, Alexandra. “An Open Gate: William Blake at Felpham.” The Rising Down: Lives in a Sussex Landscape. London: Faber, 2024. ISBN: 9780571350520. 215-37. A chapter on Blake’s time in Felpham aimed at a popular audience, touching on his relationship with Hayley, his cottage, his trial, and Milton. See Harris under Hayley in Division II for the chapter on Hayley, William Cowper, and Charlotte Smith.
Review
Hughes, Kathryn. “
The Rising Down by Alexandra Harris Review—The Joy of Sussex.”
Guardian (22 Mar. 2024). “Throughout this wonderful book, Harris demonstrates that local does not mean minor, nor parochial.”
Heagy, Angela J. “Blake’s Green Symbols of Humanity, Society, and Spirituality.” Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism 17.1 (2024): 16 pp. “An eco-critical analysis of Songs of Innocence and of Experience reveals that Blake’s depictions of nature are no less notable than those of his peers. Blake’s use of green imagery symbolizes human development, gendered and social inequalities, and divinity throughout his masterwork, all of which illustrate his continual awe for the natural world and his relevance to the broader discussions on Green Romantic poets.”
Hemmings, Richard. “Likeness in Spirit: For William Blake.” See VALA.
Hergül, Çağlayan. “The Lucerne Lion Monument of Bertel Thorvaldsen and ‘A Song of Liberty’ Poem of William Blake.” ART/icle: Journal of Art and Design 4.3 (Dec. 2024): 350-75. Abstract in English and Turkish. “The main idea of this article is to expose the intuitive connection between the Lucerne Lion and the lion metaphor in William Blake’s verse” (abstract).
Heringman, Noah. “William Blake, the Ballad Revival, and the Deep Past of Poetry.” Deep Time: A Literary History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023. <Blake (2024)>
Review
Bailes, Melissa.
Wordsworth Circle 55.3 (2024): 288-91.
Hristova, Rumyana. “Characteristics of God the Creator in Blake’s Poetry and Art.” See VALA.
I
Insley, Alice, ed. Blake e la sua epoca. Viaggi nel tempo del sogno [In the Age of Blake: Visionary Journeys]. Turin: Hopefulmonster, 2024. ISBN: 9788877573247. In Italian except for the English foreword by Maria Balshaw, director of Tate. The catalogue for the exhibition at La Venaria Reale, Turin, in partnership with Tate, 31 Oct. 2024–2 Feb. 2025. The exhibition website includes photos of the installation.
Brown, David Blayney. “Romanticismo.” 9-19.
Insley, Alice. “William Blake e la sua epoca. Viaggi nel tempo del sogno.” 21-40.
“Selezione delle opere in mostra.” 42-89. Includes “Orrore e pericolo” (46-55); “Creature fantastiche” (56-61); “Incantesimi” (62-69); “Romanticizzare il passato” (70-75); “Il Gotico” (76-81); and “Satana e gli Inferi” (82-89).
“Biografia.” 90-91.
Promotional materials (arranged chronologically)
Blink/Blinkink. “
Immerse in William Blake’s Iconic Work with Tate Experience.”
Little Black Book |
LBB Online (12 Mar. 2024). On “William Blake: Reimagined Visions,” Sam Gainsborough and Blinkink’s “immersive digital film that brings twelve of Blake’s most iconic works from Tate’s collection to life”; it will run at the exhibition.
La Venaria Reale. “
Blake e la sua epoca.” YouTube. 8 Nov. 2024. An introduction to the exhibition, with speakers in Italian and English.
Hilgers, Jasper. “
William Blake Exhibition.”
jasperhilgers.com (n.d.). On Blinkink’s film, including a video preview.
Reviews
“
Blake e la sua epoca: alla Reggia di Venaria una mostra sui sogni visionari del maestro inglese.”
Finestre sull’Arte (31 Oct. 2024). In Italian. Many images of the works shown in the exhibition.
Marks, Rebecca. “
My William Blake Pilgrimage: On Cynicism, Academia, and Regaining Childlike Wonder at La Venaria Reale.”
The Culture Dump (10 Dec. 2024). Includes photos of the exhibition. “The final room is a triumph. I know this because I usually
hate it when exhibitions finish with cinematic features, and I was enraptured by this one. It consists of a series of twelve animations of characters from Blake’s works, accompanied by a deep, meditative soundscape.”
Martellotta, Mara. “
The Exhibition Hosted at the Reggia di Venaria Is Entitled ‘Blake and His Era, Journeys in the Time of Dreams.’”
MontenapoDaily (8 Nov. 2024).
“
Quando William Blake dipinse il fantasma di una pulce … dopo una visione.”
Finestre sull’Arte (25 Nov. 2024). In Italian. A short article on
The Ghost of a Flea, one of the works in the exhibition.
Shelidon. “
Blake and His Time: A Journey into Dreamland.”
Shelidon (19 Nov. 2024). Many photos of the exhibition.
J
§ Jacquemin, Thomas. William Blake, le peintre des ténèbres: Un romantique tourné vers l’invisible. 50minutes.fr, 2014. 36 pp. ISBN: 9782806258175. In French.
Jesse, Jennifer G. Rev. of Madeleine Callaghan, Eternity in British Romantic Poetry. See Callaghan.
Jesse, Jennifer, with artwork by Rob Davis. “My Night at the Museum: Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar Lives!” See VALA.
Jones, Jonathan. Rev. of David Bindman and Esther Chadwick, eds., William Blake’s Universe. See Bindman and Chadwick.
K
Keery, James, and Steve Clark. “‘And the Song they sung was this / Composed by an African Black’: Blakean Spirituals.” See Global Blake in Part V.
Kolotilina, Svetlana. “Beskonechnye miry Uil'yama Bleyka i Frensisa Bekona [Infinite Worlds of William Blake and Francis Bacon].” Angliyskiy simvolizm: svoeobrazie i evropeyskiy radius [English Symbolism: Peculiarity and European Radius]. Saint Petersburg: Aletheia, 2024. ISBN: 9785001657026. 114-27. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). The author considers the universe structure given in the works of Blake and the painter Francis Bacon (1909–92), comparing these two concepts to the philosophical and visual concepts of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (third season).
Kröger, Noëlle. William Blakes Universum. English version: William Blake’s Universe, trans. Barbara Lang. Hamburg: Hamburger Kunsthalle, 2024. A graphic novel on the life and times of Blake, given out for free at the exhibition held at the Hamburger Kunsthalle.
Kur'yanova, E. S. “Obraz Londona v poezii Uil'yama Bleyka [The Image of London in William Blake’s Poetry].” Filologiya. Sotsial'naya I natsional'naya variativnost' yazyka i literatury. Materialy IX Mezhdunarodnogo nauchnogo kongressa [Philology. Social and National Variability of Language and Literature. Proceedings of the IX International Scientific Congress]. Simferopol: Arial, 2024. 735-37. In Russian. The image of London is considered as material for Blake’s lyrics.
L
Leporati, Matthew. “Blake’s Vortices: ‘Hold.’” See VALA.
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. <Blake (2024)>
Review
Whittaker, Jason. See
Blake 58.2.
Leporati, Matthew. Rev. of Jason Whittaker, Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness, and Joseph Fletcher, William Blake as Natural Philosopher, 1788–1795. See Whittaker, Jerusalem, and Fletcher, William Blake.
Leveton, Jacob Henry. Rev. of Joseph Viscomi, William Blake’s Printed Paintings: Methods, Origins, Meanings. See Viscomi.
Lindstrom, Eric. Rev. of Tristram Wolff, Against the Uprooted Word: Giving Language Time in Transatlantic Romanticism. See Wolff.
Lloyd, Joe. Rev. of David Bindman and Esther Chadwick, eds., William Blake’s Universe. See Bindman and Chadwick.
M
Maberly, James. “Crossing the Rubicon.” See VALA.
Mabille, Pierre. “William Blake.” Cahiers d’art 20 (1947): 117-27. <BB #2167> B. Pierre Mabille et le surréalisme: une anthologie critique (1934–1952). Paris: Hermann, 2024. ISBN: 9791037039484. In French.
Mahmoud, Jude. Rev. of Lucy Cogan, Blake and the Failure of Prophecy. See Cogan.
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. <Blake (2024)>
Review
Rogers, Annise. See
Global Blake in Part V.
Marks, Rebecca. “‘Organs of Embodied Sentiment’: Contextualising William Blake’s Sistine Studies, c. 1770–1790.” Cambridge Quarterly 52.3 (2023): 270-89. On Blake’s series of drawings after Michelangelo, with references to Fuseli.See also Marks’s presentation of the same title in the “In Conversation” series at the Global Blake site. <Blake (2024)>
Marks, Rebecca. Rev. of Jason Whittaker, Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness. See Whittaker, Jerusalem.
Marsh, George. “Is Innocence Emptiness?” See VALA.
Mauger, Matthew. William Blake and the Visionary Law: Prophecy, Legislation and Constitution. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan-Springer Nature, 2023. <Blake (2024)>
Review
Worrall, David. See
Blake 58.2.
Mayberry, Tommy. “‘Composite Gender’ as the Book of Oothoon: Dress, Drag, and the Transgender Marygold Flower-Nymph.” See Crosby and McQuail.
McCord, Jim. “God Judging Adam.” See VALA.
McCormick, Neil. Rev. of David Bindman and Esther Chadwick, eds., William Blake’s Universe. See Bindman and Chadwick.
