Table of Contents:
Symbols and Abbreviations
Introductory Essay
Division I: William Blake
Division II: William Blake’s Circle
Banks, Thomas
Barry, James
Basire, James
Blair, Robert
Boehme, Jacob
Bowyer, Robert
Calvert, Edward
Cosway, Maria
Cowper, William
Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition
Darwin, Erasmus
d’Éon, Chevalier
Flaxman, John
Fuseli, Henry
Gough, Richard
Hayley, William
Johnson, Joseph
Kauffman, Angelica
Lamb, Lady Caroline
Lawrence, Thomas
Linnell, John
Macklin, Thomas
Mora, José Joaquín de
Mortimer, John Hamilton
Reynolds, Joshua
Romney, George
Society of Antiquaries
Southcott, Joanna
Stedman, John Gabriel
Stothard, Thomas
Swedenborg, Emanuel
Wainewright, Thomas Griffiths
West, Benjamin
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim
Wollstonecraft, Mary
Symbols
| § |
Works preceded by a section mark are reported on secondhand authority |
Abbreviations
| BB |
G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Books (1977) |
| BBS |
G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Books Supplement (1995) |
| Blake |
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly
<Blake ([year])> indicates the installment of “William Blake and His Circle” published in the year specified |
| BR(2) |
G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Records, 2nd ed. (2004) |
| BSJ |
G. E. Bentley, Jr., with Keiko Aoyama, Blake Studies in Japan (1994) |
| Butlin |
Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake (1981) |
| Diss. |
Dissertation |
| E |
David V. Erdman, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (rev. ed., 1988) |
| Essick, CB |
Robert N. Essick, William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations (1991) |
| Essick, SP |
Robert N. Essick, The Separate Plates of William Blake: A Catalogue (1983) |
| K |
Geoffrey Keynes and Edwin Wolf 2nd, William Blake’s Illuminated Books: A Census (1953) |
| MPI |
Miscellaneous prints and impressions |
| 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
The annual Blake checklist is an annotated bibliography that aims to compile the scholarly, and much of the popular, engagement with Blake and members of his circle from the preceding year. Given that it is always a substantial undertaking, I wish to express my deep gratitude to my collaborators for their assistance. The annotations in the citations for the relevant language groups are theirs, as are the translations of titles and abstracts into English (when not provided by the original). I am also indebted to Sarah Jones for her editorial work, Morton D. Paley for providing grist for the mill, Luke Walker for clarifying the status of his research, Alex Peachey for their invaluable assistance in compiling and annotating digital sources, and Joy Davis Ripley for her help in copyediting and in so many other things this past year.
Discoveries
An unrecorded version of the Visionary Head of Queen Boadicea (for other versions, see Butlin #717 and #718) was sold at an auction in Maine. Its verso contains a new sketch by Blake of an Egyptian temple and pyramids. An unrecorded impression of Blake’s “Enoch” also came to auction, at Christie’s in London.These discoveries are described in Robert N. Essick’s “Blake in the Marketplace, 2021,” Blake 55.4 (spring 2022).
Arguing with a note in W. H. Stevenson’s Blake: The Complete Poems, Matthew M. Davis makes a persuasive case that the “Aumont” in The French Revolution was the royalist Louis-Alexandre-Céleste d’Aumont (1736–1814) and not his revolution-supporting brother, Louis-Marie Guy d’Aumont (1732–99).
Editions and Translations
In English, new editions of Blake’s works were limited to the William Blake Archive. In 2022, the archive added copy U (printed 1818) and copy W (printed 1825) of Songs of Innocence and of Experience; sixteen MPI from America a Prophecy, including the one and only surviving fragment of Blake’s illuminated copperplates (as well as the engraving on its verso by Blake’s student Thomas Butts, Jr.); and forty-one MPI from Europe a Prophecy, including different versions of the work’s title page. The archive has also made available Blake’s autograph in the album of William Upcott, and four new paintings that can be viewed in the works in preview section: An Allegory of the Spiritual Condition of Man (1811), Epitome of James Hervey’s “Meditations among the Tombs” (c. 1820), The Sea of Time and Space (1821) (once referred to as the Arlington Court Picture), and The Characters in Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” (c. 1825).
Curated by Joseph Viscomi, the archive’s new exhibition, Fake Blakes, displays illuminated books and prints that were not printed or colored by Blake but were wrongly ascribed to him: Songs of Innocence copy T; Songs of Innocence and of Experience copies e/K and f/j; America a Prophecy copy Q; and Europe a Prophecy copy L, in addition to various photolithographs and kerographs of the illuminated books.
There are Spanish and French editions of A Descriptive Catalogue, both put out by the same Spanish publisher, Casimiro, that issued the 2021 Italian edition described in last year’s checklist. The 2022 Spanish edition, William Blake. Invenciones, is translated with a prologue and notes by Juan Francisco Pastor Paris. The 2020 French edition, William Blake. Mes Tableaux, is translated by Jean-Luc Ben Ayoun.
Jean-Yves Lacroix’s French translation of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (2011) has a new edition, and Fernando Castanedo’s English-Spanish edition of Marriage (2002; rev. 2012) has reached its eleventh edition. (Alexander S. Gourlay reviews Castanedo’s 2020 translation and critical edition of the Ballads Manuscript in Blake 56.2.) Mesut Küçükoğlu has a Turkish translation of Marriage, while Kaan H. Ökten’s Turkish anthology has been reissued by a new publisher, Everest Yayınları, with minor changes. Mihai A. Stroe has produced a dual-language, English-Romanian, edition of Jerusalem. (In scholarship on translations, G. I. Modina considers genre in Russian translations of “Auguries of Innocence,” while A. Yu. Popova and N. G. Smolina compare translations of “The Tyger” by Konstantin Bal'mont and Samuil Marshak.)
Reproductions
The Thomas set of the Paradise Lost illustrations is reproduced in the limited-edition reprint of the manuscript of book 1 of Paradise Lost. “Head of a Damned Soul in Dante’s Inferno” (Essick, SP XXXII), Blake’s unpublished engraving after Henry Fuseli, appears in the catalogue for the exhibition of Fuseli’s works that was held at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris (described below). A digital edition of Vetusta Monumenta contains high-quality images of plates that are signed by James Basire, Sr., but that have long been attributed to Blake (BB #503). The antiquarian bookseller John Windle issued a new catalogue (#70) titled William Blake: Present Joy. It reproduces an assortment of Blake’s original works, facsimiles, and key print editions and studies.
Digital Resources
As noted in last year’s checklist, one of the few positive effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the explosion in virtual events and the recording and posting of in-person events. I’ve endeavored to record as many of these as I could find, and I have also attempted to list various author or curator talks (loosely defined to include interviews, podcasts, formal in-person lectures, and essays by authors on their own work or its topic). These are cross-listed with the works themselves in Part VI.
This section also records more popular engagements with Blake found on blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels (but not Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, or TikTok). I hope that this material documents Blake’s wider reception and will be of use to future scholars. That said, given the sheer amount of such material, I have not listed readings of individual poems or works unless they are marked in some significant way, nor have I documented YouTube videos that appear to be rote lessons on Blake for online schooling or national exams.
The Paul Mellon Centre’s public lecture series Georgian Provocations, conducted on Zoom in 2020, offered in 2022 a second set of talks, which were mostly in person but recorded and posted to YouTube. I have documented and linked to both series. The second contains lectures on figures more typically associated with Blake’s circle, such as Angelica Kauffman, Henry Fuseli, and George Romney, but the first set includes talks on William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds.
The Allen Ginsberg Project concluded its posts of Ginsberg’s 1978 class at Naropa on The Four Zoas; users can access both a transcription and audio files. For Blake’s birthday in 2022, the site posted a 10 July 1989 reading at Naropa with Steven Taylor, who collaborated with Ginsberg on music. Taylor reflects on their relationship in one of the monthly events of the Blake Society, most of which are still conducted virtually and posted on YouTube. Other virtual events held by the Blake Society include Keri Davies discussing inoculation and Blake; Andy Wilson and Tim Heath examining the Blakean influence on Blade Runner for the film’s fortieth anniversary; the musician Billy Bragg talking about Blake’s influence on his work; Jason Whittaker presenting on the libretto for Hubert Parry’s “Jerusalem”; Daisy Hay speaking about her book Dinner with Joseph Johnson; S. F. Said discussing his new Blakean novel, Tyger ; and, finally, an online launch of the third issue of the society’s journal, Vala. This issue highlights Blake and nature, and it is freely available as a PDF at the society’s website.
At Keri Davies’s blog, Index Rerum, there are several interesting posts on inoculation in relationship to Catherine the Great, Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job, and William Hayley; he also discusses the content-warning signs at the Blake and Hogarth exhibitions at Tate Britain. James Murray-White’s Finding Blake offers an interview with Jason Whittaker on Blake’s reception and the January 2022 online conference Global Blake; two remembrances of the poet Niall McDevitt (1967–2022); a discussion of Blake’s The Ghost of a Flea by the poet Helen Moore; and a review of Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem.
Both the redesign of Whittaker’s Zoamorphosis and the details of the Global Blake conference were described in last year’s checklist. Complementing his new book on the “Jerusalem” hymn, Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness (2022), are posts by Whittaker reflecting on why he wrote about the poem and on its potential role in the Commonwealth Games in representing a more diverse England. Also at Zoamorphosis, Whittaker reviews Lucy Cogan’s Blake and the Failure of Prophecy (2021); the Blake Archive exhibition Fake Blakes; Butterworth’s play Jerusalem; and Said’s novel Tyger.
Tied to the publication of John Higgs’s William Blake vs. the World (2021) was an in-person event on 31 August 2021 at the Airy Fairy garden, Sheffield, titled Blame Blake. The celebration was filmed and posted to YouTube, where one can also find many of the participants, including Higgs, being interviewed. Higgs, whose next book, on James Bond and the Beatles, is already out, still often talks about Blake on his press tours, and I have listed discussions with relevant content. (In the same spirit as Blame Blake, Tate Britain’s in-person celebration of Blake’s birthday is also available on YouTube.)
The psychotherapist and writer Mark Vernon made several appearances on podcasts, and his in-person lecture on Blake and Christianity, delivered on 12 July 2022 at St. Matthew’s Church in Wimbledon, is on YouTube. His blog, Mark Vernon, often posts on Blake, and perhaps his most interesting post is from 9 September 2022, in which he sketches the role that the Blake scholar Kathleen Raine played as a spiritual mentor to Prince Charles.
In terms of Blake’s popular reception, there are a number of YouTube videos analyzing the video game Devil May Cry 5 (a use of Blake previously noted by Liz Potter at Zoamorphosis and Julian S. Whitney at Hell’s Printing Press). One, by the Pixel Critic, makes extensive use of The [First] Book of Urizen, and a series by the GamingMuse Archives has many images and videos from the game and Blake’s works. The video game and Blake are also treated in a Russian article by Andrey Shteynbrekher and Konstantin Savel'ev (found in Part VI).
Many online newspaper articles covered the virtual-reality app animating Blake’s illustrations, a collaboration between Apple and the Getty Museum. More impressive than the app, to me at least, is a charcoal-drawing animation by Rune Callewaert on YouTube, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Less impressive are two videos that animate Blake reciting poetry.
Finally, the E. J. Pratt Library at the University of Toronto commemorated the seventy-fifth anniversary of Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry with an in-person exhibition, A Visionary Symmetry: Northrop Frye & William Blake, which ran from 20 October to 9 December 2022. A digital version of the exhibition features all the materials on display, as well as articles on Frye; the reception and influence of Fearful Symmetry; Blake and G. E. Bentley, Jr.; and remembrances of Frye by his students.
Criticism, Biography, and Reviews
Jason Whittaker’s Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness (2022) shows that reception remains a dominant genre of Blake studies. Whittaker’s impressive work traces the “Jerusalem” hymn from its production in Milton to its circulation in the twenty-first century. The heart of the book focuses on the excerpting of the poem as a hymn, its setting by Hubert Parry, and its twentieth-century reception in nationalistic debates, which were often dominated by the Right.
Whittaker is also one of the contributors to a new collection of essays on reception, “The Artist of the Future Age: William Blake, Neo-Romanticism, Counterculture and Now.” Edited by Douglas Field and Luke Walker, it was published as a special issue of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library. The introduction seeks to highlight the importance of the British counterculture, which, it suggests, was passed over in Stephen Eisenman’s recent exhibition and catalogue, William Blake and the Age of Aquarius (2017). To illustrate this point, the collection reprints Michael Horovitz’s 1958 essay “The Blake Renaissance” and includes a subsequent, new essay by Horovitz (who passed away before publication) reflecting on Blake’s influence on him and various artists, poets, and activists of the British counterculture. Additionally, David Hopkins traces how Blake’s reception changed in artistic circles between the 1950s and 1970s; James Riley explores Blake’s impact on literary figures of the British counterculture, including Horovitz and Iain Sinclair; and Whittaker looks at Blake and science-fiction novels of the late 1970s. Jodie Marley goes further back in time to consider the reception of Yeats and Ellis’s The Works of William Blake (1893) and how it impacted the poet George William Russell (Æ). Colin Trodd, in an interesting complement to the period covered in Whittaker’s book on “Jerusalem,” traces how notions of citizenship and hospitality shaped Blake’s reception between the 1910s and 1940s. Finally, Franca Bellarsi examines Blake’s impact on maelstrÖm reEvolution, a neo-Romantic collective in Brussels.
In other work on the counterculture, David Stephen Calonne’s book The Beats in Mexico touches on Blake’s influence on the Beats but also, more originally, on his place in the anthology America a Prophecy: A New Reading of American Poetry from Pre-Columbian Times to the Present (1973). Dean Sluyter’s popular account in The Dharma Bum’s Guide to Western Literature highlights Blake’s spiritual and visionary awakening. Alicia Carpenter’s chapter in James Rovira’s collection Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism: The Emancipation of Female Will focuses on Blake and Patti Smith.
Blake’s relationship to other writers received much attention. Keith O’Regan has a study of Blake and Bertolt Brecht, Towards a Productive Aesthetics: Contemporary and Historical Interventions in Blake and Brecht. Leon Conrad sees Blake as one of the two major influences on the English polymath George Spencer-Brown. His impact on Virginia Woolf is the subject of a 2022 dissertation by Michael William Black, and a previously unrecorded Chilean dissertation, from 2008, traces Blake’s and John Keats’s influences on Jorge Luis Borges. A book by David Hopkins and Tom Mason on Geoffrey Chaucer’s eighteenth-century reception references Blake slightly, mostly with regard to Dryden.
In Japanese, there was a good deal of work on reception or on Blake’s relationship to other authors. Hikari Sato calls attention to the references to Blake in the work of William Henry Hudson, an ornithologist. Yuko Akimoto traces Blake’s influence on the Japanese writer and activist Yutaka Haniya, and Atsushi Tanigawa considers how Blake figures in the works of Haruo Sato, Haniya, and Sei Ito. Naoki Isobe attempts to reconstruct the binding technique that the Blake scholar Bunsho Jugaku used for Blake and Whitman. Kiyoshi Ando examines the religious stances of Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth.