McQuail, Josephine A. “Blake and the Antiquarians: The Manuscript of The Four Zoas and the ‘Monumental Folios’ of the Dilettanti and the Antiquarians.” See Crosby and McQuail.
McQueen, Joseph. Rev. of Jeffrey W. Barbeau, ed., The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism and Religion. See Barbeau.
Meihuizen, Nicholas. Romantic Daemons in the Poetry of Blake, Shelley and Keats: Beyond the Human. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024. ISBN: 9781527577527. There are two chapters on Blake: “Blake: From Poetical Sketches to Songs of Innocence and Experience” (38-127) and “Blake’s Prophetic Books” (128-216).
Michael, Jennifer Davis. “Behn, Bysshe, and the Blakes: Bibliomancy and the Joys of Unbinding.” See Crosby and McQuail.
Miles, Barry. “Ginsberg’s Blake Recordings.” See Global Blake in Part V.
Millington, M. J., with artwork by Tamsin Rosewell. “What Dread Hand?” See VALA.
Montague, Jane. “Art Is the Tree of Life.” See VALA.
Morton, Timothy. Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9780231214711. Blake figures prominently in Morton’s reflections.
Author talks
Morton, Timothy. “Timothy Morton—The Marriage of Religion and the Biosphere.” See
Blake Society in Part V.
Riordan, John. “Morton in Hell.” See
VALA.
Review
Wilson, Andy. See
VALA.
Mugleston, Charles. “IMN Amun Amon Ra.” See VALA.
Myers, Ben. “Blakean Anti-Wisdom in Thomas Merton’s Proverbs.” Literature and Theology 38.1 (2024): 1-12. “The paper explores the way Blakean proverbs function in Merton’s work as a model of social critique” (abstract).
N
Nakajima, Toshiro, and Yuko Nagano. “Jugaku Bunsho to Blake seitan 200 nen kinen: Blake sashie wo shujiku toshite [Bunsho Jugaku and the 200th Birth Anniversary of Blake: With a Focus on the Illustrations by Blake].” Kojitsuan [Sunward Cottage] 7 (2024): 10-37. In Japanese. 12 plates by Blake. In 1957, Bunsho Jugaku, a Blake scholar, worked as chief editor of a special issue of Eigo Seinen, a monthly magazine on English language and literature, and organized a “Blake Gallery” in the magazine. This article places Jugaku in the history of Blake studies after World War II and explores his commentaries on Blake’s illustrations.
Nakajima, Yoshie. “Hearn to William Blake: Sono 1 [Hearn and William Blake: Part 1].” Yakugaku Toshokan [Pharmaceutical Library Bulletin] 69 (2024): 58-64. In Japanese. An introductory essay on Lafcadio Hearn and Blake; it includes a portrait of Blake and 7 plates by him.
O
Okada, Shunnosuke. Kami wo itadaku seiyo sekai, Kamigami no zasu Nihon: Bungaku bunka ronshu [The West Worshipping the God, Japan Having Gods among Itself: A Collection of Essays on Literature and Culture]. Tokyo: Sairyusha, 2023. 443 pp. ISBN: 9784779129377. In Japanese. It includes a desultory essay on “A Poison Tree” (372-76).
Oliveira, Camila. Rev. of Gordon Cameron Sly, Britten’s Donne, Hardy and Blake Songs. See Global Blake in Part V.
Oliveira, Camila. “William Blake and Visionary Cover Arts.” See Global Blake in Part V.
Oliveira, Camila, and Bruce Dickinson. “Blake’s Mandrake.” See VALA.
Oliveira, Camila, and Jason Whittaker. “Blake and Music, 2023.” See Blake 58.1.
Otto, Peter. “Catastrophe, Sublimity, and Digital Thinking in Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas.” See Crosby and McQuail.
Ozansoy, Esin (trans. from the Greek by Francisco Javier Ortolá Salas). “Proverbios. Aforismos de Lugares Comunes Literarios en Elytis y William Blake.” Litera 28.1 (2018): 101-15. In Spanish (abstract in Spanish and English). “This article examines the influence of William Blake on Odysseas Elytis and their similarities through an analysis of Proverbs and Aphorisms. … Elytis and Blake seem to have many points in common, though independent from each other. In the texts of Blake, Elytis recognized ideas and perspectives that he had himself ” (abstract). The original article was published in 2015 in the journal ENEKEN.
P
Pacitti, Diane, with artwork by Antonio Pacitti. “Uncaging God.” See VALA.
Palieraqui, Mariana dos Reis. “O paralelo entre John Milton e William Blake: aspectos estéticos em Milton a partir de Paradise Lost [Parallels between John Milton and William Blake: Milton’s Aesthetic Traits from Paradise Lost].” Caderno de Anais da XV Semana de Letras do CPAN. Campo Grande: Editora Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul, 2024. ISBN: 9786586943542. 32-40. In Portuguese. “Ultimately, the challenge for the reader of Blake stems from the difficulties associated with interpreting his narration’s mythological pantheon of figures—and their symbolic meanings—alongside his own textual dialogue with Paradise Lost” (trans. from the abstract).
Paolini, Daniela, and Mario Rucavado Rojas. “Del Redentor al Demiurgo: Las ilustraciones de William Blake vistas a través de las Meditaciones poéticas de José Joaquín de Mora [From Redeemer to Demiurge: William Blake’s Illustrations as Seen through José Joaquín de Mora’s Meditaciones poéticas].” Hyperbórea. Revista de ensayo y creación 7 (2024): 40-57. In Spanish (abstract in Spanish and English). “José Joaquín de Mora’s Meditaciones poéticas consists of a series of eleven poems inspired by William Blake’s illustrations for Robert Cromek’s edition of Robert Blair’s poem The Grave (1808). … This article contextualises Mora’s poems and explores to what extent they can be considered an ekphrasis of Blake’s designs” (abstract).
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. <Blake (2024)>
Review
Rogers, Annise. See
Global Blake in Part V.
Polzunova, Marina, and V. V. Krasheninnikov. “Lingvisticheskiy analiz khudozhestvennogo proizvedeniya Uil'yama Bleyka ‘Kniga Urizena’ [Linguistic Analysis of William Blake’s The Book of Urizen].” Dni nauki—2024. Materialy XXIV vserossiyskoy nauchno-prakticheskoy konferentsii [Days of Science—2024. Proceedings of the XXIV All-Russian Scientific and Practical Conference]. Ozyorsk: National Research Nuclear University “MEPhI,” 2024. 269-73. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). “The article considers a comprehensive linguistic analysis of the prophetic book by the English romantic writer William Blake—The Book of Urizen: emotive, denotative and semantic space, logical and semantic connections” (abstract).
Potter, Elizabeth. “‘on Every one of these Books I wrote my Opinions’: Re-assessing Blake’s Marginalia.” See Crosby and McQuail.
Pritchard, Stephen. “Omegod” and “Pain Threshold.” See VALA.
Pritchard, Stephen. Rev. of Jason Wright, Blake’s Job: Adventures in Becoming. See VALA.
R
Raz, Yosefa. “Walking through Blake’s Irregular Bible.” The Poetics of Prophecy: Modern Afterlives of a Biblical Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9781009366274. 56-88. “Rather than functioning as an underlying code or ordering system, the biblical text often generates disorder and further instability. More broadly, the Bible cannot function as a codebook, containing a unified system of symbols or archetypes, which might serve to decipher Blake’s puzzling texts; it is itself a fundamentally unstable document” (59). Blake is also considered in the chapter on Robert Lowth (see Raz under Lowth in Division II).
Regier, Alexander. “Printing Blake in Texas.” See Global Blake in Part V.
Riccardi, Silvia. “Dal colosso al frammento: Fuseli, Flaxman, Blake e i giganti di Botticelli (If. XXXI-XXXII).” Dante e Botticelli II. Ed. Cornelia Klettke and Dagmar Korbacher. Firenze: Franco Cesati Editore, 2025. In Italian.
Riccardi, Silvia. “The Page Embodied in The Four Zoas.” See Crosby and McQuail.
Riordan, John. “God at the Window Panel.” See VALA.
Riordan, John. LOS: A Vision of William Blake. Book 1: Innocence. John Riordan Images & Comics (n.d.). An excerpt (up through Blake’s baptism) from his forthcoming graphic-novel biography of Blake.
Riordan, John. “Morton in Hell.” See VALA.
Ripley, Wayne C. “A List of Morris Eaves’s Publications.” See Blake 57.4.
Ripley, Wayne C., with Fernando Castanedo, Hikari Sato, Hüseyin Alhas, and Vera Serdechnaia. “William Blake and His Circle: A Checklist of Scholarship in 2023.” See Blake 58.1.
Robertson, Lisa Ann. Rev. of Richard C. Sha, Romanticism and Consciousness, Revisited. See Sha.
Rogers, Annise. “‘I am God from Eternity to Eternity’: Urizen’s Self-Delusional Godhood?” See VALA.
Rogers, Annise. “Indirect Artistic Influences: The Visual Art of J. R. R. Tolkien and William Blake.” The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Ed. Will Sherwood and Julian Eilmann. Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers, 2024. ISBN: 9783905703511. 175-205. Considers parallels in their art, though concedes that “any direct link between their artwork was most probably done so unconsciously by Tolkien” (176).
Rogers, Annise. Rev. of Brian Russell Graham, Speech Acts in Blake’s “Milton.” See Blake 58.3.
Rogers, Annise. Rev. of Paula García-Ramírez et al., eds., Weaving Tales: Anglo-Iberian Encounters on Literatures in English. See Global Blake in Part V.
Rogers, Annise. “‘thy young hands tore human limbs, and gorged human flesh!’: Poetical Sketches and Blake’s Development of Samson.” See Global Blake in Part V.
Roob, Alexander. William Blake’s “The Ancient Britons”: Appearances of a Vanished Picture / William Blake’s “The Ancient Britons”: Erscheinungen eines verschollenen Bildes. Hamburg: Textem Verlag, 2022. <Blake (2023)>
Review
Erle, Sibylle. See
Blake 57.4.
Rowland, Christopher. “Friends of Albion?: The Dangers of Cathedrals.” Speaking of God in an Inhumane World: Essays on Liberation Theology and Radical Christianity. Vol. 1. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2024. ISBN: 9781666753868. 180-93. Uses Blake’s views of cathedrals (“Despite exceptional prophetic spirits who emerged from some of the cathedrals, he saw that the Christian religion was severely compromised by the cathedrals’ cultural ethos and opposed to the way of Jesus” [180-81]) as the starting point for his own reflection on cathedral culture.
Rowland, Christopher. “‘Why is the Bible more entertaining & instructive than any other book?’: William Blake and the Enhancement of the Literary.” Enlightenment to Romanticism. Ed. Stephen Prickett with Elisabeth Jay. The Bible and Western Christian Literature: Books and the Book, vol. 3. London: T&T Clark, 2024. ISBN: 9780567681973. 209-26. On how Blake used, illustrated, and critiqued the Bible. There are also two “Passage and Commentary” chapters with selections from works by Blake that engage with the Bible and commentary by Rowland (for Part I) and Susanne Sklar (for Part II, focused on Jerusalem). The wider book has chapters on the eighteenth century and the Bible (including Christopher Burdon’s “From Evidence to Praise: The Bible in the Age of Newton” [103-58] and Jan-Melissa Schramm’s “Rights, Romantic Radicalism and the Bible” [159-208]) and excerpts from a range of writers, including John Locke, Isaac Watts, and John Wesley. See also Stephen Prickett’s essay under Lowth in Division II.
Rubel, William. “Critical Mass.” See VALA.
Rubel, William. “‘A fly like thee.’” See Global Blake in Part V.
S
Sakikawa, Nobuo. “Hearn no Blake ron: Tokyo Teikoku Daigaku Eibungaku Kogi wo chushin ni [Hearn’s Argument on Blake: On His Lectures in Tokyo Imperial University].” Herun [Hearn] 61 (2024): 31-41. In Japanese. It discusses the lectures on Blake by Lafcadio Hearn at Tokyo Imperial University in the context of the religions in China, India, and Japan. Hearn was customarily called “Herun,” which is the title of the journal, by Japanese native speakers when he was living in Japan.
Santos, Fernando Glaybson do Nascimento. “Os traços do paraíso em William Blake: matrizes barrocas na linguagem emblemática de For Children: The Gates of Paradise de 1793 [The Traces of Paradise in William Blake: Baroque Matrices in the Emblematic Language of For Children: The Gates of Paradise from 1793].” Temporalidades—Revista de História 15.2 (2023–24): 717-40. In Portuguese (abstract in Portuguese and English). “This article aims to investigate the relationship between Blake’s pictorial universe and the cultural, visual, mythical and religious matrices of the Baroque through the emblematic language expressed in the engravings of For Children: The Gates of Paradise from 1793, analysing them in starting from the iconographic-iconological method of Erwin Panofsky and establishing a dialogue with authors who undertook similar research” (abstract).
Sato, Hikari. “Blake kenkyu ni okeru Ruskin densetsu [An Old Story Concerning Ruskin in Blake Studies].” Ruskin Bunko Tayori [Ruskin Library Bulletin] 88 (2024): 5-7. In Japanese. 2 plates by Blake. The relationship between Ruskin and Blake is discussed with a reference to the old story that Ruskin “cut up” one of the copies of Jerusalem.
Sato, Hikari. “Jugaku Bunsho Blake ronshu towa nanika: Chosha to henja no hihyogan [What Is A Collection of Blake Essays by Bunsho Jugaku?: Critical Eyes of the Author and the Editor].” Kojitsuan [Sunward Cottage] 7 (2024): 1-9. In Japanese. Muneyoshi Yanagi edited A Collection of Blake Essays <BSJ p. 52> by Bunsho Jugaku while Jugaku was in hospital because of typhus in 1931. This essay discusses the active role that Yanagi played to help his friend.
Savage, April Grace Ingraham. “Pentecostal Theology in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” PhD diss., Columbia International University, 2024. “This study offers a multifaceted perception of Blake by integrating proto-Pentecostal theology, contributing to a doctrinal literary criticism that enriches Blake studies and prompts self-reflection in readers’ religious beliefs” (abstract).
Schouten de Jel, Joshua. “Ageing as Fading and the Importance of Monument-Making in William Blake’s The Book of Thel.” Gothic Studies 26.3 (2024): 266-80. Stressing the importance of Blake’s apprentice work engraving funeral monuments, Schouten de Jel reads memorialization in “Fair Elenor” from Poetical Sketches, Thel, and Urizen both in terms of the work and in how Blake’s illuminated books embody his own efforts at memorialization.
Schouten de Jel, Joshua. William Blake’s Divine Love: Visions of Oothoon. New York: Routledge, 2024. ISBN: 9781032706191. A book on Visions that “explores the hermeneutical possibilities of Oothoon’s self-annihilation and the epistemological potential of her visual copulation by establishing an artistic and hagiographical heritage which informs the pictorial representation and poetic pronunciation of Oothoon’s enlightened entelechy” (publisher description).
Sengupta, Oishani, Helen Davies, Alexander J. Zawacki, Christina Duffy, Eric Loy, and Samuel Allen. “‘All that we See is Vision’: William Blake’s Four Zoas Manuscript and Multispectral Imaging (MSI).” See Crosby and McQuail.
Serdechnaia, Vera. “Uil'yam Bleyk i angliyskiy simvolizm: poeziya, proza i kritika [William Blake and English Symbolism: Poetry, Prose, and Criticism].” Angliyskiy simvolizm: svoeobrazie i evropeyskiy radius [English Symbolism: Peculiarity and European Radius]. Saint Petersburg: Aletheia, 2024. ISBN: 9785001657026. 80-89. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). The article traces the influence of Blake’s imagery and poetic manner on the writers of the symbolist era, as well as the role of symbolist poets in establishing Blake’s reputation; the author considers the works of George MacDonald, Edith Sitwell, and Francis Thompson.
Serdechnaia, Vera. “William Blake in Russian Music in 2010s–2020s.” See Global Blake in Part V.
Severina, Nadezhda. “Stikhotvorenie U. Bleyka ‘The Clod and the Pebble’ v interpretatsiyakh V. Toporova [Blake’s Poem ‘The Clod and the Pebble’ in V. Toporov’s Interpretations].” Sopostavitel'noe izuchenie germanskikh i romanskikh yazykov i literatur. Materialy XXII Mezhdunarodnoy studencheskoy nauchnoy konferentsii [Comparative Study of Germanic and Romance Languages and Literatures. Proceedings of the XXII International Student Scientific Conference]. Donetsk: Donetsk National University, 2024. 330-33. In Russian. The author considers two versions of Toporov’s translations, in 1975 and 1982.
Sha, Richard C. “Blakean Experience and the Hard Problem of Consciousness Revisited.” Romanticism and Consciousness, Revisited. Ed. Richard C. Sha and Joel Faflak. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9781474485104. “Blake reminds us of costs and rewards of consciousness, and also the potentially high costs for an enactive consciousness: cognitive efficiency, a relationality blind to structured hierarchy, and a consciousness that cannot separate itself from ideology. In short, a consciousness whose embeddedness is not only shorn of prepositions, but also deaf to the nuances of repetition” (111).
Review
Robertson, Lisa Ann.
Wordsworth Circle 54.4 (2023): 516-23.
Sklar, Susanne. “The Peace of Jerusalem.” See VALA.
Skoruk, Yuliya. “Lingvostilisticheskie osobennosti stikhotvoreniya U. Bleyka ‘The Fly’ i ikh peredacha v russkikh i ukrainskikh perevodakh [Linguostylistic Features of W. Blake’s ‘The Fly’ and Their Transmission in Russian and Ukrainian Translations].” Sopostavitel'noe izuchenie germanskikh i romanskikh yazykov i literatur. Materialy XXII Mezhdunarodnoy studencheskoy nauchnoy konferentsii [Comparative Study of Germanic and Romance Languages and Literatures. Proceedings of the XXII International Student Scientific Conference]. Donetsk: Donetsk National University, 2024. 346-49. In Russian. The author considers, however, only Russian translations by Marshak, Toporov, and Stamova.
§ Sly, Gordon Cameron. “Songs and Proverbs of William Blake.” Britten’s Donne, Hardy and Blake Songs: Cyclic Design and Meaning. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2023. <Blake (2024)>
Review
Oliveira, Camila. See
Global Blake in Part V.
Sooke, Alastair. Rev. of David Bindman and Esther Chadwick, eds., William Blake’s Universe. See Bindman and Chadwick.
Stepanova, Angelina. “Khudozhestvennye obrazy Uil'yama Bleyka v instrumental'nom tvorchestve D. N. Smirnova [Artistic Images of William Blake in the Instrumental Work of Dmitrii Nikolaevich Smirnov].” Angliyskiy simvolizm: svoeobrazie i evropeyskiy radius [English Symbolism: Peculiarity and European Radius]. Saint Petersburg: Aletheia, 2024. ISBN: 9785001657026. 716-28. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). “This article examines methods of personification and generalized treatment of the subject of pictorial sources on the example of such works as ‘The Moonlight Story’ (Op. 51, 1998) for six instruments, ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ (Op. 58, 1990) for six instruments, ‘Abel’ (Op. 65, 1991) for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, ‘The River of Life’ (Op. 66, 1992) for sixteen instrumentalists” (abstract).