Similar works in Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian include Juan de Dios Torralbo’s consideration of translations of English Romantics by the Cordoban poet Carlos Clementson; Arthur Aroha Kaminski da Silva’s comparison of Blake’s ideas of innocence and childhood with those of J. D. Salinger in Nine Stories (1953); and Yaroslava Muratova’s analysis of Byron’s Cain and Blake’s The Ghost of Abel.
Eco-criticism, the Body, and Disease
The third issue of Vala, the journal of the Blake Society of London, focuses on Blake and nature; it contains essays, poems, drawings, and other creative work, much of which highlights Blake’s relevance to our environmental crisis. As Ines Tebourski formulates this claim, “The ecological poetics of Blake’s works aspired to foreground natural issues as a subject of utmost emergency” (74). Hugo W. Larman describes and reproduces the blueprints he designed for a “Garden of the Four Zoas” dedicated to Kathleen Raine. Sibylle Erle gives a personal sketch of her relationship to Blake. Tristanne Connolly examines Blake’s and Erasmus Darwin’s use of plants and points to likely instances of Darwin’s influence.
Outside of Vala, Alexander S. Gourlay’s appendix to his review of Adam Komisaruk and Allison Dushane’s edition of The Botanic Garden traces Darwin’s influence on The Book of Thel, and Caroline Dauphin’s 2021 dissertation in French also considers Darwin and Blake. Emphasizing the importance of Mary Wollstonecraft rather than Darwin, the Jordanian scholars Majd M. Alkayid and Murad M. Al Kayed examine Blake’s use of flowers to represent women.
Steve Clark’s essay in Ve-Yin Tee’s new collection, Romantic Environmental Sensibility, uses Milton to sketch Blake’s “environmental poetics” (212), with references to James Thomson, Mark Akenside, and Iolo Morganwg. Kate Rigby’s 2020 essay suggests that Blake’s work exemplifies “a specifically ecopoetic variant of the prophetic mode of Romantic literature” (113), while Jacob Henry Leveton connects The [First] Book of Urizen with the steam engines at Albion Mill and the pollution they produced. Edward Lee-Six employs Raymond Williams’s concept of “structure of feeling” to read Blake’s relationship to empiricism and capitalism. Tara Lee completed her dissertation on “William Blake and the Language of Preformationist Biology,” and she published articles on Blake and the fibrous body in relationship to the German scientist Lorenz Oken (1779–1851) and on vitalism in Jerusalem.
Intentional misrepresentation of bodies is the subject of a 2021 essay by Anthony Apesos, who examines how Blake diverged from the models of anatomical correctness offered by William Hunter’s lectures on anatomy at the Royal Academy and compares Blake’s practices with those of Joshua Reynolds and Luigi Schiavonetti. Addressing neurodivergence, David Worrall argues that Blake experienced Klüver form-constant visual hallucinations and suggests that the patterns created by these hallucinations can be seen in his works.
Art, Language, and Media Studies
A new reference book that every reader of this journal will want is David Alexander’s A Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Engravers, 1714–1820. In addition to its biographical entries, which include Blake and every member of his circle who worked as an engraver, it offers an introduction to eighteenth-century engraving and a list of known apprentices.
Louise Wilson’s essay in Blake examines the National Gallery of Victoria’s prints of Blake’s Virgil to reveal a “complex history” of its woodblocks and the artists who used them, including Edward Calvert and John Linnell. A chapter in Tristram Wolff’s book Against the Uprooted Word: Giving Language Time in Transatlantic Romanticism (2022) considers Blake’s sense of language in connection with discoveries in geology and scales of time. Sarah Weston has an interesting article looking at Blake’s relief etching in relationship to the development of braille. Matthew Martello reads the Notebook in toto and argues that its poetics inform the Laocoön separate plate. In Russian, Galina Kovalenko and Il'ya Smyvalov analyze the words and images of “The Little Boy Lost” as a “creolized text,” while, also in Russian, E. S. Chunyak sees a “synthesis of the arts” in Blake’s works.
In a special issue of Modern Philology devoted to the Society of Antiquaries (fully described in Division II), Luisa Calè argues that Blake’s “physiological aesthetics and his experience of ‘fourfold vision’” was shaped by his early experiences as an apprentice and engraver working as a “practical antiquary.” A special issue of European Romantic Review, “Romanticism and Vision” (also fully described in Division II), edited by Terry F. Robinson and John Savarese, was inspired by work on Blake and Romantic visual culture. In the collection’s two essays on Blake, Stephanie O’Rourke considers how Fuseli, Blake, Banks, and other artists challenged both neoclassical and scientific ideas of the body, making “it more difficult to posit the self evident [white, male] body as a universal and stable category” (509), while Calè, writing on Blake’s watercolor Pestilence (c. 1805), traces his connection between disease and moral sentiments. Elsewhere, Marta Fabi, addressing Blake’s notion of disease in Songs of Experience, concludes with the hopeful note that Blake shows humanity that we can “use the knowledge acquired by dealing and coping with [the experience of disease], in order to start a change, which should always be for the better” (187). At his blog, Mark Vernon explicitly suggests that Blake can help us learn from the ordeal of COVID-19.
Joseph Monteyne’s new book, Media Critique in the Age of Gillray: Scratches, Scraps, and Spectres, devotes a chapter to The [First] Book of Urizen and its negation of the page and the book. Esther Alice Chadwick’s previously unrecorded 2016 dissertation examines the relationship of “high art, printmaking and political radicalism,” discussing Blake, James Barry, John Hamilton Mortimer, James Gillray, and Thomas Bewick. Elizabeth Potter’s dissertation focuses on Blake’s marginalia to Joshua Reynolds, while Trevor A. McMichael’s dissertation on revenge and British Romanticism touches on Blake’s commercial engraving “Tythe in Kind; or The Sow’s Revenge” for the Wit’s Magazine (1784).
Mark Lussier has an essay on the Dante illustrations in a festschrift published as an issue of Phoebus, Arizona State University’s art history journal. Writing in Portuguese, Thiago Mota and Fernanda S. Murro look at representations of Dante’s Hell in Blake, Gustave Doré, and Helder Rocha.
Religion and Philosophy
The Bible scholar Christopher Rowland has an enormous book on apocalypticism, “By an Immediate Revelation”: Studies in Apocalypticism, Its Origins and Effects, which draws together many of his previously published works, along with new essays. It has an entire section devoted to Blake (as well as another essay on Blake elsewhere in the volume). Although none of his Blake essays is new, the book makes them more readily available, and some of them have not been previously recorded in Blake or WBHC.
Madeleine Callaghan’s Eternity in British Romantic Poetry (2022) includes a chapter looking at Blake’s idea of eternity across many of his works. Chris Townsend has a book on Romanticism and George Berkeley, with a chapter on Blake. Focusing on The Book of Los and engaging with recent studies of Blake and Lucretius, Andrew Lincoln suggests that “Blake saw in Lucretius … a form of prophecy that represented an alluring alternative to his own prophetic mission, one whose malign influence could embroil those who tried to contain or oppose it.” Blake’s visionary engagement with empiricism and the Enlightenment is considered by Sergio Navarro Ramírez. Similarly, Cătălin Ghiţă analyzes the conflict between visionary art and experimental science. Jesús David Curbelo discusses Blake’s rejection of “authoritarianism and orthodoxy,” and Daniela Picón suggests that the eagle-headed human in Jerusalem pl. 78 was a prophetic figure with which Blake identified.
Passings
In addition to Michael Horovitz and Niall McDevitt, R. Paul Yoder (1955–2022), likely best known to readers of this journal for his book The Narrative Structure of William Blake’s Poem “Jerusalem”: A Revisionist Interpretation (2010), passed away.
Blakeana
Anne K. Mellor’s classic 1974 study Blake’s Human Form Divine has been reissued by the University of California Press’s Voices Revived series. As noted, S. F. Said’s novel Tyger, illustrated by Dave McKean, was discussed by the author at a Blake Society event; it also features in the pages of Vala and in a review by Jason Whittaker at Zoamorphosis. There are reviews by Whittaker, Mark Vernon, and James Murray-White of the new run of Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem (2009) at London’s Apollo Theatre.
One of the strangest but most stimulating creative engagements with Blake is found in Alexander Roob’s German-English dual-language book. It chronicles a group of contemporary German artists, followers of Mesmer, who attempted to recreate Blake’s lost painting The Ancient Britons while in hypnotic states. William Blake’s “The Ancient Britons”: Appearances of a Vanished Picture / William Blake’s “The Ancient Britons”: Erscheinungen eines verschollenen Bildes (2022) documents the process and the art they created.
Blake’s Circle
There were many significant works on Blake’s circle. The first is Daisy Hay’s eminently readable biography of Joseph Johnson, Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age (2022). Hay highlights Johnson’s relationships, distinguishing her book from Gerald P. Tyson’s Joseph Johnson: A Liberal Publisher (1979) and Helen Braithwaite’s Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty (2003). Dinner with Joseph Johnson spends a good deal of time on figures like Erasmus Darwin, Henry Fuseli, Joseph Priestley, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and Mary Wollstonecraft, sketching Johnson’s important relationships with them. Blake, William Cowper, William Hayley, and John Gabriel Stedman are minor characters, but Hay details, for example, the tumultuous relationship between Stedman and Johnson, in which Blake played a part, and the rise and fall of the Milton Gallery.
In Fuseli, Johnson and Blake shared at least one mutual friend, and he was the subject of two major exhibitions in 2022. The first—Füssli, entre rêve et fantastique [Fuseli, the Realm of Dreams and the Fantastic]—was held at the Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris, from 16 September 2022 to 23 January 2023. Curated by Christopher Baker, Andreas Beyer, and Pierre Curie, it highlighted Fuseli’s paintings and drawings of the grotesque, gothic, and fantastical. The exhibited works included three versions of his Nightmare; his paintings and illustrations of different authors, myths, and folklore; and his erotic drawings of his wife and other women. The other exhibition was Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism, curated by David Solkin and Ketty Gottardo. Shown at the Courtauld Gallery, London, from 14 October 2022 to 8 January 2023 and at the Kunsthaus Zürich from 24 February to 21 May 2023, it focused largely on Fuseli’s drawings of women, including courtesans and his wife, which show elaborate coiffures, dresses, and sexualized objects and poses. A video available on YouTube, “Open Courtauld Hour: The Modern Woman and Fuseli,” features a discussion by the curators, with Kate Lister providing context about eighteenth-century sex workers. Both exhibitions have beautifully produced catalogues with important scholarly essays. As with exhibitions of Blake’s works, I have tried to record as many reviews as I could find. In addition, pieces by Fuseli and Blake were on display at Paradise Lost: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in 2021.
In scholarship beyond the exhibitions, Sharon Choe’s dissertation explores Fuseli’s use of Northern antiquarianism, while Manfred Engel reads The Nightmare as a gothic turn from classicist motifs. Martin Myrone has a chapter in French in the catalogue for Füssli, entre rêve et fantastique, and an in-person talk on The Nightmare in the Paul Mellon Centre’s Georgian Provocations series. Perry McPartland contends that a fairy in Titania and Bottom is based on Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian fairy. Catherine Phillips discusses works owned by Fuseli’s father that are now in the collection of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.
In other work on writers tied to Johnson, Lucy Cogan considers Erasmus Darwin’s influence on Maria Edgeworth, while Elliot Patsoura suggests that “Darwin gives expression to the incapacity of nature to be fully domesticated.” There is now an English translation of a Dutch graphic novel that dramatizes the life of Quaco, an enslaved boy whose life is described by John Gabriel Stedman, along with a teacher’s guide. Scholarship on Mary Wollstonecraft includes a book on her ideas of virtue through a Thomistic-Aristotelian lens by Emily Dumler-Winckler; an examination of the “feud” between Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Inchbald by Willow White; the positioning of Wollstonecraft in debates about fathers watching breastfeeding by Virlana M. Shchuka; a dissertation on Wollstonecraft and “social reproduction pedagogy” by Alex Sibo; a critical survey of French and German rewritings of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Laura Kirkley; an analysis of Wollstonecraft’s use of “gothic violence” by Megan Gallagher; and an explication of Wollstonecraft’s theory of tyranny by Sandrine Bergès and Alan Coffee. In terms of Johnson’s competitors, Naomi Billingsley examines the grangerized copy of the Macklin Bible owned by Robert Bowyer.
As regards the Hayley circle, Kaz Oishi discusses William Cowper in an environmental context (as does Sean M. Nolan’s dissertation), while Matthew McConkey looks at Cowper’s idea of habit. A pilot project at the Fitzwilliam Museum offers digital images of William Hayley’s correspondence with his wife, Eliza Hayley; with John Flaxman; and with Anna Seward. Ruth Scobie suggests that Hayley’s The Triumphs of Temper provided eighteenth-century fiction with the model of a young white woman reading about herself in the newspaper and becoming a celebrity. George Romney was the subject of Nicholas Robbins’s talk at the Paul Mellon Centre. Romney’s lost painting The Death of General Wolfe features in a 2017 article by Morton D. Paley. (Mairead Horton’s article on Benjamin West’s The Death of General Wolfe is worth reading for her recasting of West’s depiction of Native American agency.) In the annual Transactions of the Romney Society, one can find Alex Kidson’s edition of Romney’s letters in volume 22 and a 2015–20 supplement to his catalogue of Romney’s paintings in volume 25. I’ve recorded the titles of other articles published in the journal since 2016, but I have not been able to access them for annotation.
Two articles on Thomas Stothard look at his illustrations for The Seasons and Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, respectively. In the Mellon Centre’s Georgian Provocations series, Paris Spies-Gans speaks on Eliza Trotter, Angelica Kauffman, and Lady Caroline Lamb. Diane Boucher has a short article on Maria Cosway’s painting A Persian Going to Adore the Sun. Clare Siviter examines the Chevalier d’Éon’s celebrity as depicted in French and English newspapers.
José Joaquín de Mora is the subject of a collection of essays in Spanish edited by Salvador García Castañeda and Alberto Romero Ferrer, and a monograph in English by Sara Medina Calzada. An article by Alberto Custodio Romero Vallejo discusses how Mora used Blake’s illustrations to The Grave in his Meditaciones poéticas.
In addition to Elizabeth Potter’s dissertation on Blake’s annotations, work on Joshua Reynolds includes a French dissertation by Deborah Waintraub; David Hopkins’s examination of Reynolds in the context of the eighteenth-century “clubbable man”; Martin Postle’s talk at the Mellon Centre on Reynolds’s self-portraits; and Thomas McGeary’s article on British flautists in Italy.
Noah Heringman, Crystal B. Lake, and Katharina Boehm’s digital edition of Vetusta Monumenta is a superb scholarly accomplishment. On top of its high-quality digital reproductions and its transcriptions, translations, and commentary on each set of engravings, it offers illuminating contextual information about the Society of Antiquaries; a description of the long-running Vetusta Monumenta project itself; and biographies of major contributors, like James Basire, Richard Gough, and William Stukeley. The edition is well complemented by a special issue of Modern Philology, “Ancient Objects and New Media.” In addition to Luisa Calè’s article on Blake, described above, the issue includes Bernard Nurse’s detailed description of Gough’s role in the publications of the society, with ample references to Basire; Dana Arnold’s analysis of how the publications utilized ekphrasis in architecture; Dustin Frazier Wood’s examination of “the distinction between image and text within antiquarian visual culture”; and Boehm’s comparison of how novels by Ann Radcliffe and Walter Scott portrayed the past in light of the society’s projects.
On a similar topic, William Fitzgerald’s book The Living Death of Antiquity: Neoclassical Aesthetics (2022) considers uses of the classical from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries; it has chapters on Johann Joachim Winckelmann, John Flaxman, and Antonio Canova. Other work on eighteenth-century and Romantic-era display and exhibition includes Esther Chadwick’s talk at the Paul Mellon Centre, “A Black King in Georgian London: British Art and Postrevolutionary Haiti.” Leigh G. Dillard considers intersections of image and text in commonplace books. Amanda Lahikainen’s Money and Materiality in the Golden Age of Graphic Satire is a fascinating study of how concerns over paper money manifested themselves in print satire. Taking a broader approach, Joseph Monteyne’s Media Critique in the Age of Gillray, referenced above in relation to Blake, considers how satire reflects anxieties over traditional concepts of subjective agency spurred by new reproductive print technologies. In addition to the articles on Blake by Calè and O’Rourke in the European Romantic Review special issue “Romanticism and Vision,” Terry F. Robinson and John Savarese’s introduction argues for the importance of visual culture in the Romantic period, and David Francis Taylor considers William Martin’s and James Barry’s use of ekphrasis in their paintings of Cymbeline.
Division I: William Blake
Part I: Blake’s Writings
Section A: Original Editions, Facsimiles, Reprints, and TranslationsNote the publication of the spurious copies Songs of Innocence copy T, Songs of Innocence and of Experience copies e/K and f/j, America a Prophecy copy Q, and Europe a Prophecy copy L in the Blake Archive exhibit Fake Blakes.
America a Prophecy (1793)
America a Prophecy [16 MPI and a copperplate fragment (recto and verso)]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2022. 4 impressions of the frontispiece (BB pl. 1, E i, K i); 1 impression (BB pl. 3, E 1, K 1); 1 impression (BB pl. a, E a, K a); 1 impression (BB pl. b, E b, K b); 1 impression (BB pl. c, E c, K c); 3 impressions (BB pl. 4, E 2, K 2); 1 impression (BB pl. 10, E 8, K 8); 1 impression (BB pl. 11, E 9, K 9); 1 impression (BB pl. 12, E 10, K 10); 2 impressions (BB pl. 15, E 13, K 13); copperplate fragment, recto (BB pl. a, E a, K a) and verso (the head of a saint engraved by Thomas Butts, Jr., the son of Blake’s patron).
Ballads (Pickering) Manuscript (1807?)
Augurios de inocencia. Edición bilingüe de Fernando Castanedo. Traducción de Fernando Castanedo. Madrid: Cátedra, 2020. <Blake (2021)>
Reviews
Gourlay, Alexander S. See
Blake 56.2 in Part VI.
Rodríguez Rivero, Manuel. “Lanzando libros al vuelo.”
El País,
Babelia (5 Dec. 2020): 14-15.
A Descriptive Catalogue (1809)
William Blake. Invenciones. Trans., prologue, and notes by Juan Francisco Pastor Paris. Madrid: Casimiro, 2022. 112 pp. ISBN: 9788417930530. In Spanish. “La materia del símbolo” (7-22); “Catálogo descriptivo de cuadros, invenciones poéticas e históricas” (25-65, 81-99); “notas” (100-08). With 13 color images of the extant works presented by Blake in his 1809–10 exhibition above his brother’s shop in Soho (68-80). <Blake (2022), for Italian ed.>
§ William Blake. Mes Tableaux. Trans. Jean-Luc Ben Ayoun. Madrid: Casimiro, 2020. 96 pp. ISBN: 9788417930684. In French. Illustrated with the extant works presented by Blake in his 1809–10 exhibition above his brother’s shop in Soho. <Blake (2022), for Italian ed.>
Europe a Prophecy (1794)
Europe a Prophecy [41 MPI]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2022. 6 impressions of the frontispiece (BB pl. 1, E i, K i); 5 impressions of the title page (BB pl. 2, E ii, K ii); 3 impressions of the Preludium (BB pl. 4, E 1, K 1); 3 impressions (BB pl. 5, E 2, K 2); 2 impressions (BB pl. 6, E 3, K 3); 2 impressions (BB pl. 7, E 4, K 4); 2 impressions (BB pl. 9, E 6, K 6); 3 impressions (BB pl. 10, E 7, K 7); 4 impressions (BB pl. 11, E 8, K 8); 2 impressions (BB pl. 12, E 9, K 9); 2 impressions (BB pl. 13, E 10, K 10); 2 impressions (BB pl. 14, E 11, K 11); 1 impression (BB pl. 16, E 13, K 13); 2 impressions (BB pl. 17, E 14, K 14); 2 impressions (BB pl. 18, E 15, K 15).
Jerusalem (c. 1804–20)
§ Stroe, Mihai A. “William Blake in Romanian Translation: Jerusalem—A Critical Bilingual Edition.” Creativity 4.2 (2021): 247–552. “A Romanian translation has long been due, and we offer it here, together with a critical apparatus (introductory study: Some aspects of William Blake’s cosmogony; and Notes, clarifying both the literary, philosophical, historical, religious-spiritual and scientific context as well as matters of translation)” (abstract).
Letters
12 March 1804 to William Hayley
Artists’ Letters: Leonardo da Vinci to David Hockney. Ed. Michael Bird. London: White Lion, 2019. <Blake (2020)> B. Artist no Tegami: Da Vinci, Goya, Monet, Rodin, Warhol … Hyakunin no Kigakari [Artists’ Letters: Da Vinci, Goya, Monet, Rodin, Warhol … Anxieties of a Hundred People]. Trans. Kenji Otsubo. Tokyo: Maar sha, 2020. 223 pp. ISBN: 9784837306856. In Japanese.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93?)
§ Cennet ile Cehennemin Evliliği. Trans. Mesut Küçükoğlu. Türkiye: Dedalus Kitap, 2022. ISBN: 9786054708352. In Turkish.
§ Le mariage du ciel et de l’enfer. Trans. Jean-Yves Lacroix. Paris: Editions Allia, 2011. 14 cm., 69 pp. ISBN: 9782844854124. <WBHC p. 301> B. 2nd ed. 2022. Très Petite Collection. 80 pp. ISBN: 9791030414950. In French (reproduces a copy of Marriage).
El matrimonio del cielo y el infierno [H]. Ed. and trans. Fernando Castanedo. 2002, 2007, 2010, 2012 (4th ed., revised), 2014, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021. In Spanish, with facing English for Marriage. <Blake (2003, 2014, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022)> K. 11th ed., 2022.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794)
Songs of Innocence and of Experience [U]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2022.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience [W]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2022.
Upcott’s Autograph Album (1826)
Blake’s Autograph in the Album of William Upcott. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2022.
Section B: Collections and Selections
§ Chansons et mythes: poèmes choisis. Trans. and prologue by Pierre Boutang. Paris: La Différence, 1989. <Blake (1992–93)>Recorded in Blake 26.3 (winter 1992–93) by D. W. Dörrbecker. B. Chansons et mythes. 2013. 186 pp. ISBN: 9782729120344. English and French on facing pages.
“A Cradle Song.” “Weep you no more”: Concert Repertory Shu: Igirisu no Ai to Yume [“Weep you no more”: A Collection of Concert Repertoire: British Love and Dreams]. Ed. Hirohisa Tsuji and Akane Nakanishi. Tokyo: Kawai Shuppan, 2020. 91 pp. ISBN: 9784760941865. In Japanese. It reprints the first, second, third, and fourth stanzas of “A Cradle Song” with a musical score by Gustav Holst (34-35) and a translation into Japanese (87).
§ Poesie. Introduction by Sergio Perosa. Trans. Giacomo Conserva. 1976, 1991, 2003, 2005 [2 eds.], 2007. <WBHC p. 550, Blake (2018)> G. With an essay by James Joyce [“William Blake”] and an introduction by Sergio Perosa. 2012. English and Italian on facing pages.This supplements the information in <Blake (2018)>. H. 2017.
“The Tyger.” The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me: 100 Classic Poems with Commentary. Ed. Brendan Kennelly and Neil Astley. Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2022. ISBN: 9781852244408.
Visiones. Trans. Enrique Caracciolo Trejo. Mexico [City]: Editorial Era, 1974. B. Antología bilingüe. Ed. and trans. Enrique Caracciolo Trejo. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1987. 237 pp. ISBN: 9788420602387. C. 1995. D. 1996. E. 1998. F. 2002. G. 2005. H. 2007. I. 2009. 262 pp. ISBN: 9788420673264. J. 2012. 304 pp. ISBN: 9788420658506.
In all editions of the Antología bilingüe, the text of Visiones is slightly revised, and “por razones de espacio” Vala, Milton, and Jerusalem are omitted. The 2012 edition consists of “Índice” (7-10), “Introducción” (11-21), “Bibliografía sugerida” (23-24), “Cronología de William Blake” (25-27), “Vocablos de sentido especial en la cosmogonía de Blake” (291-96), “Notas aclaratorias” (297-300), plus texts (English and Spanish on facing pages) of Poetical Sketches, Songs, Thel, Marriage, America, Urizen, and The Everlasting Gospel (29-289).This entry supplements the information in WBHC pp. 462-63, 588-89.
William Blake, Vahiy Kitapları [Prophetic Works]. Trans. Kaan H. Ökten. İstanbul: Pinhan Publications, 2015. <Blake (2020)> B. Everest Yayınları, 2022. In Turkish. New publisher and minor changes.
Part II: Reproductions of Drawings and Paintings
Section A: Illustrations of Individual Authors
Milton, John
Paradise Lost: Manuscript. Cambremer, France: SP Books, 2022. ISBN: 9791095457022. A fine print edition reproducing Milton’s manuscript for book 1 of Paradise Lost and the Thomas set of the Paradise Lost illustrations (1807). Limited to 1000 copies.
Section B: Collections and Selections
An Allegory of the Spiritual Condition of Man (1811) [preview mode]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2022.
Epitome of James Hervey’s “Meditations among the Tombs” (c. 1820) [preview mode]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2022.
The Sea of Time and Space (1821) [preview mode]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2022.
The Characters in Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” (c. 1825) [preview mode]. William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 2022.
Part III: Commercial Engravings
Section A: Illustrations of Individual Authors
Dante
“Head of a Damned Soul in Dante’s Inferno”
It is reproduced in
Füssli, entre rêve et fantastique (see
Fuseli in Division II).
Vetusta Monumenta
Heringman, Noah, Crystal B. Lake, and Katharina Boehm, eds. Vetusta Monumenta: Ancient Monuments, a Digital Edition. 2017–22 (last update 18 June 2022). A wonderful digital edition of engravings in the first three volumes of this work, which was originally published as seven volumes by the Society of Antiquaries between 1747 and 1906.
The edition offers an introduction; thematic essays: “About Vetusta Monumenta,” “Vetusta Monumenta and Printmaking,” “Kinds of Monuments in Vetusta Monumenta,” “Data Visualizations of Vetusta Monumenta”; links to digital versions of the print copies; and a biographical register detailing prominent contributors, including James Basire, Sr. (with references to Blake’s probable contributions), Richard Gough, William Stukeley, and George Vertue.
For each set of designs, there are high-quality images; descriptions of the engraved plates; descriptions of the objects depicted in the engravings; a transcription of any text on the plates; a translation of any non-English text; a link to the explanatory account when the work was originally published; and an extended scholarly commentary.
Blake’s contributions (vol. 2, nos. 29-35) were executed while he was an apprentice to Basire, and they are signed by Basire.Blake’s preliminary drawings can be found at the Blake Archive, under “Pen and Ink Drawings (Composed 1774-c. 1825)” and “Water Color Drawings (Composed 1775-c. 1790).” Bernard Nurse authored the commentary for the Blake set.
Part IV: Bibliographies and Catalogues
Section A: Bibliographies
[cross-listing articles with substantial bibliographical content]
Calè, Luisa. “Blake and Exhibitions, 2021.” See Blake 56.1 in Part VI.
Oliveira, Camila, and Jason Whittaker. “Blake and Music, 2021.” See Blake 56.1 in Part VI.
Ripley, Wayne C., with Fernando Castanedo, Hikari Sato, Hüseyin Alhas, and Vera Serdechnaia. “William Blake and His Circle: A Checklist of Scholarship in 2021.” See Blake 56.1 in Part VI.
Section B: Catalogues
Catalogue 70. William Blake: Present Joy: A Chronological Catalogue of Blake’s Works. San Francisco: John Windle Antiquarian Bookseller, 2022. A chronological arrangement of works by or connected to Blake that are offered by Windle.
Part V: Digital Resources
Akademia Ignatianum w Krakowie. “Odc. 21 William Blake, The Lamb, The Tiger, Chimney Sweeper (Songs of Innocence).” YouTube. 9 Dec. 2022. A short lesson on Blake’s views on society and religion, and a reading of a few of his works.
Allen Ginsberg Project
“Ginsberg on Blake Continues—106.” 17 Feb. 2022. The concluding transcription and audio for Ginsberg’s 1978 class at Naropa on The Four Zoas.
“Luke Walker on William Blake & Ginsberg’s Visions.” 19 Feb. 2022. Highlights the recent work of Walker on Blake and Ginsberg, including his talk at the Global Blake conference, “Allen Ginsberg’s Retellings of His ‘Blake Vision,’” and his forthcoming book, William Blake and Allen Ginsberg: Romanticism, Counterculture and Radical Reception.
“Franca Bellarsi / William Blake.” 20 Feb. 2022. Highlights Bellarsi’s talk at the Global Blake conference, “From Blake to Buddha, Biology, and Beyond: The Renewal of ‘Prophetic Labour’ amidst the Beats and Affiliates.”
“Steven Taylor on Blake.” 27 Mar. 2022. Highlights Taylor’s conversation on Blake and Ginsberg at the 23 March 2022 Blake Society event (see Blake Society).
“William Blake’s Birthday—1.” 28 Nov. 2022. Posts the first part of a 10 July 1989 Ginsberg reading at Naropa with Steven Taylor; both audio and a transcription are provided. (See also an interview with Taylor under the Blake Society.)