Stepanyan, Milena. “Perevodcheskie strategii G. Dashevskogo v perevodakh poezii U. Bleyka [Translation Strategies of G. Dashevsky in Translation of the Poetry by W. Blake].” Russkaya klassicheskaya i neklassicheskaya literatura: tekst, kontekst, retseptsiya. Sbornik statey mezhdunarodnoy nauchno-prakticheskoy konferentsii [Russian Classical and Non-Classical Literature: Text, Context, Reception. Collection of Articles from the International Scientific and Practical Conference]. Yaroslavl: Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University named after K. D. Ushinsky, 2024. 74-80. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). “The article examines the functional features of G. Dashevsky’s translation solutions in relation to five poems by W. Blake included in the lyrical cycle ‘From William Blake’ … as well as the connection of translations from Blake with the poems of the collection ‘The Duma of Ivan Chai’” (abstract). In 1995, the poet Grigory Dashevsky translated into Russian and later published his own versions of “Infant Sorrow,” “The Little Boy Lost,” “The Little Boy Found,” “Never Seek to Tell Thy Love,” and one more verse that can be seen as a free version of “The Garden of Love.”
Suzuki, Hideko. “Jinsei wo terasu kotoba (178): Hitotsubu no suna no nakani sekai wo mi, Ichirin no nono hana ni tengoku wo mi, Tenohira de mugen wo tsukami, Hitotoki no naka ni eien wo tsukamu [Words to Illuminate Our Life (178): To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour].” Chichi [To Reach Wisdom] 593 (2024): 116-18. In Japanese. A moralistic essay based on “Auguries of Innocence” and “On Anothers Sorrow.”
T
§ Tavares, Enéias Farias. “A unidade corpo/mente nos livros iluminados de William Blake [The Body/Mind Unity in William Blake’s Illuminated Books].” Discursos do corpo na arte. Vol. 1. Ed. Enéias Farias Tavares, Gisela Reis Biancalana, and Mariane Magno. Santa Maria, Brazil: Editora da Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, 2014. ISBN: 9788573912098. 67-110. In Portuguese.
§ Tavares, Enéias, and Fred Rubim. O Matrimônio de Céu e Inferno. Porto Alegre, Brazil: Avec Editora, 2019. 128 pp. ISBN: 9788554470425. In Portuguese. Inspired by Blake’s Marriage, a comic-book thriller set in current day São Paulo.
Tchaykov, Alexandre. “‘Invisible, as Music—But positive, as Sound—’: The Intertextual Continuum of Poetry, Music, and Song in Aaron Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, Benjamin Britten’s Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, and Benjamin T. Martin/Alexandre Tchaykov’s I See and Unsee: Five Memory Songs.” DMA diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2024. “Examining how the composers have read the poets and placed their words within the musical syntax of counterpoint, harmony, rhythm, and texture introduces the idea of a song as a realization and extension of a poem’s musicality” (abstract).
Tebourski, Inés. “Los’s Healthy Narcissism.” See Global Blake in Part V.
Tebourski, Inés. “The Signs of Islam in William Blake’s Illuminated Works.” See VALA.
Thompson, Paul. “A Streak of Tygers.” See VALA.
Townsend, Chris. Rev. of William Blake: Selected Works, ed. Peter Otto; Sarah Haggarty, William Blake in Context; and Linda Freedman, William Blake and the Myth of America: From the Abolitionists to the Counterculture. See William Blake: Selected Works in Part I, Section B.
Tsai, Li Hui. Rev. of David Bindman and Esther Chadwick, eds., William Blake’s Universe. See VALA.
V
VALA: The Journal of the Blake Society
Issue 5 (Nov. 2024)
Articles
Erle, Sibylle. “Divine Humanity; or, God Appears When We Appear Godly.” 4-7. On Blake’s concepts of God.
Leporati, Matthew. “Blake’s Vortices: ‘Hold.’” 8-13. A reading of Blake’s uses of “hold.”
Bucklow, Christopher. “Imaging Inner Gods.” 14-21. The artist on Blake’s influence, with examples of his work plus commentaries.
Pacitti, Diane, with artwork by Antonio Pacitti. “Uncaging God.” 22-23. A poem.
Oliveira, Camila, and Bruce Dickinson. “Blake’s Mandrake.” 24-27. An interview with Dickinson on Blake and Blake’s concept of God.
Westbrook, Kate, and Mike Westbrook. “Poem and ‘Hang Fire.’” 28-31. Paintings by Kate Westbrook and words by both.
Jesse, Jennifer, with artwork by Rob Davis. “My Night at the Museum: Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar Lives!” 32-35. On Blake’s use of icons, with Jesse’s personal experience of Nebuchadnezzar as the primary example. “Blake’s icons activate symbols lodged deep within us, challenging us to perceive those symbols in new ways, and empowering us to continually recreate our psychic, mental, physical and historical realities according to those visionary insights. I did survive my ‘night at the museum,’ but not as the same person” (35).
Battersby, David. “The Comic Book of Urizen.” 36-41. A brief reflection on and an excerpt from Battersby’s comic-book adaptation of The Book of Urizen.
Riordan, John. “God at the Window Panel.” 42-45. An excerpt, focused on young Blake’s experience of God at the window, from Riordan’s graphic novel LOS, a life of Blake.
Pritchard, Stephen. “Omegod” and “Pain Threshold.” 46. Poems.
Hemmings, Richard. “Likeness in Spirit: For William Blake.” 46-47. A poem and artwork.
Gopalkrishnan, Carl, Juliette Scott, and Marica Furlan. “‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time.’” 48-53. “A performance art photography project which re-imagines Blake’s God of Creativity as a Female God in love with all diverse sexualities and genders” (48).
Riordan, John. “Morton in Hell.” 54-59. An interview with Timothy Morton.
Whittaker, Jason. “Adam Was a Druid: William Blake and False Visions of God.” 60-65. On Blake’s association of druids with biblical patriarchs (and especially Abraham) and Whittaker’s own experiences with Nobodaddy, Satan, and Urizen in his own religious journey.
Rogers, Annise. “‘I am God from Eternity to Eternity’: Urizen’s Self-Delusional Godhood?” 66-67. In Urizen, “Blake is trying, and mostly failing, to show his audience that they have been worshipping the God of the fallen world, that is Urizen who is Satan, and more than that, as a people they have been doing this for centuries” (66).
Collier, Brian. “‘The Lamb,’ Revolution and the Divine.” 68-70. “Here, in this apparently inoffensive little poem, the world is not only ‘turned upside down’ but, more importantly, all degree is abolished. If all share the divine nature within them then none may hold a higher place in the world than any other” (70).
Millington, M. J., with artwork by Tamsin Rosewell. “What Dread Hand?” 71. A poem.
Vernon, Mark. “‘Enemies of the Human Race’: Blake against the Deists, Then and Now.” 72-77. “Our flaws are gifts in disguise because they are the means of connection with the true source of what is perfect: God” (77).
Tebourski, Inés. “The Signs of Islam in William Blake’s Illuminated Works.” 78-79. “Blake was influenced by the Qur’an’s narratives and prophet Muhammad’s sayings which manifest in one way or another in his illuminated poetry” (78).
Marsh, George. “Is Innocence Emptiness?” 80-82. “As a Zen Buddhist I recognise in [There Is No Natural Religion] the fundamental visionary insight of Buddhism” (80).
McCord, Jim. “God Judging Adam.” 83. A poem.
Wright, Jason. “Blake and Prophecy: A Participatory God.” 84-89. An overview of his book Blake’s Job: Adventures in Becoming.
Valentine, Lucy. “Vessel of God.” 90-93. On The Vessel of God, which is “the final piece in a multimedia project I released in December 2023, called Vault of Heaven. The project started as a series of collages contemplating the Swedenborgian idea of angels having ancillary roles in the heavenly spheres; making them a practical presence within an abstract and infinite landscape” (91).
Volpone, Annalisa. “The Pregnant Mind and Divine Inspiration.” 94-96. On the traditions shaping Blake’s concept of the birth of the mind.
Mugleston, Charles. “IMN Amun Amon Ra.” 97. A poem or mantra.
Davies, Keith G. “William Blake vs. Richard Dawkins and The God Delusion.” 98-101.
Eagles, Diane. “God Is Light.” 102-05. “God is Light is a decorated ceramic chamberstick informed by the etchings and poems of William Blake, bringing into being a visual correspondence, with candlelight representing the light of God.”
Maberly, James. “Crossing the Rubicon.” 106-07. “Thus the seeds of Beulah for some are here and growing, whilst the Urizenic leadership across the world is trying its best to reassert itself with shows of power and destabilisation, once more seeking to instill fear into a world it wishes to control” (106).
Sklar, Susanne. “The Peace of Jerusalem.” 108-13. “Blake would weep at the destruction now eviscerating the Holy Land, the slaughter of thousands of innocents” (108).
Hristova, Rumyana. “Characteristics of God the Creator in Blake’s Poetry and Art.” 114-17. “Because for Blake Jesus is ‘the greatest man’ (E 43) we have the artist’s reassurance that if we follow his ultimate architect, we can become the architects of our own Divine reality, here and now, and uncover the true God who dwells within us” (117).