“William Blake’s Birthday—2.” 28 Nov. 2022. Posts the second part of the 1989 reading.
Andrews, Susanna. “The 4 States of Mind in William Blake’s Mythology.” Collector (23 Sept. 2022). A short biography, with an analysis of some of his works and their relation to four states of mind (Ulro, Generation, Beulah, and Eden/Eternity).
Art Tourist. “Know the Artist: William Blake Revisited.” YouTube. 9 Dec. 2022. A biography of Blake, with a focus on his art and poetry.
Bedworth, Candy. “William Blake’s Demonic Red Dragon.” Daily Art Magazine (16 Jan. 2023). On Blake’s life, highlighting The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun.
Blake Society (see also Vala in Part VI)
Davies, Keri. “‘Inoculation should be common everywhere.’” 19 Jan. 2022.
Wilson, Andy, and Tim Heath. “Blake or Blade Runner.”The title of the YouTube video is “Blake & Blade Runner.” 23 Feb. 2022. “On the fortieth anniversary of the release of the film Blade Runner, we look at Blake made manifest.”
Taylor, Steven. “Blake’s Tyger and the Lion of Dharma: Allen Ginsberg’s Innocence & Experience.” 23 Mar. 2022. “A conversation between Steven Taylor and Camila Oliveira Querino about how Allen Ginsberg set Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience to music, and then sang them.” (For more on Taylor, see Allen Ginsberg Project.)
Bragg, Billy. “‘Till we have built Jerusalem’—Billy Bragg on William Blake.” 20 Apr. 2022. “Billy Bragg talks about William Blake.”
Visionary Company. “Albion, Awake! William Blake Live on Stage.” 20-22 May 2022. “The Visionary Theatre Company presents the genius of William Blake live on stage.”
Whittaker, Jason. “Visions of Albion in Felpham: Blake, Sussex, and the Origins of the Hymn ‘Jerusalem.’” 29 June 2022. “Professor Jason Whittaker talks about the origin of Blake’s libretto for Parry’s anthem Jerusalem.”
“Another Room.” 14 Aug. 2022. An in-person gathering at Bunhill Fields burial ground “to celebrate the dance of eternal death of William Blake who was buried in August 1827 in Bunhill Fields.” Not recorded.
Hay, Daisy. “Dinner with Joseph Johnson.” 7 Sept. 2022. Hay discusses her book Dinner with Joseph Johnson.
Said, S. F. “Tyger—SF Said.” 19 Oct. 2022. Said discusses his new novel, Tyger.
“Vala 3 Online Launch.” 30 Nov. 2022. See Vala in Part VI.
“The Westbrook Blake at St. James’s Church, Piccadilly.” 24 Nov. 2022. “In collaboration with The Blake Society, St. James’s, Piccadilly present[s] legendary jazz pianist and composer Mike Westbrook and band, performing his celebrated musical settings of Blake’s verse.” In-person event; not recorded (but see Richard Williams’s description of the event, below).
Blame Blake
An in-person eventThe event’s schedule, according to its Facebook page, included: “John Higgs (The KLF, Watling St., Stranger Than We Can Imagine); David Bramwell (The Cult of Water, Odditorium, Catalyst Club); The Buddhist Punk (poet: new book ‘A Tempting Magic’); Myra Stuart (with Puppet William Blake); Dave Lee (chaos magician, author); Lisa Lovebucket (playwright, artist, poet, performer); Claudia Egypt (actor, writer, alternative theatre legend); Ben Graham (poet, author, Quietus/Shindig writer); Laura Fives (DJ); Sheffield Arts Lab.” held on 31 August 2021 at the Airy Fairy garden, Sheffield, UK, to celebrate Blake and the publication of John Higgs’s book William Blake vs. the World. I’ve documented the YouTube videos related to it here and cross-referenced the event under Higgs in Part VI.
Airy Fairy. “Blame Blake.” YouTube. 17 Apr. 2021. A virtual discussion among the participants, including John Higgs.
Airy Fairy. “Claudia Boulton, Writer, Actor and Creative Spirit, Talks about Blame Blake.” YouTube. 31 Oct. 2021. Boulton discusses Blake and her work as a performance artist.
Airy Fairy. “John Higgs, Writer, Talks about Blame Blake.” YouTube. 2 Nov. 2021. Higgs discusses Blake, Sheffield, his book, and how the pandemic prevented him from doing a book tour, which led to Blame Blake.
Airy Fairy. “Ben Graham, Poet, Talks about Blame Blake.” YouTube. 8 Feb. 2022. Graham discusses Blake and his involvement with the Blame Blake event.
Airy Fairy. “Dave Lee, Magick [sic] Practitioner, Breathwork Coach & Writer, Talks about Blame Blake.” YouTube. 8 Feb. 2022. Lee discusses Blake.
Airy Fairy. “Myra Stuart, Puppeteer, Talks about Blame Blake.” YouTube. 8 Feb. 2022. On the creation of her Blake puppet and her thoughts on Blake.
Airy Fairy. “Tim Holmes, Poet, Talks about Blame Blake.” YouTube. 8 Feb. 2022. Holmes discusses his experience with Blake.
Airy Fairy. “Blame Blake; A Day Inspired [by] and in Celebration of William Blake.” YouTube. 9 Feb. 2022. “The [video] highlight[s] performances from the Blame Blake event that took place in the Airy Fairy garden on 31st August 2021. Contributing artists include John Higgs, Claudia Boulton, Tim Holmes, Ben Graham, Myra Stuart, Dave Lee, Geoff Winde, David Bramwell, Tryptoman, Sheffield Arts Lab. A day to celebrate the publication of William Blake vs. the World by John Higgs and use it as inspiration to create a day of bea[u]ty and wonder centred around the works, ideas and life of William Blake” (description).
Books & Bridges. “The Profound Poetic Vision of William Blake.” YouTube. 23 Nov. 2022. A discussion about Blake by Mark Matheson.
Brand, Betsy. “Experience William Blake in Augmented Reality.” Getty (15 Dec. 2022). A description of a project in collaboration with Apple in London that created an app for consumers to view creatures from The Ghost of a Flea and Satan Exulting over Eve in augmented reality.
Branwyn, Gareth. “The Unique Etching and Printing Process of William Blake.” Boing Boing (29 Apr. 2022). Slight explication of two Michael Phillips YouTube videos on Blake’s printing process and John Higgs’s 23 June 2021 British Library talk.
British Association for Romantic Studies
Brown, Matt. “Spot These Gorgeous William Blake Mosaics, Hiding in Lambeth.” Londonist (3 Oct. 2022). On the mosaics in Lambeth modeled on Blake’s works.
Callewaert, Rune. “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—William Blake—2023 Charcoal Animation.” YouTube. 20 Dec. 2022. An interpretive animation of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Interesting and creepy.
Carney, James. “Tracing the Legacy of William Blake with British Literary Manuscripts Online.” Gale Review (1 Feb. 2022). A post by a “Gale Ambassador,” who examines some of Blake’s manuscripts through the Gale database British Literary Manuscripts Online: c. 1660–1900.
Chen, Min. “William Blake’s Visions Arrive in AR Form via an App by Getty Museum and Apple.” Jing Culture & Crypto (28 July 2022). An article describing Blake’s The Ghost of a Flea and its place in the new collaborative app between the Getty Museum and Apple. “Viewers can summon moving and morphing models of Blake’s Flea [sic], serpents, and eagle, created using motion capture. The animations are accompanied by a soundtrack by producer Just Blaze, who set Blake’s poetry to beats.”
Davies, Keri. Index Rerum: A Blog about Books, Book-Collecting, William Blake, and Lots of Other Things.
Scholarship:
“‘Inoculation should be common everywhere.’” 26 Jan. 2022. A brief but illuminating note on Catherine the Great, whose portrait and letter proclaiming “inoculation should be common everywhere” were auctioned by MacDougall Arts of St. James’s Square in December 2021. (See also Davies’s lecture on the topic of inoculation under the Blake Society.)
“Blakespotting.” 5 June 2022. Consideration of the controversies over the content-warning signs at both the William Blake and the Hogarth and Europe exhibitions at Tate Britain, and the use of Blake by the Right.
“William Blake and Smallpox: The Disease in Blake’s London and in Blake’s Art.” 5 June 2022. On smallpox inoculation and Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job, pl. numbered 6.
“William Hayley and Smallpox.” 5 June 2022. Traces the Hayleys’ use of surrogate mothers, the impact of smallpox on the Hayley family (including Hayley’s son, Thomas Alphonso), and Hayley’s friendship with Edward Jenner, who discovered the smallpox vaccine.
Donway, Walter. “William Blake, the Romantic Revolution, and Liberty.” Online Library of Liberty (8 Nov. 2022). A short biography of Blake with a focus on the French Revolution and his thoughts on slavery, the workforce, and freedom.
Donway, Walter. “William Blake: Romantic Poet and Enlightenment Man?” Online Library of Liberty (9 Nov. 2022). An article discussing the influence that the Enlightenment and revolutions had on Blake, as well as an analysis of Blake’s influence on the later Romantic era.
Escalante-De Mattei, Shanti. “Getty Museum and Apple Bring William Blake’s Monsters to Life for New AR Project.” ARTnews (27 July 2022). An article describing the Getty Museum and Apple’s augmented-reality project in London.
Eternalised. “The Otherworldly Art of William Blake.” Eternalised (11 Apr. 2022). A post analyzing Blake’s work and philosophy.
Eternalised. “The Otherworldly Art of William Blake.” YouTube. 11 Apr. 2022. An overview of Blake’s life and art.
Fedorenko, Yuriy. “Celebrating the Birthday of William Blake in Tate Britain.” YouTube. 29 Nov. 2022. An in-person gathering at Tate Britain to celebrate Blake’s birthday.
GamingMuse Archives. YouTube. 28-29 Oct. 2022. A five-part series of livestreams playing the video game Devil May Cry 5 and analyzing Blake’s works and life in conjunction with the game.
Gilchrist, Cherry.I saw no indication at the blog that the author is related to Alexander or Anne Gilchrist. “William Blake and the Moravians.” Cherry’s Cache (19 June 2022). An overview that draws on academic sources.
Golgonooza. “Opening the Doors: William Blake, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and the Beat Generation.” thehumandivine.org (3 Apr. 2022). Synthesizes two previously published articles on Blake and the Beats: Alexandre Ferrere’s 2019 “Visions, Symbols and Intertextuality: An Overview of William Blake’s Influence on Allen Ginsberg” <Blake (2020)>, and David Wills’s “William Blake and the Beat Generation,” Beatdom (30 Oct. 2012), not previously recorded in Blake or WBHC.
Higgs, John. “Author Interview: John Higgs’s William Blake vs. the World.” See Higgs in Part VI.
Higgs, John. “Divinely-Inspired Art: John Higgs on William Blake’s Visions of the Sublime.” See Higgs in Part VI.
Higgs, John. “God Has a Beautiful Mansion for Me Elsewhere: The Last Days of William Blake.” See Higgs in Part VI.
Hoakley, [Howard?]. “Painted Stories in Britain 9: William Blake.” Eclectic Light Company (26 Oct. 2022). A survey of Blake’s career.
Huntington. “A William Blake Hand-Printed Drawing (1795).” YouTube. 7 July 2022. A defense of including Blake’s Hecate, or The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy in the Huntington’s exhibition 100 Great British Drawings, which ran from 18 June to 5 September 2022.
Idler. “On William Blake and His Mind-Forg’d Manacles | A Drink with Mark Vernon.” YouTube. 4 July 2022. A discussion of “London” between Vernon and Tom Hodgkinson.
Jones, Josh. “William Blake: The Remarkable Printing Process of the English Poet, Artist & Visionary.” Open Culture (19 May 2022). Highlights Blake’s printing process, drawing on the YouTube video featuring Michael Phillips that was made for the 2015 Ashmolean exhibition William Blake: Apprentice and Master.
Laing, Michael. “William Blake & the Divinity of Imagination.” Synchronicity (27 May 2022). An analysis of Blake and his “childlike sense of wonder.”
Lawson-Tancred, Jo. “Apple Has Teamed Up with the Getty to Unleash Augmented-Reality Demons Inspired by William Blake at Its New London Store.” Artnet News (28 July 2022). An article describing Blake’s work featured in Apple’s new augmented-reality app.
Lilian. “Top 10 Surprising Facts about William Blake” [as of 9 May 2023, “Top 15 Surprising Facts about William Blake”]. Discover Walks Blog (28 Mar. 2022).
“List of William Blake Artworks.” History of Art (13 Dec. 2022). Not a list.
Marshall, Colin. “The Otherworldly Art of William Blake: An Introduction to the Visionary Poet and Painter.” Open Culture (22 June 2022). A brief introduction to Blake’s work, linking to the YouTube video posted by Eternalised.
Metzger, Michael. “Bono, William Blake and C. S. Lewis.” Religion Unplugged (15 Nov. 2022). Originally posted as “Two Peas in a Pod” at the Clapham Institute (14 Nov. 2022).
Michalska, Magda. “The Bible according to William Blake.” Daily Art Magazine (26 Feb. 2023). A brief breakdown of four biblical subjects in Blake’s work: Jesus, Satan, Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel.
Michalska, Magda. “William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience Explained.” Daily Art Magazine (28 Nov. 2022). Brief discussion of Songs.
Miller, Catriona. “Masterpiece Story: ‘The Ancient of Days’ by William Blake.” Daily Art Magazine (26 Feb. 2023).
Modernpoetry1. “Highly Sensitive Poetry | William Blake—Ah! Sun-flower (1794).” YouTube. 6 Feb. 2023. An animated Blake reading “Ah! Sun-Flower.”
Murray-White, James. Finding Blake: Reimagining William Blake for the 21st Century.
Whittaker, Jason. “Going Global—Blake’s Afterlife.” 10 Jan. 2022. Whittaker reflects on his interest in Blake’s reception, leading to the Global Blake conference of January 2022.
Murray-White, James. “On Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem & Our Fallacy of Albion.” 4 Aug. 2022. A review of the play.
Murray-White, James. “Niall McDevitt, 1967–2022.” 1 Oct. 2022. A remembrance of the poet McDevitt, who devised “walking guides of Blake’s London.”
Foyle, Naomi. “Niall McDevitt (1967–2022): Entering the Mystery.” 15 Oct. 2022. Another remembrance of McDevitt.
Moore, Helen. “The Ghosts of Fleas.” 29 Oct. 2022. Moore, a poet, discusses her poem inspired by The Ghost of a Flea, which is in her collection ECOZOA (2015).
Owen, Nick. “Other People’s Struggles.” paper-darts.com (19 Dec. 2022). A reading of “The Human Abstract.”
Paul Mellon Centre
Pearce, J. M. S. “William Blake.” Hektoen International: A Journal of Medical Humanities 14.4 (fall 2022). A biography of Blake followed by an analysis of some of his most popular works and religious ideas.