Harding, George. “What Does God Look Like? ” 118-19. On Blake and the artist’s series of paintings What Does God Look Like?
Rubel, William. “Critical Mass.” 120-27. Excerpts from different books and creative, visionary reactions.
Thompson, Paul. “A Streak of Tygers.” 128-29. On “The Tyger” and Thompson’s and Terrie Reddish’s designs inspired by it.
Montague, Jane. “Art Is the Tree of Life.” 130. On her art inspired by Blake.
Reviews
Tsai, Li Hui. “Blake’s Universe and Runge’s Cosmos.” 132-33. A review of the exhibition William Blake’s Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. “Overall, the exhibition … was a must-see for it gave a profound and immersive experience that captivated the senses and stimulated the intellect” (133).
Erle, Sibylle. “Blake in Hamburg.” 134-36. A review of the exhibition William Blakes Universum at the Hamburger Kunsthalle.
Wilson, Andy. “Retipped Arrows of Desire.” 137. A review of Timothy Morton, Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology. “It has been a long time since I read a book with Blake at its heart that was so authentically Blakean in terms of its passionate and indignant righteousness, but what strikes me most is just how well it augurs, and how appropriate it seems, that this work, the most radical invocation of Blake for a generation, should arise in the course of its author’s deep engagement with the sacred, and their finding God.”
Pritchard, Stephen. “Job: Descent and Renewal.” 138-39. A review of Jason Wright, Blake’s Job: Adventures in Becoming. “In this excellent book, Wright confirms Blake’s belief that we can go beyond the boundaries of our poorly-constructed, misconstrued sense of Self into the limitless possibilities of Becoming” (139).
Valentine, Lucy. “Vessel of God.” See VALA.
Vernon, Mark. “‘Enemies of the Human Race’: Blake against the Deists, Then and Now.” See VALA.
Viscomi, Joseph. William Blake’s Printed Paintings: Methods, Origins, Meanings. London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2021. <Blake (2022)>
Reviews
Leveton, Jacob Henry.
Wordsworth Circle 54.4 (2023): 476-80.
Whitson, Roger. “
Toward an Archaeology of Seeing Blake by Technical Means.”
European Romantic Review 35.3 (2024): 563-71.
Volobuev, Nikita. “‘Bleyk-sonata’ dlya fortepiano Dmitriya Smirnova: kontseptual'no-dramaturgicheskaya traktovka zhanra sonaty-poemy [‘Blake Sonata’ for Piano by Dmitrii Smirnov: Conceptual and Dramaturgical Interpretation of the Sonata-Poem Genre].” Arte 4 (2024): 76-89. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). “The purpose of the article is to identify the features of the implementation of the artistic concept in the ‘Blake Sonata’ (2008) by D. N. Smirnov. … The composition of two contrasting parts, striving to merge into a single form, draws two polar ‘images of time’: pulsating ‘vector time’ and frozen ‘circular time’ of eternity. … Thanks to a careful selection of means, D. Smirnov finds an original way to achieve a new integrity of cultural consciousness” (abstract).
Volpone, Annalisa. “‘From out the Portals of My Brain’: William Blake’s Partus Mentis and Imaginative Regeneration.” Humanities 13.4 (2024): 13 pp. “The article examines various instances of mental impregnation and parturition in William Blake’s works, specifically through Urizen, Los, Enitharmon, and the Nameless Shadowy Female” (2).
Volpone, Annalisa. “The Pregnant Mind and Divine Inspiration.” See VALA.
W
Walker, Luke. “‘Relationships of ownership / They whisper in the wings’: Bob Dylan and William Blake.” See Global Blake in Part V.
Wanderlinde, William Weber, and Maria Rita Drumond Viana. “O Diabo em O casamento do céu e do inferno de William Blake: confluências com a recepção do Satã de Paraíso perdido no século XVIII [The Devil in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Confluences with the Reception of Paradise Lost’s Satan in the Eighteenth Century].” Anuário de Literatura 29 (2024): 1-21. In Portuguese (abstract in Portuguese and English). “This article aims to analyze how the Devil is depicted in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), written by English writer William Blake, mainly by comparing it with readings of the character Satan, from John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)” (abstract).
Wang, Yilin. “The Revelation of Social Reality in the Poetry of William Blake.” BCP: Education and Psychology 7 (2022): 392-99. “My goal in this paper is to analyze the social reality reflected by Blake’s poetry from the background of his life and historical context, to reveal the suffering life of the toiling masses and the hypocrisy of capitalist politicians, and the darkness of the church power” (393).
Watanabe, Hideki. “Eishi ni okeru shudai teijion bunsan (hypogram) saiko: Herrick to Wordsworth, Shakespeare to Blake no hikaku kara [Hypogram in English Poetry Reconsidered: Through Comparison of Herrick, Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Blake].” Gengo Bunka Kyodo Kenkyu Project, 2023 [Cultural Formation Studies, 2023] (2024): 15-23. In Japanese. “The Tyger” and “The Lamb” are phonetically analyzed in the discussion of the effects of alliteration, rhyme, and hypogram.
Westbrook, Kate, and Mike Westbrook. “Poem and ‘Hang Fire.’” See VALA.
Whitehead, Angus. “‘My Fingers Emit Sparks of Fire’: William Blake, Letter Writer.” See Crosby and McQuail.
Whitson, Roger. “Reassembling Visionary Physics: Donald Ault, Bruno Latour, and William Blake’s Mathematical Scenographies.” See Global Blake in Part V.
Whitson, Roger. “Toward an Archaeology of Seeing Blake by Technical Means.” Rev. essay on Joseph Viscomi, William Blake’s Printed Paintings: Methods, Origins, Meanings. See Viscomi.
Whittaker, Jason. “Adam Was a Druid: William Blake and False Visions of God.” See VALA.
Whittaker, Jason. “‘By the Voice of the Servant of the Lord’: Blake’s New Jerusalem and Swedenborgianism in the Work of Sheila Kaye-Smith.” See Crosby and McQuail.
Whittaker, Jason. Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. <Blake (2023, 2024)>
Reviews
Leporati, Matthew.
European Romantic Review 35.3 (2024): 571-76. With Joseph Fletcher,
William Blake as Natural Philosopher, 1788–1795. “Whittaker succeeds admirably in his goal of narrating the history of ‘Jerusalem’ and showing how the hymn became a meeting ground of ‘conflicting notions’ of Englishness” (573).
Marks, Rebecca.
Romanticism 30.1 (2024): 103-05.
Whittaker, Jason. “Mapping Hell: Alasdair Gray and William Blake.” See Global Blake in Part V.
Whittaker, Jason. Rev. of Andrew M. Cooper, A Bastard Kind of Reasoning: William Blake and Geometry. See Global Blake in Part V.
Whittaker, Jason. Rev. of David Bindman and Esther Chadwick, eds., William Blake’s Universe. See Global Blake in Part V (and also the podcast review with Whittaker et al. at Global Blake).
Whittaker, Jason. Rev. of Matthew Leporati, Romantic Epics and the Mission of Empire. See Blake 58.2.
Wilson, Andy. Rev. of David Bindman and Esther Chadwick, eds., William Blake’s Universe. See Bindman and Chadwick.
Wilson, Andy. Rev. of Timothy Morton, Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology. See VALA.
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, 2024)>
Review
Lindstrom, Eric.
Wordsworth Circle 54.4 (2023): 480-85.
Worrall, David. Rev. of Matthew Mauger, William Blake and the Visionary Law: Prophecy, Legislation and Constitution. See Blake 58.2.
Worrall, David. William Blake’s Visions: Art, Hallucinations, Synaesthesia. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan-Springer Nature, 2024. ISBN: 9783031532535.
Author talk
Worrall, David. “William Blake’s Visions.” See
Global Blake in Part V.
Wright, Jason. “Blake and Prophecy: A Participatory God.” See VALA.
Wright, Jason. Blake’s Job: Adventures in Becoming. Abingdon: Routledge, 2023. <Blake (2024)>
Author talk
Wright, Jason. “Blake’s Illustrations for the Book of Job: A Healing Journey.” See
Blake Society in Part V.
Reviews
Erle, Sibylle. See
Global Blake in Part V.
Pritchard, Stephen. See
VALA.
Wroe, Nicholas. Rev. of David Bindman and Esther Chadwick, eds., William Blake’s Universe. See Bindman and Chadwick.
Z
Zhao, Hui. “La naissance d’une œuvre ouverte: l’analyse de Jérusalem de William Blake à travers une heuristique du montage [The Birth of an Open Work: Analyzing William Blake’s Jerusalem through a Heuristic of Montage].” PhD diss., École Pratique des Hautes Études, 2023. In French.
Division II: William Blake’s Circle
Banks, Thomas (1735–1805)
Sculptor
Price, Dorothy, et al. Entangled Pasts, 1768–Now: Art, Colonialism and Change. See Price et al. under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Barry, James (1741–1806)
History painter
Chadwick, Esther. “Barry’s Contemporaneity.” The Radical Print: Art and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain. London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2024. ISBN: 9781913107437. 9-49. On Barry’s prints of the 1770s, especially “The Phoenix, or the Resurrection of Freedom” (1776), and his use of aquatint.
Parla, Merve. “Masterpiece Story: King Lear Weeping over the Dead Body of Cordelia by James Barry.” DailyArt Magazine (28 July 2024). An appreciation.