Perry, William P. “Tyger Tyger Burning Bright … The Poetical Art of William Blake.” Berkshire Edge (24 July 2022). A description of some of Blake’s works.
Pixel Critic. “Devil May Cry 5 Poetry Explained—Vergil/V Character Analysis.” YouTube. 23 July 2021. An analysis of the game using The [First] Book of Urizen.
Popova, Maria. “The Only Valiant Way to Complain Is to Create: William Blake and the Stubborn Courage of the Unexampled.” Marginalian (18 June 2022). A description of the method of printing that Blake invented and how it changed his works.
Popova, Maria. “What We Keep in Loss: William Blake’s Stirring Letter to a Bereaved Father.” Marginalian (16 July 2022). Reflects upon Blake’s perspective on loss and grief, excerpting his 6 May 1800 letter to William Hayley.
Regeneration: Mike Sauter and Michael Martin. “Introduction to William Blake.” YouTube. 23 Sept. 2022. A podcast discussion of Blake.
Regeneration: Mike Sauter and Michael Martin. “Mark Vernon on William Blake.” YouTube. 30 Sept. 2022. A discussion with Vernon about some of Blake’s works.
Rice University. “Fondren Completes Collection of William Blake Replica Prints and Plates.” YouTube. 28 Feb. 2022. On the acquisition of facsimiles of Blake’s illuminated books created by Michael Phillips; the video features him working in the printing workshop. (See also Shilcutt.)
School of Alchemy. “William Blake: Visionary by Paul Getty Museum.” YouTube. 28 June 2022. A look at the catalogue for the Getty exhibition that was postponed because of COVID-19.
Shilcutt, Katharine. “Fondren Updates Collection of William Blake Replica Prints and Plates.” Rice University News and Media Relations (25 Feb. 2022). Details Rice’s acquisition of facsimiles of Blake’s illuminated books created by Michael Phillips and links to a YouTube video, posted by the university, which shows Phillips in the printing workshop.
Starkey, Arun. “How William Blake Inspired a Classic Led Zeppelin Song.” Far Out Magazine (27 Dec. 2022). How Blake’s print “The Dance of Albion” inspired the Led Zeppelin song “Achilles Last Stand.”
Stripped Cover Lit. “And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time by William Blake Summary, Analysis, Interpretation, Theme, Review.” YouTube. 28 Apr. 2022. A reading of “Jerusalem.”
Stripped Cover Lit. “The Sick Rose by William Blake Summary, Analysis, Themes, Review.” YouTube. 14 Apr. 2022. A reading of “The Sick Rose”: “Prior to the internet, … all caps meant, probably, that you were going to shoot people, so ‘The Sick Rose’ reads as such.”
Stripped Cover Lit. “The Tyger by William Blake: Summary, Analysis, Themes, Review.” YouTube. 7 Apr. 2022. A reading of “The Tyger” and “The Lamb.”
Takac, Balasz [Vladimir Bjelicic]. “Visionary and Mystical Worlds in William Blake Paintings and Prints.” Widewalls (29 Aug. 2022). An analysis of Blake’s works that feature a mystical or fantastical setting.
Tyutvinova, Tat'yana. “Uil'yam Bleyk i britanskie khudozhniki-vizionery [William Blake and British Visionary Artists].” Culture.ru (22 Mar. 2022). In Russian. A lecture on Blake and his contemporaries read by the deputy head of the Department of Engraving and Drawing, State Museum of Fine Arts named after A. S. Pushkin.
Vardell, Sylvia. “A Place for Poetry.” Horn Book Magazine (1 May 2022): 82-86. On the Newbery award and poetry, with a discussion of Nancy Willard’s A Visit to William Blake’s Inn (1981) <BBS p. 679, WBHC p. 2863>.
Vernon, Mark. Mark Vernon.
Vernon, Mark. “William Blake and the Future of Christianity.” YouTube. 16 July 2022. A 12 July 2022 lecture at St. Matthew’s Church, Wimbledon, London.
VictoryXR. “Experience William Blake Delivering His Famous Poem ‘London’ in VR on the VictoryXR Academy Campus.” YouTube. 1 Sept. 2022. An animated version of Blake reciting “London.”
A Visionary Symmetry: Northrop Frye & William Blake
“An exhibition celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake,” held at the E. J. Pratt Library from 20 October to 9 December 2022 and curated by Agatha Barc, Bailey Chui, and Lisa J. Sherlock. The online exhibition offers digital images of the items in the physical display cases, including different editions of Fearful Symmetry; photographs of Frye; manuscripts and other books by Frye; key books on Blake written by others; facsimiles and scholarly editions of Blake’s works; and reflections on Frye by former students. Remarks delivered on the opening night of the exhibition are also available: Angela Esterhammer, “Recollections on the 75th Anniversary of the Publication of Fearful Symmetry” and Jean O’Grady, “Frye and Fearful Symmetry.”
Wakeling, Kate. “William Blake: How His Poetry Inspired Composers.” Classical Music (9 Jan. 2023). An overview.
Whittaker, Jason. “The Radical Visions of William Blake.” Tribune Magazine (28 Nov. 2022). On Blake’s political radicalism in contrast to the use of his poetry and images for commercial and nationalistic agendas.
Whittaker, Jason. “Upon Clouded Hills.” History Today 72.8 (2022): 22-24. A concise popular account of the reception of “Jerusalem.”
Whittaker, Jason. Zoamorphosis.
For a description of and links to the online conference Global Blake, which took place in January 2022, see <Blake (2022)>. For Whittaker’s reflection on the conference, see his post “Going Global—Blake’s Afterlife” at James Murray-White’s Finding Blake.
Scholarship:
“‘Jerusalem’—A Personal History.” 12 June 2022. “With the publication of Jerusalem: Blake, Parry and the Fight for Englishness in a month’s time, Jason Whittaker gives some of the reasons as to why he wrote about Blake’s most famous poem.”
“‘Jerusalem’ and the Commonwealth Games.” 4 Aug. 2022. “Why do English athletes sing the Blake-Parry hymn ‘Jerusalem’ at the Commonwealth Games? Can it represent a more diverse England?”
Reviews:
Blakespotting:
Blakeana:
“William Blake.” Melt (n.d.). An analysis of some of Blake’s works and philosophies.
William Blake Archive
Exhibition:
Fake Blakes. April 2022. “Curated by Joseph Viscomi and designed by Michael Fox with the assistance of Grant Glass.” Exhibition of “illuminated books and prints that were not printed or colored by William Blake”: Songs of Innocence copy T; Songs of Innocence and of Experience copies e/K and f/j; America a Prophecy copy Q; Europe a Prophecy copy L; and various photolithographs and kerographs.
Review
Whittaker, Jason. See Whittaker, Zoamorphosis.
Meaghan Green. “The Mystery and Magic of Photo Processing.” 20 May 2022. On the use of Photoshop to reveal details in Blake’s works, with examples from his autograph in the album of William Upcott and America a Prophecy.
“William Blake: A Rebel against the Age of Enlightenment: Pauper, Prophet and Pre-Romantic.” Medium (19 Apr. 2022). A brief article describing Blake’s life, work, and thought.
“William Blake—Artist William Blake’s Paintings and Illustrations.” Art in Context (7 Sept. 2022). A biography of Blake, with his accomplishments and influences.
“William Blake Completes Apprenticeship and Starts Independent Career.” Cove (n.d.). A paragraph on Blake’s invention of illuminated printing, in the style of “on this day in history.”
“William Blake—Poet and Painter of Passion.” Poetry Changes Lives (28 Nov. 2022). A brief biography of Blake, followed by “Earth’s Answer.”
Williams, Richard. “William Blake in Piccadilly.” thebluemoment.com (25 Nov. 2022). A review of Mike Westbrook’s concert, Visions and Voices: Echoes of William Blake, on 24 November 2022 at St. James’s Church, Piccadilly.
You Call That Radio. “John Higgs Talks the KLF, William Blake, the Beatles and More (Reupload).” YouTube. 20 May 2022. A discussion with Higgs, author of William Blake vs. the World, about Blake and other topics.
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
§ Aberbach, David. “Industry and the Romantics: Blake, Wordsworth, and Goethe.” The Environment and Literature of Moral Dilemmas: From Adam to Michael K. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022. ISBN: 9780367770877. 126-32.
Adam, Edina, with Julian Brooks, and an essay by Matthew Hargraves. William Blake: Visionary. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2020. <Blake (2021, 2022)>
Reviews
Brylowe, Thora.
Journal of British Studies 61.4 (2022): 996-97.
Reesman, Linda L.
1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 27 (2022): 304-07.
Akimoto, Yuko. Takiguchi Shuzo Kenkyu: Eizo Ningen no Keifu [A Study of Shuzo Takiguchi: A Genealogy of a Shadowy Person]. Osaka: Izumi Shoin, 2022. 398 pp. ISBN: 9784757610354. In Japanese. Chapter 2, “His Baptism of William Blake: Metaphysics of Light,” discusses the influence of Blake on Yutaka Haniya (107-46).
Alexander, David. A Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Engravers, 1714–1820. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9781913107215. An exceedingly useful resource that, in addition to its biographies of engravers contemporary with Blake (including most members of his circle), contains a historical overview of the profession and a list of apprentices. Its entry on Blake unfortunately misnames Joseph Johnson, John.
Alkayid, Majd M., and Murad M. Al Kayed. “The Language of Flowers in Selected Poems by William Blake: A Feminist Reading.” Theory and Practice in Language Studies 12.4 (2022): 784-89. “Blake talks about women symbolically using different kinds of flowers” (788).
Ando, Kiyoshi. “Igirisu Romanha Shijin no Shukyoteki Stance: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge [Religious Stances of the English Romantic Poets: Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge].” Kanto Gakuin Daigaku Jimbun Gakkai Kiyo [Bulletin of the Society of Humanities, Kanto Gakuin University] 145 (2021): 33-46.
Apesos, Anthony. “Visionary Anatomy: Blake’s Bodies.” Romantik: Journal for the Study of Romanticisms 10 (2021): 57-82. “I will explore the origin and significance of Blake’s divergence from anatomical correctness” (abstract). Also references William Hunter, Joshua Reynolds, and Luigi Schiavonetti.
B
Bakić, Tanja. “William Blake the Designer: The Reception of Robert Blair’s Grave in Serbia.” Literature Compass 19.7 (2022): 13 pp. “The aim of this article is to bring the figure of William Blake the designer closer to the Serbian reader, and to set it apart from the previously dominant figure of Blake the poet, when it comes to his reception in that country” (abstract).
Barra van Treek, Erika de la. “Desterritorialización y reterritorialización de ‘Tyger’ de Blake y ‘Nightingale’ de Keats en la obra de Jorge Luis Borges.” PhD diss., Universidad de Chile, 2008. 217 pp. In Spanish. “A study of the intertextual and intercultural dialogue between Borges and two English Romantics, William Blake and John Keats, through the de-territorializing of The Tyger and Ode to a Nightingale from the 19th century English romantic context and their re-territorializing in modern/postmodern Argentina of the 20th century” (abstract).
Bellarsi, Franca. “A Cosmopolitan Case Study: Countercultural Blake in the Therapoetic Practice of maelstrÖm reEvolution.” See Bulletin of the John Rylands Library.
Bellarsi, Franca. “‘Without Contraries is no progression’: Blake My Teacher.” See Vala.
Black, Michael William. “‘Mental fight’ and ‘seeing & writing’ in Virginia Woolf and William Blake.” PhD diss., University of Glasgow, 2022.
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly
Volume 55, number 4 (spring 2022)
Articles
Essick, Robert N. “Blake in the Marketplace, 2021.” 9 pars., plus listings.
Worrall, David. “‘Seen in my visions’: Klüver Form-Constant Visual Hallucinations in William Blake’s Paintings and Illuminated Books.” 61 pars. Suggests that Blake experienced “geometric-patterned phosphenes perceived as self-luminous entoptic hallucinations in the visual field.” These hallucinations manifest in “four form-constant patterns: tunnel, spiral, net or lattice, and cobweb or concentric circles” (par. 14), and Worrall finds examples in Blake’s works.
Reviews
Walker, Luke. Linda Freedman, William Blake and the Myth of America: From the Abolitionists to the Counterculture. 14 pars. “A welcome addition” (par. 1).
Schuchard, Marsha Keith. Adam Komisaruk, Sexual Privatism in British Romantic Writing: A Public of One. 3 pars. Komisaruk’s “willingness to confront the intellectual contradictions and gender confusions in [Blake’s] controversial (and often effaced) erotic images is provocative” (par. 3).
Gourlay, Alexander S. Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, ed. Adam Komisaruk and Allison Dushane. 9 pars. “A thoroughly creditable performance” (par. 6). Includes a short appendix, “Darwin’s Anemone and Blake’s Thel,” which suggests Darwin’s influence on the title page of The Book of Thel.
Volume 56, number 1 (summer 2022)
Articles
Ripley, Wayne C., with Fernando Castanedo, Hikari Sato, Hüseyin Alhas, and Vera Serdechnaia. “William Blake and His Circle: A Checklist of Scholarship in 2021.” 40 pars., plus listings. Includes a description of and links to the presentations at Global Blake: Afterlives in Art, Literature and Music, the 11-13 January 2022 online conference sponsored by the University of Lincoln and Bishop Grosseteste University and organized by Jason Whittaker and Sibylle Erle.
Oliveira, Camila, and Jason Whittaker. “Blake and Music, 2021.” 3 pars., plus listings. Given the pandemic, focuses on “streaming settings of Blake’s works,” and the list includes many 2020 productions released on “Bandcamp and SoundCloud ” (par. 1).
Calè, Luisa. “Blake and Exhibitions, 2021.” 3 pars., plus listings. Notes the continued impact of the pandemic on exhibitions; records which of Blake’s works were part of exhibitions commemorating the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death; and highlights “experimentation with digital facsimiles” (par. 3).
Volume 56, number 2 (fall 2022)
Articles
Davis, Matthew M. “The House of Aumont and Blake’s French Revolution.” 38 pars. Argues persuasively that “Aumont” in The French Revolution was the royalist Louis-Alexandre-Céleste d’Aumont (1736–1814) and not his revolution-supporting brother, Louis-Marie Guy d’Aumont (1732–99), as was suggested in W. H. Stevenson’s Complete Poems.Blake: The Complete Poems, 3rd ed. (Harlow: Pearson, 2007) 140n.
Wilson, Louise. “Printing Imperfections in William Blake’s Virgil Wood Engravings and What They Reveal.” 20 pars. A technical examination of the National Gallery of Victoria’s prints from Blake’s Virgil woodblocks; their printing imperfections “provide a tangible commentary on the complex history of [the] woodblocks and the various artists who printed from them” (par. 1).
Reviews
Rovira, James. Mike Goode, Romantic Capabilities: Blake, Scott, Austen, and the New Messages of Old Media. 8 pars. “Goode provokes argument in the best possible way and, in the process, opens up the field of literary studies to new possible readings” (par. 8).
McQuail, Josephine A. Marsha Keith Schuchard, A Concatenation of Conspiracies: “Irish” William Blake and Illuminist Freemasonry in 1798. 8 pars. “A readable and compelling study” (par. 1).
Gourlay, Alexander S. Fernando Castanedo, ed. and trans., William Blake, Augurios de inocencia. 4 pars. “Castanedo writes clearly in both English and Spanish, and is a judicious, thorough, and painstaking scholar as well as a gifted translator” (par. 2).
Volume 56, number 3 (winter 2022–23)
Articles
Martello, Matthew. “The Notebook, Laocoön, and Blake’s Beauties of Inflection.” 73 pars. A reading of the Notebook as a whole, suggesting its form and poetics inform the Laocoön separate plate.
Lincoln, Andrew. “Blake, Lucretius, and Prophecy: The Book of Los.” 23 pars. Highlights The Book of Los: “Blake saw in Lucretius not only a materialistic cosmology that he felt compelled to attack, but also a form of prophecy that represented an alluring alternative to his own prophetic mission, one whose malign influence could embroil those who tried to contain or oppose it—including John Milton” (par. 1).
Review
Rosso, G. A. Lucy Cogan, Blake and the Failure of Prophecy. 18 pars.
Bode, Christoph. Rev. of Alexander Regier, Exorbitant Enlightenment. See Regier.
Brylowe, Thora. Rev. of Edina Adam, with Julian Brooks, and an essay by Matthew Hargraves, William Blake: Visionary. See Adam with Brooks.
Bulletin of the John Rylands Library
Volume 98, issue 1 (May 2022)
“The Artist of the Future Age:
William Blake, Neo-Romanticism, Counterculture and Now”
Ed. Douglas Field and Luke Walker
Field, Douglas, and Luke Walker. “Introduction.” 1-5. Highlights the explosion of reception studies on Blake and contrasts the collection’s focus on the British counterculture movement with Stephen Eisenman’s American focus in William Blake and the Age of Aquarius.
Horovitz, Michael. “The Blake Renaissance.” 7-15. Reprints an article originally published in Oxford Opinion (1958) that helped to spur Blake’s reception in the British counterculture movement. Horovitz “argues that Blake ‘evades appraisal because he was always working for a synthesis of creation far beyond outward forms and genres,’ which meant ‘he had to invent his own methods to express himself adequately’” (abstract).
Horovitz, Michael. “William Blake and (a Few of) His Friends in Our Time.” 17-22. “Horovitz reflects on his longstanding fascination with William Blake,” including “how the spirit of Blake loomed large at the International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall in the summer of 1965, where his fellow travellers, among them Adrian Mitchell, were driven by the nineteenth-century poet” (abstract).
Marley, Jodie. “‘Invisible Gates Would Open’: W. B. Yeats and William Blake in the 1890s.” 23-38. “This article examines The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical (1893) and Yeats’s 1890s reviews of his contemporary Blake critics, as well as his relationship with the mystic poet and artist George William Russell (Æ), whom he repeatedly compared to Blake” (abstract).
Trodd, Colin. “William Blake and the Spiritual Forms of Citizenship and Hospitality.” 39-54. A substantial examination of Blake’s reception in Britain between the 1910s and the 1940s.
Hopkins, David. “Avant-Garde Blake: From Francis Bacon to Oz Magazine.” 55-73. Examines “the way the artistic reception of William Blake changed in Britain between the 1950s and the early 1970s” (55).
Riley, James. “Iain Sinclair, William Blake and the Visionary Poetry of the 1960s.” 75-92. “Considers the use made of William Blake by a range of writers associated with the ‘countercultural’ milieu of the 1960s, particularly those linked to its London-based literary context,” including Iain Sinclair, Michael Horovitz, and Harry Fainlight (abstract).
Whittaker, Jason. “‘The Place Where Contrarieties are Equally True’: Blake and the Science-Fiction Counterculture.” 93-106. “Explores the more detached and ironic view of Blake that emerged in the 1970s compared to appropriations of him in the 1960s, as evident in three science-fiction novels: Ray Nelson’s Blake’s Progress (1977), Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977), and J. G. Ballard’s The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)” (abstract).
Bellarsi, Franca. “A Cosmopolitan Case Study: Countercultural Blake in the Therapoetic Practice of maelstrÖm reEvolution.” 107-26. “Explores an instance of the reception and transformation of William Blake’s countercultural legacy by focusing on the neo-Romantic resurgences embodied by maelstrÖm reEvolution, an experimental performance collective based in Brussels but with marked transnational affiliations” (107).
C
Calè, Luisa. “Blake and Exhibitions, 2021.” See Blake 56.1.
Calè, Luisa. “William Blake’s ‘Fourfold Vision’: A Practical Antiquary’s Visionary Contemplations among the ‘Couches of the Dead.’” See Society of Antiquaries in Division II.
Calè, Luisa. “William Blake’s Pestilence, Sympathy, and the Politics of Feeling.” See European Romantic Review under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition in Division II.
Callaghan, Madeleine. “‘All is done as I have told’: Blake’s Eternal Prophecy.” Eternity in British Romantic Poetry. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9781800856066. 23-58. The chapter surveys Blake’s idea of eternity in multiple works.
Author talk
Sangster, Matthew [interviewer]. See
BARS Blog in Part V.
Calonne, David Stephen. The Beats in Mexico. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9781978828728. Slight references to Blake’s influence on Ginsberg, but also, in terms of reception, Blake’s place in the anthology America a Prophecy: A New Reading of American Poetry from Pre-Columbian Times to the Present (1973) (12).
Carpenter, Alicia. “‘There Is No Pure Evil, Nor Pure Good, Only Purity’: William Blake’s and Patti Smith’s Art as Opposition to Societal Boundaries.” Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism: The Emancipation of Female Will. Ed. James Rovira. New York: Routledge, 2023. ISBN: 9781032069845. 103-22.
Chadwick, Esther Alice. “The Radical Print: British Art and Graphic Experiment in the Paper Age.” See Chadwick under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition in Division II.
Choe, Sharon. “Deformed, Dismembered, and Disembodied: Reinventing the Body Politic in William Blake.” PhD diss., University of York, 2022. With references to Thomas Gray, Henry Fuseli, and James Macpherson, Choe “proposes that Northern antiquarianism provided Blake with the necessary language and imagery to critique formations of British identity at the turn of the century” (abstract).
Chrimes, Penny. “Following Blake’s Paths: From Menageries to Brick Pits.” See Vala.
Chunyak, E. S. “Sintez iskusstv v tvorchestve Uil'yama Bleyka (‘Pervaya kniga Urizena’) [The Synthesis of the Arts in the Works of William Blake (The First Book of Urizen)].” Aktual'nye problemy gumanitarnogo obrazovaniya: materialy ikh mezhdunarodnoy nauchno-prakticheskoy konferentsii [Current Problems of Humanitarian Education: Proceedings of the IX International Scientific and Practical Conference]. Minsk, Belarus, 2022. ISBN: 9789858814465. 209-14. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English).
Clark, Steve. “Blake and the Pastoral-Georgic Tradition.” Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire.Romita Ray’s essay in the same collection, “On the Prowl: Tigers and the Tea Planter in British India,” touches very briefly on “The Tyger” (116). Ed. Ve-Yin Tee. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9781474456470. 211-29. Considers Milton “from the perspective of a more historically engaged environmental poetics, drawing on its indebtedness to the tradition of sensibility and focusing in particular on James Thomson, Mark Akenside, and Iolo Morganwg” (212-13).
Cogan, Lucy. Blake and the Failure of Prophecy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan-Springer Nature, 2021. <Blake (2022)>
Reviews
Rosso, G. A. See
Blake 56.3.
Whittaker, Jason. See Whittaker,
Zoamorphosis, in Part V.
Cogan, Lucy. Rev. of William Blake: Modernity and Disaster, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Joel Faflak. See Rajan and Faflak.
Connolly, Tristanne. “The Eternal Lettuce.” See Vala.
Conrad, Leon. “Roots, Shoots, Fruits: William Blake and J. M. Robertson: Two Key Influences on George Spencer-Brown’s Work and the Latter’s Relationship to Niklas Luhmann’s Work.” Kybernetes 51.5 (2022): 1879-95. “This paper explores two key influences on George Spencer-Brown” (1923–2016), an English polymath (abstract).
Curbelo, Jesús David. “William Blake: apuntes para tratar de visionar la voz del bardo.” Agulha 67 (2009): 30 pars. 26 pp. In Spanish. Describes the strength and originality of Blake’s ideas and discourse, while discussing his role as one in a group of “visionaries, individualists and revolutionaries thanks to whom thought has moved against all kinds of authoritarianism and orthodoxy.”
D
D’Agata D’Ottavi, Stefania. La fucina della poesia. Strutture del non finito in Vala or The Four Zoas di William Blake. Venice: Supernova, 2001. 253 pp. ISBN: 9788886870801. In Italian. “The author proposes here a study of William Blake’s manuscript The Four Zoas” (publisher).
Dauphin, Caroline. “Éros et Uranie: Passions animales et végétales dans la poésie d’Erasmus Darwin et de William Blake [Eros and Urania: The Passions of Animals and Plants in the Poetry of Erasmus Darwin and William Blake].” PhD diss., Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2021. 476 pp. In French (abstract in French and English). “The present work aims at observing how a new vision of nature is imagined at the intersection of the Enlightenment and Romanticism from Darwin to Blake. This nature, teeming with passions, is in the wake of the age of sensibility of the long 18th century: plants and animals are endowed with emotions and sensations. It is also remodeled by the transition from the classical episteme to the modern episteme, according to Michel Foucault’s terminology: natural history becomes biology and opens itself to transformism, which arouses a mixture of terror and fascination in Blake’s imagination” (abstract).
Davies, Keri. “Blakespotting.” See Davies in Part V.
Davies, Keri. “‘Inoculation should be common everywhere.’” See Davies in Part V.
Davies, Keri. “William Blake and Smallpox: The Disease in Blake’s London and in Blake’s Art.” See Davies in Part V.
Davies, Keri. “William Hayley and Smallpox.” See Davies in Part V.
Davis, Howard. “Stepping through the Outdoors of Perception.” See Vala.
Davis, Matthew M. “The House of Aumont and Blake’s French Revolution.” See Blake 56.2.
Dennis, Ian. Rev. of Mike Goode, Romantic Capabilities: Blake, Scott, Austen, and the New Messages of Old Media. See Goode.
Dumont, Montaine. Rev. of John Higgs, William Blake vs. the World. See Higgs.
E
Eagles, Diane. “Shadow of Delight and Dance of Eternal Death.” See Vala.
Erle, Sibylle. “The Bloody Burden: Blake’s Flea and Me.” See Vala.
Erle, Sibylle. “Newton’s Sleep.” See Vala.
Essick, Robert N. “Blake in the Marketplace, 2021.” See Blake 55.4.
F
Fabi, Marta. “‘O Rose thou art sick’: Unravelling Social Implications of Body and Mind’s Sickness in William Blake’s Poems of Experience.” Testo e Senso 25 (2022): 177-89. Abstract in Italian and English.
Field, Douglas, and Luke Walker. “Introduction” [to “The Artist of the Future Age: William Blake, Neo-Romanticism, Counterculture and Now”]. See Bulletin of the John Rylands Library.
Freedman, Linda. William Blake and the Myth of America: From the Abolitionists to the Counterculture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. <Blake (2019, 2020)>
Review
Walker, Luke. See
Blake 55.4.
G
§ Ghiţă, Cătălin. “Imaginaţia vizionară contra relativismului ştiinţific. Lupta lui Blake cu Newton.” Litere fără obstacole. Ipostaze ale actului critic. Bucharest: Edítura Ideea Europeană, 2017. ISBN: 9786065945623. 19-29. In Romanian. A chapter on the conflict between experimental science and visionary art as represented by Newton and Blake.
Goldstein, Amanda Jo. “William Blake and the Time of Ontogeny.” Systems of Life: Biopolitics, Economics, and Literature on the Cusp of Modernity. Ed. Richard A. Barney and Warren Montag. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. <Blake (2019, 2021)>
Review
Loar, Christopher F. “
Eighteenth-Century Scholarship in the Web of Life.”
Eighteenth-Century Fiction 34, supplement 1 (fall 2022): 591-603 (with three other books).
Goode, Mike. “Blakespotting” and “The Joy of Looking: What William Blake’s Pictures Want.” Romantic Capabilities: Blake, Scott, Austen, and the New Messages of Old Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. <Blake (2021, 2022)>
Reviews
Dennis, Ian.
Eighteenth-Century Fiction 34.4 (summer 2022): 488-90. Offers “genuine interest to any students of the period and its heritage” (490).
Rovira, James. See
Blake 56.2.
Gopalkrishnan, Carl. “An Artists [sic] Exploration of the Mythic, Subconscious and Literary Constructions of Military Interventions in the Indo-Pacific.” Critical Military Studies (2022): 5 pp. “I share my experience of using William Blake’s 1793 poem America a Prophecy as a lens to explore the mythic, subconscious and literary constructions of military interventions in the Indo-Pacific for my painting Australia a Prophecy” (abstract).
Gorman, Cliff. “Blake Beuys Trees.” See Vala.
Gourlay, Alexander S. Rev. of Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, ed. Adam Komisaruk and Allison Dushane. See Blake 55.4.
Gourlay, Alexander S. Rev. of William Blake, Augurios de inocencia, ed. and trans. Fernando Castanedo. See Blake 56.2.
H
Harmancı, Hasan. “Ebu’l-Alâ el-Ma’arrî’nin el-Lüzûmiyyât’ı ile William Blake’in Masumiyet ve Tecrübe Şarkıları adlı eserlerinde pesimizm [Pessimism in Ebu’l-Alâ el-Ma’arrî’s al-Lüzûmiyyât and William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience].” RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi [RumeliDE Journal of Language and Literature Studies] 26 (Feb. 2022): 825-40. In Turkish (abstract in Turkish and English).
Hay, Daisy. Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age. See Johnson in Division II.
Higgs, John. William Blake vs. the World. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2021. <Blake (2022)>
Reviews
Dumont, Montaine. “
William Blake vs. the World by John Higgs: An Invitation to Blake’s Artistic Journey.”
Daily Art Magazine (28 Nov. 2022).
Kate. “
Fantastic Non-Fiction.”
The Quick and the Read (31 Jan. 2023). “As an English teacher, I’ve often taught Blake’s poetry—‘London,’ blah blah, Romantic poet, blah blah, ‘Poison Tree,’ blah blah, painter, and so on. Still, I didn’t actually know much about the man himself—and it is quite a life story!”
Schaap, Rosie. “Burning Bright.”