Bartolozzi, Francesco (1727–1815)
Engraver
Blessin, Joseph. “Vegetable Pornography: The ‘Moral’ (Scientific) Debate Surrounding Francesco Bartolozzi’s ‘Stipple Gardens’ and William Blake’s ‘Vegetable Earth’ in John Gabriel Stedman’s Surinam Travelogue.” See Blessin in Division I, Part VI.
Basire, James, Sr. (1730–1802)
Engraver, Blake’s master
Crosby, Mark. “‘Unentangled in the intricate windings of modern practice’: William Blake’s Apprentice Copperplates and Engravings.” See Blake 58.3 in Division I, Part VI.
Blair, Robert (1699–1746)
Poet
Metcalf, James. “‘This ado in Earthing up a Carcase’: Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743) as Eighteenth-Century Churchyard Georgic.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 57.2 (2024): 155-73. One mention of Blake in the footnotes.
Boehme, Jacob [Jakob Böhme] (1575–1624)
Mystic
Muratori, Cecilia. “‘Michael Angelo could not have done better’: Dionysius Andreas Freher and the Visual Transmission of German Mysticism in Eighteenth-Century England.” See Bindman and Chadwick in Division I, Part VI.
Zuber, Mike A. “Jacob Boehme’s Spiritual Alchemy of Rebirth.” Spiritual Alchemy: From Jacob Boehme to Mary Ann Atwood. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. ISBN: 9780190073046. 48-68. “After briefly delineating the place of alchemy in Aurora, this chapter focuses on the spiritual alchemy of rebirth Boehme developed in works composed from 1619 to 1622” (48).
Cosway, Maria (1760–1838)
Painter, acquaintance of Blake
Balen, Anya. “Maria Hadfield Cosway—A Tale of Art, Love and Diplomacy.” Medium (28 Mar. 2024). A biographical sketch.
“Final Known Work of Maria Cosway Given to Nelson-Atkins.” Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (8 Mar. 2024). Notes the donation of A Religious Allegory on the Death of a Young Woman.
Holowchak, M. Andrew. Thomas Jefferson and Maria Cosway: A Gordian Love Affair: Complete Correspondence with Critical Commentary. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2024. ISBN: 9781648898631. Gives the correspondence (including English translations) and historical contextualization.
“Our ‘Faerie Queene’ Returns from Tate.” Chatsworth (18 Nov. 2024). On the return of the Portrait of Georgiana as Cynthia from Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” to the Chatsworth collection, with some description of the painting’s restoration.
Rabier, Amandine, ed. Maria Cosway, 1760–1838: L’itinéraire singulier d’une artiste/A strada ecceziunale di un’artista. Gent: Snoeck, 2024. ISBN: 9789461619051. In French (also available in English). The catalogue for the exhibition held at the Musée Pascal Paoli/Museu Pasquale Paoli, Merusaglia, Corsica, 18 May–30 Oct. 2024.
Spies-Gans, Paris A. “Maria Hadfield Cosway’s ‘Genius’ for Print: A Didactic, Commercial, and Professional Path.” See Martinez and Roman under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Vitek, Donna, and M. Andrew Holowchak. “Valentine’s Day Show: Thomas Jefferson and Maria Cosway: RTJ #15.” The Real Thomas Jefferson (12 Feb. 2024). A podcast episode discussing Jefferson’s relationship with Cosway.
Cosway, Richard (1742–1821)
Miniaturist, acquaintance of Blake
Sandover, Cherry. “Let Us Go Forward: The Soul, Spiritualism, and the Funerary Commemoration of Richard Cosway, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Evelyn De Morgan.” The Persistence of the Soul in Literature, Art and Politics. Ed. Delphine Louis-Dimitrov and Estelle Murail. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan-Springer Nature, 2024. ISBN: 9783031409332. 137-54.
Cowper, William (1731–1800)
Poet, hymnist
Harris, Alexandra. “Desolate Paradise: William Cowper at Eartham, Charlotte Smith on the Hills.” See Harris under Hayley.
Stokes, Christopher. “‘The solitary saint walks forth to meditate at even-tide’: Evangelical Prayer and Interiority in William Cowper.” Romantic Prayer: Reinventing the Poetics of Devotion, 1773–1832. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 39-67. “Anxious attempts to turn inwards towards this deep root of identity involve Cowper in a traumatic experience of self-enquiry as self-division” (41).
Review
Barbeau, Jeffrey W.
Wordsworth Circle 55.3 (2024): 300-04.
Townsend, Chris. “Poetic Injustice: Blank-Verse Abolitionism and Cowper’s The Task.” European Romantic Review 35.3 (2024): 495-510. “Taking as a case study William Cowper’s The Task of 1785—the poem of Cowper’s that gained him the attention of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787—this essay considers some of the reasons why heroic couplets came to be treated with suspicion by politicized poets at the end of the eighteenth century, and thinks through some of the affordances of blank verse, in particular, that marked it out as attractive to abolitionists like Cowper” (abstract).
Cromek, Robert Hartley (1770–1812)
Entrepreneur, engraver, friend-enemy of Blake
McKeever, Gerard Lee. “Of Poets, Mermaids and Brownies.” Regional Romanticism: Literature and Southwest Scotland, c. 1770–1830. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan-Springer Nature, 2024. ISBN: 9783031613241. 93-136. Reads “Cunningham’s contributions to R. H. Cromek’s 1810 Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song” (42).
Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition
Avery-Quash, Susanna, and Christian Huemer, eds. London and the Emergence of a European Art Market, 1780–1820. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2019.
Murgia, Camilla. “From Private to National: Exhibiting Fine Arts in London around 1800.” 105-17. Blake is mentioned on 113.
Alexander, David. “The Evolution of the Print Market and Its Impact on the Art Market, 1780–1820.” 118-30.
Roworth, Wendy Wassyng. “Angelica Kauffman: The Acquisition and Dispersal of an Artist’s Collection, 1782–1825.” 131-44.
Dostal, Alexandra Zoë. “Rope, Linen, Thread: Gender, Labor, and the Textile Industry in Eighteenth-Century British Art.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2024. “The second chapter, ‘Linen,’ is about the structure, materiality and hidden histories embedded in linen painting canvas. First, by comparing linen weaves, thread counts, stamps, and fiber content, I demonstrate the material connections between the world of coarse linen goods and the textile supports of oil paintings. I then argue that the texture of canvas was crucial to the ‘unfinished’ aesthetic of portraiture that became fashionable in the late eighteenth century and attend to the racialized and gendered discourses intrinsic to this painting style” (abstract).
Lyons, Hannah. “‘Exercising the Art as a Trade’: Professional Women Printmakers in England, c. 1750–c. 1850.” PhD diss., Birkbeck, University of London, 2022. Considers Maria Cosway, Angelica Kauffman, and Caroline Watson, among others.
Martinez, Cristina S., and Cynthia E. Roman, eds. Female Printmakers, Printsellers, and Print Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women, c. 1700–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9781108844772. The most relevant chapters are:
Spies-Gans, Paris A. “Maria Hadfield Cosway’s ‘Genius’ for Print: A Didactic, Commercial, and Professional Path.” 25-39.
McPherson, Heather. “Caroline Watson and the Theatre of Printmaking.” 40-55.
Schmid, F. Carlo. “‘Talent and Untiring Diligence’: The Print Legacy of Angelika Kauffmann, Marie Ellenrieder, and Maria Katharina Prestel.” 56-74.
Lyons, Hannah. “Living ‘in the bosom of a numerous and worthy family’: Women Printmakers Learning to Engrave in Late Eighteenth-Century London.” 75-90.
Torbert, Amy. “A Changing Industry: Women Publishing and Selling Prints in London, 1740–1800.” 174-88.
Price, Dorothy, et al. Entangled Pasts, 1768–Now: Art, Colonialism and Change. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2024. The catalogue for the exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, 3 Feb.–28 Apr. 2024. An exhibition on the legacies of racism and colonialism, including works by Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Stothard, Thomas Banks, Benjamin West, and William Woollett, and portraits of Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho. There are very slight references to Blake and Richard Cosway. Especially relevant chapters are:
Chadwick, Esther. “‘All Beautiful in Woe’: The Royal Academy and Enslavement, 1768–1840.” 18-27.
Gilroy-Ware, Cora. “Repairing the Sable Venus.” 28-37. Partly on Stothard.
Cunningham, Allan (1784–1842)
Biographer
McKeever, Gerard Lee. “Of Poets, Mermaids and Brownies.” See McKeever under Cromek.
Darwin, Erasmus (1731–1802)
Scientist, poet
Acosta, Rebeca Araya. “Expanding Comparative Views: Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1789–1791) and The Temple of Nature (1803).” Compiling Texts in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Mediating the Scottish Enlightenment. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan-Springer Nature, 2024. ISBN: 9783031638350. 207-74. Some references to Fuseli’s designs but not Blake’s engravings.
Bailes, Melissa. Regenerating Romanticism: Botany, Sensibility, and Originality in British Literature, 1750–1830. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2023. <Blake (2024)>
Review
Dushane, Allison.
Wordsworth Circle 55.3 (2024): 314-18.
Wang, Fuson. “Darwin’s Evolutionary Metaphor.” The Smallpox Report: Vaccination and the Romantic Illness Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023. <Blake (2024)>
Review
Hegele, Arden.
Wordsworth Circle 55.3 (2024): 329-33.
Flaxman, John (1755–1826)
Sculptor, friend of Blake
Catalogue: “John Flaxman.” See Bindman and Chadwick in Division I, Part VI.
Riccardi, Silvia. “Dal colosso al frammento: Fuseli, Flaxman, Blake e i giganti di Botticelli (If. XXXI-XXXII).” See Riccardi, “Dal colosso al frammento,” in Division I, Part VI.
Fuseli, Henry [Johann Heinrich Füssli] (1741–1825)
Painter, friend of Blake
Acosta, Rebeca Araya. “Expanding Comparative Views: Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1789–1791) and The Temple of Nature (1803).” See Acosta under Darwin.
Ayres, Brenda. Becoming Wollstonecraft: The Interconnection of Her Life and Works. See Ayres, Becoming, under Wollstonecraft.
Carter, Sarah. “The Ambiguities of Translation: Fuseli, Blake, and the Making of Aphorisms on Man.” See Blake 58.2 in Division I, Part VI.
Catalogue: “Blake and Fuseli.” See Bindman and Chadwick in Division I, Part VI.
Evseeva, Tat'yana. “‘Glaza moi byli zakryty …’: Eskhatologicheskie syuzhety v tvorchestve Filippa de Louterburga, Ioganna Genrikha Fyussli, Uil'yama Bleyka i Dzhona Martina. Put' k simvolizmu [‘My eyes were closed …’: The Eschatological Theme on the Creativity by Philip de Loutherbourg, Henry Fuseli, William Blake, and John Martin. The Way to Symbolism].” See Evseeva in Division I, Part VI.
Marks, Rebecca. “‘Organs of Embodied Sentiment’: Contextualising William Blake’s Sistine Studies, c. 1770–1790.” See Marks, “Organs,” in Division I, Part VI.
O’Rourke, Stephanie. “Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions.” Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. <Blake (2024)>
Review
Thomas, Sophie.
Wordsworth Circle 54.4 (2023): 548-53.
Riccardi, Silvia. “Dal colosso al frammento: Fuseli, Flaxman, Blake e i giganti di Botticelli (If. XXXI-XXXII).” See Riccardi, “Dal colosso al frammento,” in Division I, Part VI.
Riccardi, Silvia. “‘The true terrors of Dante’: l ’Inferno di Henry Fuseli.” Dante in der romanischen Welt. Ed. Thomas Klinkert and Patricia Oster-Stierle. Paderborn: Brill Fink, 2024. 93-113. In Italian.
Hayley, William (1745–1820)
Man of letters, patron of Blake
Crosby, Mark. “‘Absorbed by the Poets’: The Sources and Hanging Arrangement for Blake’s Eighteen Heads of Poets.” See William Blake Archive in Division I, Part V.
Harris, Alexandra. “Desolate Paradise: William Cowper at Eartham, Charlotte Smith on the Hills.” The Rising Down: Lives in a Sussex Landscape. London: Faber, 2024. ISBN: 9780571350520. 195-212. On their relationship to Hayley.
Hope, Thomas (1769–1831)
Collector, connoisseur
Van Keuren, Frances, and Kristen Miller Zohn. “‘Some Useful Hints for Improving the Elegance and Dignity of her Attire’: Thomas Hope and Henry Moses, Greek Vases and Neoclassical Fashion.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 29.4 (2022): 390-429. “Author, artist, designer and collector Thomas Hope (1769–1831) published his influential Costume of the Ancients in 1809 and in an enlarged version in 1812. This article identifies archaeological sources for figures in the plates of Costume of the Ancients and seeks to explain why Hope altered his sources by adding patterns from Greek vases” (abstract).
Johnson, Joseph (1738–1809)
Bookseller, employer of Blake
Ayres, Brenda. Becoming Wollstonecraft: The Interconnection of Her Life and Works. See Ayres, Becoming, under Wollstonecraft.
Hay, Daisy. Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022. <Blake (2023, 2024)>
Review
Levy, Michelle.
Eighteenth-Century Studies 58.1 (2024): 125-27.
Kauffman, Angelica [Angelika Kauffmann] (1741–1807)
Painter
Cypess, Rebecca. “Musical Improvisation and Poetic Painting in the Salon of Angelica Kauffman.” Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. ISBN: 9780226817910. 233-78. “Musical performance, and especially the fleeting art of sung poetic improvisation, destabilized the permanence of painting, rendering the total artistic experience of Kauffman’s salon more temporal—more delicate and fleeting—than the visual dimension alone would suggest” (238).
Harmeyer, Rachel. “The Education of Daughters: Embroidered Pictures after Angelica Kauffman.” The Enlightened Mind: Education in the Long Eighteenth Century. Ed. Amanda Strasik. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2022. ISBN: 9781648895357. 43-66. “This chapter will provide a close study of amateur embroidered pictures made after Kauffman’s The Parting of Hector and Andromache, 1768 (Saltram House, National Trust) and will argue that makers of embroidered pictures emulating history paintings responded to debates on women’s education and sought to elevate the genre of needlework” (44).
Roworth, Wendy Wassyng. “An Artist’s Bedrooms: Angelica Kauffman in London and Rome.” Intimate Interiors: Sex, Politics, and Material Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Bedroom and Boudoir. Ed. Tara Zanardi and Christopher M. S. Johns. London: Bloomsbury, 2023. ISBN: 9781350277625. 123-42. About Kauffman’s bedrooms as places of display for clients.
Roworth, Wendy Wassyng. “Angelica Kauffman: The Acquisition and Dispersal of an Artist’s Collection, 1782–1825.” See Avery-Quash and Huemer under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Schmid, F. Carlo. “‘Talent and Untiring Diligence’: The Print Legacy of Angelika Kauffmann, Marie Ellenrieder, and Maria Katharina Prestel.” See Martinez and Roman under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Lavater, Johann Caspar (1741–1801)
Physiognomist, friend of Fuseli
Carter, Sarah. “The Ambiguities of Translation: Fuseli, Blake, and the Making of Aphorisms on Man.” See Blake 58.2 in Division I, Part VI.
Stengel, Friedemann. Enlightenment All the Way to Heaven: Emanuel Swedenborg in the Context of Eighteenth-Century Theology and Philosophy. See Stengel under Swedenborg.
Lowth, Robert (1710–87)
Bible scholar
Prickett, Stephen. “The Hebrew Bible and Romantic Criticism: Robert Lowth and English Poetics.” Enlightenment to Romanticism. Ed. Stephen Prickett with Elisabeth Jay. The Bible and Western Christian Literature: Books and the Book, vol. 3. London: T&T Clark, 2024. ISBN: 9780567681973. 21-39. On Lowth’s influence.
Raz, Yosefa. “Seraphic Choirs and Stuttering Prophets: Symmetry, Disorder, and the Invention of the Literary Bible.” The Poetics of Prophecy: Modern Afterlives of a Biblical Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9781009366274. 27-55. “Lowth’s analysis of the forms and style of Hebrew poetry replaced the religious authority of the biblical text with an aesthetic authority” (28). The chapter’s conclusion is titled “Coda: Blake and Isaiah 6.”
Mora, José Joaquín de (1783–1864)
Polymath, politician
Paolini, Daniela, and Mario Rucavado Rojas. “Del Redentor al Demiurgo: Las ilustraciones de
William Blake vistas a través de las Meditaciones poéticas de José Joaquín de Mora.” See Paolini and Rojas in Division I, Part VI.
Morganwg, Iolo [Edward Williams] (1747–1826)
Welsh poet, antiquarian
Shestakova, Nadezhda. “Izobretaya proshloe: Yolo Morganug i ego neodruidicheskoe uchenie [Inventing the Past: Iolo Morganwg and His Neo-Druidic Doctrine].” Izvestiya Uralskogo federalnogo universiteta. Seriya 2: Gumanitarnye nauki [Ural Federal University Journal. Series 2: Humanities and Arts] 26.2 (2024): 74-89. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). “This article examines the historical mythmaking of the multifaceted Welsh intellectual Edward Williams and his bardo-druidic doctrine known as ‘Bardism’ and developed by him based on the ideas of the main ancient religions (Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.)” (abstract).
Mortimer, John Hamilton (1740–79)
Painter
Chadwick, Esther. “Mortimer’s Caprice.” The Radical Print: Art and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain. London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2024. ISBN: 9781913107437. 51-89. On Mortimer’s Fifteen Etchings Dedicated to Sir Joshua Reynolds (1778), the influence of Salvator Rosa, and Mortimer’s use of banditti figures. “Mortimer’s prints effected the paradoxical manoeuvre of suggesting that it is precisely through ‘caprice’ that the artist asserts his freedom, and thus secures for his art a critical function fit for his age” (89).
Reynolds, Joshua (1723–92)
Painter
Potter, Elizabeth. “‘on Every one of these Books I wrote my Opinions’: Re-assessing Blake’s Marginalia.” See Crosby and McQuail in Division I, Part VI.
Robinson, Henry Crabb (1775–1867)
Writer
Vigus, James. “Henry Crabb Robinson, William Blake and Anglo-German Cultural Relations.” See Bindman and Chadwick in Division I, Part VI.
Royal Academy of Arts
Price, Dorothy, et al. Entangled Pasts, 1768–Now: Art, Colonialism and Change. See Price et al. under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Stedman, John Gabriel (1744–97)
Soldier, writer, friend of Blake
Blessin, Joseph. “Vegetable Pornography: The ‘Moral’ (Scientific) Debate Surrounding Francesco Bartolozzi’s ‘Stipple Gardens’ and William Blake’s ‘Vegetable Earth’ in John Gabriel Stedman’s Surinam Travelogue.” See Blessin in Division I, Part VI.