New York Times Book Review (5 June 2022): 58. “To me, Higgs often comes across as a bewilderingly innocent reader of Blake, his ear untuned to the poet’s frequencies of irony and humor and to the interpretive and emotional possibilities they extend.” The review is titled “
Songs of Innocence, Experience and a Galaxy Far, Far Away,” in the
New York Times online.
Voves, Ed. “
Art Eyewitness Book Review: William Blake vs. the World by John Higgs.”
Art Eyewitness (28 Nov. 2022).
“
William Blake vs. the World.”
Kirkus (2 Feb. 2022).
Excerpts and author talks
Blame Blake. See
Blame Blake in Part V.
Higgs, John. “
Author Interview: John Higgs’s William Blake vs. the World.”
ArtCurious (24 May 2022). An interview with Higgs on a podcast.
Higgs, John. “
Divinely-Inspired Art: John Higgs on William Blake’s Visions of the Sublime.”
Lit Hub (13 May 2022). An excerpt from Higgs’s book, describing Blake’s childhood.
Higgs, John. “
God Has a Beautiful Mansion for Me Elsewhere: The Last Days of William Blake.”
Lapham’s Quarterly (5 May 2022). An excerpt from Higgs’s book, recounting Blake’s final years, including his conversations with Henry Crabb Robinson.
Higgs, John. “
William Blake vs. the World (with John Higgs).”
History of Literature Podcast (13 June 2022).
TJump. “
John Higgs (Journalist) William Blake vs. the World.” YouTube. 20 Dec. 2022.
Hopkins, David. “Avant-Garde Blake: From Francis Bacon to Oz Magazine.” See Bulletin of the John Rylands Library.
Hopkins, David, and Tom Mason. Chaucer in the Eighteenth Century: The Father of English Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9780192862624. Slight references to Blake’s use of Chaucer in relationship to Dryden’s translation of “The Knight’s Tale,” Palamon and Arcite, in Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry (the source of “At length for hatching ripe he breaks the shell” in The Gates of Paradise) and how Blake echoes Dryden’s idea of the Canterbury pilgrims as types in A Descriptive Catalogue. No discussion of Blake’s Canterbury pilgrims painting or engraving.
Horovitz, Michael. “The Blake Renaissance.” See Bulletin of the John Rylands Library.
Horovitz, Michael. “William Blake and (a Few of) His Friends in Our Time.” See Bulletin of the John Rylands Library.
Hristova, Rumyana. “Man and Nature in Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell.’” See Vala.
I
Isobe, Naoki. “Jugaku Bunsho no Hondukuri to Shisaku no Seisei: Blake to Whitman no Seihon Giho Saigen no Kokoromi [Bookbinding of Bunsho Jugaku and His Generation of Thought: An Attempt at Reconstruction of His Technique for Binding Blake and Whitman <BSJ pp. 25-27>].” Kojitsuan [Sunward Cottage] 5 (2022): 38-48. In Japanese.
Ito, Yuki. “Toso no Honoo to Moetsukinu Mono: Blake to Nietzsche wo Tunagu Mono tshiteno Yeats no Jacob Böhme no Juyo nitsuite [A Flame of Battle and Something That Never Burns Out: The Reception of Jacob Böhme in Yeats as a Link between Blake and Nietzsche].” See Ito under Boehme in Division II.
J
James, John Patrick. “Blake’s Debt: Artisanship and the Future of Labor.” Literature Compass 19.3-4 (2022): 15 pp. “Investigates William Blake’s poetic response to the problems of religious and financial debt within the context of his own environmentally compromised era” (abstract).
K
Kaminski da Silva, Arthur Aroha. “As crianças de Salinger: Inocência e sacralização da infância em Nine Stories (1953) [Salinger’s Children: Innocence and Childhood Sacredness in Nine Stories (1953)].” Teoliterária 11.24 (2021): 242-69. In Portuguese (abstract in Portuguese and English). “There is a strong similarity between the way that the north American writer J. D. Salinger built the various child-characters of Nine Stories (1953)—specially the one named Teddy—and the romantic poetic of childhood, inaugurated by English authors like William Blake and William Wordsworth” (abstract).
§ King, William S. In the Cause of Liberty: William Blake, Thomas Paine, Jean-Paul Marat and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century. Atmosphere Press, 2022. Appears to be self-published.
Knott, Sam. “On the Inside-Outline.” See Vala.
Komisaruk, Adam. “Love among the Ruins.” Sexual Privatism in British Romantic Writing: A Public of One. New York: Routledge, 2019. <Blake (2020)>
Review
Schuchard, Marsha Keith. See
Blake 55.4.
Kovalenko, Galina, and Il'ya Smyvalov. “Interpretatsiya i perevod kreolizovannogo poeticheskogo teksta U. Bleyka ‘The Little Boy Lost’ v aspekte teorii kontseptual'noy integratsii [Ιnterpretation and Translation of W. Blake’s Creolized Poetic Text ‘The Little Boy Lost’ in the Aspect of the Theory of Conceptual Integration].” Molodoy uchenyy [Young Scientist] 21 (416) (2022): 236-40. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). “The article deals with the concept of ‘creolized text,’ with the theory of conceptual integration, the interaction of meanings formed in the process of perception of the verbal and pictorial components of the illustrated poem by W. Blake ‘The Little Boy Lost.’”
L
Larman, Hugo W. “The Garden of the Four Zoas.” See Vala.
Lee, Tara. “Against Self-Organization: Redefining Vitality with William Blake in Jerusalem and The Four Zoas.” Studies in Romanticism 61.3 (fall 2022): 351-77. “Blake, incorporating opposing scientific theories into one mythological framework, drew heavily on preformationist ideas and imagery to contrast the eternal forms of spiritual life against material, autopoietic semblances of vitality” (abstract).
Lee, Tara. “Fibres, Globules, Cells: William Blake and the Biological Individual.” Romanticism on the Net 76 (2021). “This article argues that William Blake’s critique of eighteenth-century medicine is grounded upon a Romantic view of organic form shared by contemporary scientists such as Lorenz Oken” (abstract).
Lee, Tara. “Soul, Seed, Species: William Blake and the Language of Preformationist Biology.” PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2022.
Lee-Six, Edward. “Blake’s Compasses: Materialist Criticism and Romanticism as a Structure of Feeling.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 24.1 (2022): 54-79. A Marxist reading of Blake’s and Romanticism’s relationship to empiricism and capitalism, using Raymond Williams’s term “structure of feeling.”
Leveton, Jacob Henry. “Of ‘Combustion, blast, vapour, and cloud’: William Blake’s Urizen as Steam Engine, Albion Mill, and Notes towards a Materialist Method for the Anthropocene.” Essays in Romanticism 29.2 (2022): 131-54. The depiction of pollution in The [First] Book of Urizen “invites readers to make connections with Albion Mill as a resonant site of industrial production where steam engines were first deployed in a process of mass manufacture in Romantic-period London” (abstract).
Leveton, Jacob Henry. “Blake’s Gothic Nature as Spiritual Exercise.” See Vala.
Lincoln, Andrew. “Blake, Lucretius, and Prophecy: The Book of Los.” See Blake 56.3.
Loar, Christopher F. Rev. of Systems of Life: Biopolitics, Economics, and Literature on the Cusp of Modernity, ed. Richard A. Barney and Warren Montag. See Goldstein.
§ Lussier, Mark. “The Contra-dictions of Design II: William Blake’s Illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy.” “The Classroom as Home: A Festschrift in Honor of Anthony Lacy Gully (1938–2021).” Phoebus: A Journal of Art History 11 (2022).
M
Marchetto, Cecilia. “Blake’s Gothic Nature versus the Appeal-to-Nature Fallacy.” See Vala.
Marley, Jodie. “‘Invisible Gates Would Open’: W. B. Yeats and William Blake in the 1890s.” See Bulletin of the John Rylands Library.
Martello, Matthew. “The Notebook, Laocoön, and Blake’s Beauties of Inflection.” See Blake 56.3.
McLean, Andrea. “The Making of a Mythical Shield.” See Vala.
McMichael, Trevor A. “Everyday Revenge and British Romanticism.” PhD diss., Indiana University, 2022. Touches on Blake’s commercial engraving “Tythe in Kind; or The Sow’s Revenge,” which was published in the Wit’s Magazine (1784) (Essick, CB XVI).
McQuail, Josephine A. Rev. of Marsha Keith Schuchard, A Concatenation of Conspiracies: “Irish” William Blake and Illuminist Freemasonry in 1798. See Blake 56.2.
Mellor, Anne Kostelanetz. Blake’s Human Form Divine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022. UC Press Voices Revived. A reprint of her 1974 study <BB A2211, WBHC pp. 2397-98>.
Modina, G. I. “Zhanrovaya priroda ‘Proritsaniy nevedeniya’ Uil'yama Bleyka v russkikh perevodakh [The Genre Essence of William Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’ in Russian Translations].” Kazanskaya nauka [Kazan Science] 4 (2022): 23-26. In Russian.
Monteyne, Joseph. “Form and Formlessness in Blake’s Embedded Media.” See Monteyne under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition in Division II.
Morton, Timothy. “Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence.” See Vala.
Mota, Thiago, and Fernanda S. Murro. “O Inferno de Dante e suas representações: Análise do inferno d’A Divina Comédia através das ilustrações de William Blake (século XVIII), Gustave Doré (século XIX) e Helder Rocha (século XX) [Dante’s Hell and Its Representations: Analyses of The Divine Comedy’s Hell across the Illustrations of William Blake (Eighteenth Century), Gustave Doré (Nineteenth Century), and Helder Rocha (Twentieth Century)].” Contemporâneos 5 (2010): 30-41. In Portuguese (abstract in Portuguese and English).
Muratova, Yaroslava. “Romanticheskiy diptikh: ‘Kain’ lorda Bayrona i ‘Prizrak Avelya’ Uil'yama Bleyka [Romantic Diptych: Lord Byron’s Cain and The Ghost of Abel by William Blake].” “V otvet na luchshie dary”: venok k 63-mu dnyu rozhdeniya Aleksandra Evgen'evicha Makhova [“In response to the best gifts”: A Wreath for the Sixty-Third Birthday of Alexander Evgenievich Makhov]. Tula: Akvarius, 2022. ISBN: 9785604863541. 312-21. In Russian.
Murray-White, James. “Alive and Undead in the Vegetable World.” See Vala.
Myrone, Martin, and Amy Concannon, with an afterword by Alan Moore. William Blake. London: Tate Publishing, 2019. Catalogue for the 2019–20 Tate Britain exhibition. <Blake (2020, 2021, 2022)>
Review
Taws, Richard.
Print Quarterly 38.4 (2021): 438-39.
Mzokova, Violetta. “Vokal'nyy tsikl Desyat' pesen Bleyka Voana Uil'yamsa [Ten Blake Songs Vocal Cycle by Vaughan Williams].” Internauka 25.1 (248) (2022): 29-30. In Russian.
N
Navarro Ramírez, Sergio. “La aporía de la profecía en William Blake.” Palabra y acción. El profetismo en la literatura moderna y contemporánea. Ed. Gabriel Insausti and Luis Galván. Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza, 2022. ISBN: 9788413404837. 45-59. In Spanish. The essay “studies Blake’s visionary poems, his overcoming of the empirical tradition and of enlightened thinking, his theory of the imagination and his attempt at a (re)mythologizing of the world” (prologue, p. 11).
Nicholson, Eric. “The Seductive Trap of Nature.” See Vala.
Nurse, Bernard. “Commentary [to vol. 2, nos. 29-35].” See Vetusta Monumenta in Part III, Section A.
O
Oliveira, Camila, and Jason Whittaker. “Blake and Music, 2021.” See Blake 56.1.
O’Regan, Keith. Towards a Productive Aesthetics: Contemporary and Historical Interventions in Blake and Brecht. Leiden: Brill, 2022. ISBN: 9789004501843. “Compare[s] the political-aesthetic strategies of William Blake (1757–1827) and Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)” (abstract). The chapters on Blake focus on the Songs and Milton.
O’Rourke, Stephanie. “Art after Self Evidence: Fuseli, Blake, and Banks.” See European Romantic Review under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition in Division II.
O’Sullivan, Michael. “‘Nature has no Outline but Imagination has.’” See Vala.
Öztürk, Zekiye Aslıhan. “Bir Aydınlanma Tartışması: Blake & Newton [An Enlightenment Argument: Blake & Newton].” Uluslararası Disiplinlerarası ve Kültürlerarası Sanat Dergisi [International Journal of Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Art] 7.15 (Dec. 2022): 156-66. In Turkish (abstract in Turkish and English).
P
Pashchenko, Maria. “Vzaimosvyaz' slova i izobrazheniya v khudozhestvennykh proizvedeniyakh s avtorskimi illyustratsiyami na primere rabot U. Bleyka [Interrelation of Word and Image in Literature Works with Author’s Illustrations on the Example of W. Blake’s Works].” Nauchnye dostizheniya i innovatsionnye podkhody: teoriya, metodologiya, praktika: sbornik nauchnykh trudov po materialam V Mezhdunarodnoy nauchno-prakticheskoy konferentsii [Academic Achievements and Innovative Approaches: Theory, Methodology, Practice: A Collection of Scientific Papers Based on Materials of the V International Scientific and Practical Conference]. Anapa, 2022. ISBN: 9785952839182. 65-69. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). The author analyzes text and image interaction using examples from “The Clod and the Pebble,” “The Ecchoing Green,” and “The Fly.”
Paylor, David M. “The Furnaces of William Blake.” See Vala.
Picón, Daniela. “El águila y la visión profética en los libros iluminados de William Blake.” Remontar el vuelo. Aves en la poesía británica y latinoamericana de los siglos XIX y XX. Ed. Paula Baldwin Lind. Santiago, Chile: Ril Editores, 2021. ISBN: 9788418982101. 133-45. In Spanish. The chapter wishes to “inquire into the figure of the prophet with an eagle’s head in William Blake’s Jerusalem,” a figure that “had provided the visionary tradition with a powerful model in which Blake also recognized himself” (abstract).
Popova, A. Yu., and N. G. Smolina. “Trudnosti perevoda, ili o perevodcheskom stile i lichnosti perevodchika [Difficulty of Translation, or Translator’s Style and Personality].” Vektory razvitiya rusistiki i lingvodidaktiki v kontekste sovremennogo filologicheskogo obrazovaniya. Materialy II Mezhdunarodnoy nauchno-prakticheskoy konferentsii, posvyashchennoy 90-letiyu universiteta [Development Vectors of Russian Studies and Linguistic Didactics in the Context of Modern Philological Education. Materials of the II International Scientific-Practical Conference Dedicated to the Ninetieth Anniversary of the University]. Astrakhan, 2022. ISBN: 9785992614039. 193-96. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). This article makes a comparative analysis of translations of Blake’s poem “The Tyger” by Konstantin Bal'mont and Samuil Marshak.