Hardesty, Jared Ross. The Suriname Writings of John Gabriel Stedman. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2024. ISBN: 9781647921545. An edition of Stedman’s Surinam diary, with excerpts of the published Narrative (1796) for comparison. Blake is mentioned briefly (xxxv), and “A Coromantyn Free Negro, or Ranger, Armed” and “Europe Supported by Africa and America” are among the illustrations reproduced.
Ritchie, Caroline Anjali. “‘Symbols of embodied agency’: The Reception of William Blake’s Engravings for John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative (1796) in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture.” See Blake 58.3 in Division I, Part VI.
Stothard, Thomas (1755–1834)
Painter, illustrator, friend-enemy of Blake
Gilroy-Ware, Cora. “Repairing the Sable Venus.” See Price et al. under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Swedenborg, Emanuel (1688–1772)
Mystic
Dmitriev, N. V., and Vasily Spirin. “Otnoshenie Immanuila Kanta k religiozno-misticheskomu ucheniyu Emmanuila Svedenborga [Immanuel Kant’s Attitude to the Religious and Mystical Teaching of Emanuel Swedenborg].” Aktual'nye voprosy tserkovnogo nauchnogo diskursa: istoriya, sovremennost', perspektivy. Sbornik materialov vserossiyskoy studencheskoy nauchnoy konferentsii [Current Issues of Church Scientific Discourse: History, Modernity, Prospects. Collection of Materials of the All-Russian Student Scientific Conference]. Nizhny Novgorod: Nizhny Novgorod Theological Seminary, 2024. 141-45. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English).
Martin, Leah D. “Music in Emanuel Swedenborg’s Theology: Revitalizing New Church Hymnody.” DMA diss., University of Notre Dame, 2024. Includes a discussion of music and hymnology in Swedenborg and the early New Jerusalem Church (chapters 2-4).
Misyurov, Nikolai. “Gnosticheskie kontsepty pisaniy E. Svedenborga [Gnostic Conceptions of E. Swedenborg’s Writings].” Vestnik Omskogo universiteta [Herald of Omsk University] 29.3 (2024): 50-58. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English).
Stengel, Friedemann. Enlightenment All the Way to Heaven: Emanuel Swedenborg in the Context of Eighteenth-Century Theology and Philosophy. Trans. Suzanne Schwarz Zuber. Foreword by James F. Lawrence. West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation, 2023. ISBN: 9780877853558. “An English translation of Friedemann Stengel’s 2009 German habilitation (qualifying) thesis, which was published by Mohr Siebeck Tübingen in 2011, Aufklärung bis zum Himmel: Emanuel Swedenborg im Kontext der Theologie und Philosophie des 18 Jahrhunderts” (abstract in WorldCat). A massive (922-page) study of Swedenborg’s life and career as both a scientist and a visionary theologian with regard to the context of the times. While there is no discussion of Blake, Swedenborg’s relationship to Moravianism and Methodism is discussed, as is his influence on Lavater.
Review
Dunér, David.
Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 47.4 (2024): 465-67.
Watson, Caroline (1761?–1814)
Engraver
Lyons, Hannah. “‘Exercising the Art as a Trade’: Professional Women Printmakers in England, c. 1750–c. 1850.” See Lyons under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
McPherson, Heather. “Caroline Watson and the Theatre of Printmaking.” See Martinez and Roman under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759–97)
Author, radical, known in Blake’s circle
Ayres, Brenda. Becoming Wollstonecraft: The Interconnection of Her Life and Works. New York: Routledge, 2024. ISBN: 9781032649399. A biography with nominal references to Blake and his illustrations but with many more to Henry Fuseli and Joseph Johnson.
Ayres, Brenda. Wollstonecraft and Religion. London: Anthem Press, 2024. ISBN: 9781839990199.
Batterbee, Megan. “Re-establishing Identity through Testimony: The Rape Survival Narratives of Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice (1799) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (1798).” Consent: Legacies, Representations, and Frameworks for the Future. Ed. Sophie Franklin et al. Abingdon: Routledge, 2024. ISBN: 9781032429625. 14 pp. “Consent within the romantic relationships entered into by the heroines of The Victim of Prejudice and Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman deserves greater scrutiny because it depicts the shift in loyalty from one patriarchal figure to another: from guardian to lover, blood ties to marital allegiance. The abuses within this transition of power concern both the authors and modern consent scholars alike.”
Bergoffen, Debra. “On Becoming Human and Being Humane: Human Rights, Women’s Rights, Species Rights.” Religions 15.7 (2024): 14 pp. “This essay focuses on the nexus of vulnerability and rights. It argues that in transforming vulnerability from a stigma that alienated women from their humanity to the signature of human dignity, women bridged the gap between the liberatory promise of human rights and its exploitative patriarchal politics. It finds that the ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Drucilla Cornell, and Jean-Luc Nancy were/are crucial to this transformed idea of dignity” (abstract).
Dumler-Winckler, Emily. Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. <Blake (2023, 2024)>
Reviews
Attia, Miriam.
Journal of Religion 104.4 (2024): 560-61.
Dunn, Shannon.
Theology Today 81.2 (2024): 158-59.
Galbraith, Eilidh.
Studies in Christian Ethics 37.1 (2024): 143-45.
Gallagher, Megan.
Politics and Gender 20.1 (2024): 264-66.
Moon, Catherine.
Journal of Moral Theology 13.2 (2024): 157-58.
Dumler-Winckler, Emily. “Reproductive Justice: Mary Wollstonecraft on Women’s ‘Rights Against Domination’ for the ‘Cause of Virtue.’” Political Theology (2024): 21 pp. “The article challenges” “anachronistic and revisionist histories” of Wollstonecraft that “have sought to reclaim the label ‘feminist’ by enlisting Wollstonecraft in the contemporary antiabortion, anticontraception, and heterosexual family-centered cause” (abstract).
Hobday, Alexander. “‘The Great Distinction of Our Nature’: Imagination and Commerce in the Later Wollstonecraft.” Romanticism 30.3 (2024): 236-48. “This article elucidates a central but underexplored theme in Wollstonecraft’s later writing: the distinction between the imagination and commerce” (abstract).
Hunt, Eileen M., ed. Portraits of Wollstonecraft: The Making of a Feminist Icon, 1785 to 2020. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. <Blake (2024)>
Review
Wolfson, Susan J.
Wordsworth Circle 54.4 (2023): 561-67. “What a brilliant idea for a book!” (561).
Kidd, Chelsea. “‘I Could Almost Wish for the Madman’s Happiness’: Escape, Escapism, and Madness in Wollstonecraft’s Novels.” European Romantic Review 35.2 (2024): 213-33. Reading “Mary, A Fiction (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798),” “I propose a feminist perspective on women’s insanity as a form of escape and a reading of this madness as an assertion of agency” (abstract).
King, Elizabeth. “Anti-Gothic Gothic Animals in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria (1798).” Eighteenth-Century Life 48.3 (2024): 101-19. “Wollstonecraft employs gothic iconography while simultaneously dismissing gothic sensationalism for its failure to capture women’s real-world subjugation; thus, an ‘anti-gothic gothic’ perspective characterizes her depiction of the dark realities of Enlightenment society. The animals that feature in Maria are likewise anti-gothic gothic animals” (abstract).
Kirkley, Laura. Mary Wollstonecraft: Cosmopolitan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022.
Review
Packham, Catherine.
Eighteenth-Century Fiction 36.4 (2024): 675-77.
Makarova, Elena. “Sotrudnichestvo Meri Uolstonkraft v zhurnale ‘Analytical Review’ kak etap ee ideynogo formirovaniya [Mary Wollstonecraft’s Collaboration in the Analytical Review as a Stage in Her Ideological Formation].” Istoricheskiy opyt mirovykh tsivilizatsiy i Rossiya. Materialy XII Mezhdunarodnoy nauchno-prakticheskoy konferentsii [Historical Experience of World Civilizations and Russia. Proceedings of the XII International Scientific and Practical Conference]. Vladimir: Vladimir State University, 2024. 152-63. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English).
Packham, Catherine. Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy: The Feminist Critique of Commercial Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9781009395847.
Reviews
Fontana, Biancamaria.
European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 32.1 (2025): 160-61.
Santori, Paolo.
Journal of the History of Economic Thought 47.1 (2025): 129-31.
Sigler, David. “The Necrophilia of Wollstonecraft’s ‘The Cave of Fancy.’” Romantic Women’s Writing and Sexual Transgression. Ed. Kathryn Ready and David Sigler. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9781399507622.
Weiss, Deborah. “Madness and Maria: The Wrongs of Woman and Patriarchal Control.” Women and Madness in the Early Romantic Novel: Injured Minds, Ruined Lives. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9781526175717.
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. <Blake (2024)>
Review
Neiman, Elizabeth.
European Romantic Review 35.1 (2024): 170-75.
Yücel, Uğur Eylül. “The Place of Animals in Wollstonecraft’s Early Educational Writings.” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review/Revue canadienne de philosophie (2024): 18 pp. “Thomas Taylor’s parody of Mary Wollstonecraft’s support for rights of women and humans raises a question: does his satire unwittingly propose a defence of animal rights found in Wollstonecraft’s arguments?” (abstract).
Yuen-Yuk, Liz Wan. “Haunted beyond Dreams: The Gothic and Enlightenment in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary, A Fiction.” Gothic Dreams and Nightmares. Ed. Carol Margaret Davison. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9781526160621. “With its strategic portrayal of nightmares in which reality and dreams are literally and metaphorically interwoven, Mary, as a prototypical Gothic novel, simultaneously expresses matrimonial dissent and feminist values.”