Potter, Elizabeth. “Manuscript Manifestations: Reassessing William Blake’s Marginalia in the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1798).” PhD diss., University of York, 2022.
Pritchard, Stephen. “Human Nature.” See Vala.
Pritchard, Stephen. Rev. of Jason Whittaker, Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness. See Vala.
R
Rajan, Tilottama, and Joel Faflak, eds. William Blake: Modernity and Disaster. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. <Blake (2021, 2022)>
Reviews
Cogan, Lucy.
BARS Review 56 (2021): 7 pars. “This volume brings together both established Blake scholars and newer voices to form a provocative and often exciting collection” (par. 7).
Saklofske, Jon.
European Romantic Review 33.4 (2022): 573-78 (with Jason Whittaker,
Divine Images). “It is a book by specialists, for specialists, and—while offering unique and fresh insight into the ways that Blake’s work resonates through a broad variety of ideas, theoretical concepts, and comparative illuminations—ultimately requires a significant, nuanced, and exclusive knowledge of Blake studies as a prerequisite to its comprehension and critical usefulness” (574).
Reesman, Linda L. Rev. of Edina Adam, with Julian Brooks, and an essay by Matthew Hargraves, William Blake: Visionary. See Adam with Brooks.
Regier, Alexander. Exorbitant Enlightenment: Blake, Hamann, and Anglo-German Constellations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. <Blake (2019, 2020)>
Review
Bode, Christoph.
Studies in Romanticism 61.3 (fall 2022): 467-72. “This book deserves our attention” (467).
Rigby, Kate. “‘the wrong dream’: Prophetic Ecopoetics.” Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonization. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. ISBN: 9781474290593. 113-47. “I identify a specifically ecopoetic variant of the prophetic mode of Romantic literature, as exemplified above all by Blake” (113).
Riley, James. “Iain Sinclair, William Blake and the Visionary Poetry of the 1960s.” See Bulletin of the John Rylands Library.
Ripley, Wayne C., with Fernando Castanedo, Hikari Sato, Hüseyin Alhas, and Vera Serdechnaia. “William Blake and His Circle: A Checklist of Scholarship in 2021.” See Blake 56.1.
Rodríguez Rivero, Manuel. Rev. of William Blake, Augurios de inocencia, ed. and trans. Fernando Castanedo. See Ballads Manuscript in Part I, Section A.
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. ISBN: 9783864852763. In English and German. Contemporary German followers of Mesmer document their efforts to use group hypnosis to recreate Blake’s lost painting in various media.
Rosso, G. A. Rev. of Lucy Cogan, Blake and the Failure of Prophecy. See Blake 56.3.
Rovira, James. Rev. of Mike Goode, Romantic Capabilities: Blake, Scott, Austen, and the New Messages of Old Media. See Blake 56.2.
Rowland, Christopher. “William Blake, Apocalyptic Poet and Painter.” “By an Immediate Revelation”: Studies in Apocalypticism, Its Origins and Effects. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2022. ISBN: 9783161597862. 629-738. A massive study of apocalypticism from the Hebrew Bible to William Blake that draws together many of Rowland’s disparate publications as well as previously unpublished essays. The book includes a useful list detailing “Particulars of First Publication” (775-79), and I have recorded these references in the notes and whether the essays were previously recorded in Blake or WBHC. Blake has his own section, “William Blake, Apocalyptic Poet and Painter,” as well as an appearance earlier in the book.
“William Blake (1757–1827): Visionary, Artist and Poetic Exegete.” 501-04.Originally published as part of “English Radicals and the Exegesis of the Apocalypse,” Die prägende Kraft der Texte: Hermeneutik und Wirkungsgeschichte des Neuen Testaments. Ein Symposium zu Ehren von Ulrich Luz, ed. Moisés Mayordomo (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 2005) 160-78. [Not recorded in Blake or WBHC.]
“Blake and the Bible: Biblical Exegesis in the Work of William Blake.” 631-44.“An earlier version” (631) was published in Biblical Interpretation: The Meanings of Scripture—Past and Present, ed. J. M. Court (London: T&T Clark, 2003) 168-84. It also appeared in International Journal of Systematic Theology 7 (2005): 142-54. <WBHC p. 2616> As Bentley notes, “The essay [also] seems to be silently reprinted from” the Journal of the Blake Society at St. James’s 4 (1999): 3-19.
“William Blake and Ezekiel’s Merkabah.” 645-60.“An earlier form of this essay” was published as “Wheels within Wheels”: William Blake and the Ezekiel’s Merkabah in Text and Image (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2007) and delivered as the Père Marquette Lecture in Theology in 2007. <WBHC p. 2619>
“‘Mr Blake, apo- or rather ana-calyptic Poet, and Painter’: Apocalyptic Hermeneutics in Action.” 661-80.Originally published in Die Johannesapokalypse: Kontext—Konzepte—Rezeption, ed. Jörg Frey, James A. Kelhoffer, and Franz Tóth (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012) 793-812. <WBHC p. 2618>
“Blake: Text and Image.” 681-702.Originally published in The Edinburgh Companion to the Bible and the Arts, ed. Stephen Prickett (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014) 307-26. [Not recorded in Blake or WBHC.]
“William Blake and the Apocalypse.” 703-19.Originally published in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. John Barton (5 Aug. 2016). <Blake (2017)>
“Blake, Enoch, and Emerging Biblical Criticism.” 720-38.Originally published in Sibyls, Scriptures, and Scrolls: John Collins at Seventy, ed. Joel Baden, Hindy Najman, and Eibert Tigchelaar (Leiden: Brill, 2016) 1145-65. <Blake (2017)>
Rubel, William Ilan. “‘Earth’s Answer’: Blake’s Terran Ecology.” See Vala.
S
Said, S. F. “Tyger.” See Vala.
Saklofske, Jon. Rev. of William Blake: Modernity and Disaster, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Joel Faflak, and Jason Whittaker, Divine Images: The Life and Work of William Blake. See Rajan and Faflak and Whittaker, Divine Images.
Sánchez Tierraseca, Mónica. “La concepción de un Dios antropomorfo eterno y universal en Swedenborg y William Blake.” La presencia del ausente. Dios en literatos contemporáneos. Ed. Juan Agustín Mancebo Roca, Antonio Barnés, and Alicia Nila Martínez Díaz. Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2021. ISBN: 9788490444498. 169-84. In Spanish. The article seeks to explore Swedenborg’s presence in Blake’s idea of divinity.
Sato, Hikari. “W. H. Hudson no Kyosei Shiso to Jugaku Bunsho: William Blake no Keifu nouede [Ecological Consciousness of W. H. Hudson and Bunsho Jugaku: Following the Tracks of William Blake].” Kojitsuan [Sunward Cottage] 5 (2022): 1-7. In Japanese. The essay points out that W. H. Hudson, an author and ornithologist, mentions “Auguries of Innocence” in Birds in a Village (London: Chapman & Hall, 1893, 124-25), Birds in Town & Village (London: J. M. Dent, 1919, 172), Nature in Downland, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1900, 272), and The Land’s End: A Naturalist’s Impressions in West Cornwall (London: Hutchinson, 1908, 274), and “The Tyger” in Nature in Downland (244-45) and Birds and Man (London: Duckworth, 1915, 168-69). In W. H. Hudson: A Portrait (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1924) Morley Roberts records their conversation as follows: “R. ‘What do you think of Blake?’ / H. ‘I can’t read his long mystical stuff, but of course I like Songs of Innocence’” (192).
Schaap, Rosie. Rev. of John Higgs, William Blake vs. the World. See Higgs.
Schuchard, Marsha Keith. A Concatenation of Conspiracies: “Irish” William Blake and Illuminist Freemasonry in 1798. Alexandria, VA: Plumbstone Academic, 2021. <Blake (2022)>
Review
McQuail, Josephine A. See
Blake 56.2.
Schuchard, Marsha Keith. Rev. of Adam Komisaruk, Sexual Privatism in British Romantic Writing: A Public of One. See Blake 55.4.
Sedgwick, Julian. “Fearful Eye—‘The Tyger’ and Tigers of My Childhood.” See Vala.
Shteynbrekher, Andrey, and Konstantin Savel'ev. “Bleykovskie motivy v sovremennom mediaprostranstve (na primere komp'yuternoy igry ‘Devil May Cry 5’ i animatsionnogo seriala ‘Patriotizm Moriarti’) [Blake’s Motives in the Modern Media Space (the Example of the Computer Game Devil May Cry 5 and the Animated Series Patriotism of Moriarty)].” Mirovaya literatura glazami sovremennoy molodezhi. Tsifrovaya epokha. Sbornik materialov VIII mezhdunarodnoy molodezhnoy nauchno-prakticheskoy konferentsii [World Literature in the Eyes of Modern Youth. The Digital Age. Collection of Materials of the VIII International Youth Scientific and Practical Conference]. Magnitogorsk, 2022. ISBN: 9785996725472. 157-62. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English). The article examines the phenomenon of Blake in the modern gaming and media space based on the material of the game project Devil May Cry 5 and the animated series Patriotism of Moriarty. It also analyzes the main layer of the poet’s texts and engravings appearing in the products of popular culture.
Sluyter, Dean. “Eternity’s Sunrise: William Blake.” The Dharma Bum’s Guide to Western Literature: Finding Nirvana in the Classics. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2022. ISBN: 9781608687695. 7-10. The chapter is a popular celebration of Blake’s spiritual and visionary awakening.
Suzuki, Masashi. “‘Gensoteki na Mokuso’: Blake no Kojibutsu Aiko Shugiteki Sozoryoku [‘Visionary contemplations’: Blake’s Antiquarian Imagination].” Eibungaku Kenkyu Shibu Togo Go [Studies in English Literature. Regional Branches Combined Issue] 14 (2022): 139-47. 2 plates by Blake. In Japanese, with English synopsis.
T
Takagi, Masafumi. Bijutsu de Yomu Chusei Europe no Seijin to Eiyu no Densetsu [Legends of Saints and Heroes in Medieval Europe Read through Fine Arts]. Tokyo: Miyai Shoten, 2020. 263 pp. 1 plate by Blake. ISBN: 9784838233694. In Japanese. Blake is briefly discussed in part 3, “Dante Shinkyoku [Dante, The Divine Comedy]” (193-94).
Tanigawa, Atsushi. Bungo tachi no Seiyo Bijutsu: Natsume Soseki kara Matsumoto Seicho made [Western Arts in Great Authors: From Soseki Natsume to Seicho Matsumoto]. Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2020. 111 pp. 3 plates by Blake. ISBN: 9784309291222. In Japanese. It includes sections such as “Sato Haruo no William Blake [William Blake in Haruo Sato]” (27-28), “Haniya Yutaka no Blake [Blake in Yutaka Haniya]” (84-86), and “Ito Sei no Blake [Blake in Sei Ito]” (100-02), where the author briefly discusses how these Japanese novelists and poets appreciated Blake the artist.
Taylor, David. “Albion’s Ancient Druid Rocky Shore.” See Vala.
Tebourski, Ines. “William Blake’s Jerusalem and the Rewriting of the Future.” See Vala.
Torralbo, Juan de Dios. “‘Beauty is truth’: Carlos Clementson, traductor de los románticos ingleses” [‘Beauty is truth’: Carlos Clementson, Translator of the English Romantic Poets].” Monteagudo 27 (2022): 379-407. In Spanish (abstract in Spanish and English). “Examines the translations of the English Romantics by the Cordoban poet Carlos Clementson, who put works by these eight poets into Spanish: William Blake, Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Joseph Blanco White, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats” (abstract).
Townsend, Chris. “Spiritual Bodies and Mental Reality in Blake.” George Berkeley and Romanticism: Ghostly Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9780192846785. 57-86. A long-needed reassessment of Berkeley’s impact on Romanticism. The chapter on Blake incorporates material from Townsend’s article “Visionary Immaterialism: Berkeleian Empiricism in Blake’s Poetry” <Blake (2020)>.
Trodd, Colin. “William Blake and the Spiritual Forms of Citizenship and Hospitality.” See Bulletin of the John Rylands Library.
V
Vala: The Journal of the Blake Society
Issue 3 (November 2022)
Articles
Erle, Sibylle. “Newton’s Sleep.” 4-5. An introduction to the issue, which focuses on Blake and nature: “Blake … can help us to find a common language for the future, a language that pays equal respect to the environment and the human and non-human life within it” (5).
Anonymous, with illustration by Richard Hemmings. Poem. 6. “We are part of the earth and it is part of us.” A note reads, “This poem is inspired and edited from ‘Message to the Modern World’ written by a Native American Chief in 1855” (6).
Knott, Sam. “On the Inside-Outline.” 7-9. Includes artwork.
Morley, Helen. “Creation Matters.” 10-13. Artwork from the artist’s “limited edition fine press book called Creation Matters” (13).
Eagles, Diane. “Shadow of Delight and Dance of Eternal Death.” 14-17. “I wanted to produce a work for Catherine as a companion to my ceramic sculpture for Blake’s grave, ‘The Lamb at the Gate’” (14).
Gorman, Cliff. “Blake Beuys Trees.” 18-19. “[Joseph] Beuys, just like Blake, embedded social concerns into his art. Art, he insisted, must have social value” (19).
Larman, Hugo W. “The Garden of the Four Zoas.” 20-23. An account and reproduction of a garden design dedicated to Kathleen Raine.
Erle, Sibylle, with illustration by John Riordan. “The Bloody Burden: Blake’s Flea and Me.” 24-27. On Erle’s encounters with Newton and The Ghost of a Flea.
Verlaan, Philomène. “Are Life and Nature Joined in Delight? An Exploration.” 28-29. On Blake’s line “For every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life.” “Blake’s line suggests that Life may be omni-present, auto-catalytic, and self-reflecting” (28).
Said, S. F. “Tyger.” 31-35. On his book Tyger, which is illustrated by Dave McKean.
Sedgwick, Julian. “Fearful Eye—‘The Tyger’ and Tigers of My Childhood.” 36-39. An autobiographical sketch.
Chrimes, Penny, with illustration by Tamsin Rosewell. “Following Blake’s Paths: From Menageries to Brick Pits.” 40-43. “The research I’ve done for my children’s novels—Tiger Heart and The Dragon and Her Boy—[has] found me retracing Blake’s footsteps, through the menageries and brick pits of eighteenth-century London, in search of escaped tigers and ancient beasts” (41).
Rice, Benjamin. “Wild Cherry.” 44-45. Photographs.
Saral, Ramazan, with photography by Nelin Baykaldi. “Nature Is Imagination Itself.” 46. A poem.
Mullard, Jonathan, with illustration by Richard Hemmings. “Richard Mabey and Blake.” 47. A poem by Mabey.
O’Sullivan, Michael. “‘Nature has no Outline but Imagination has.’” 48-50. “Nature has a dual significance for Blake” (50).
Murray-White, James. “Alive and Undead in the Vegetable World.” 51-53. On his film Finding Blake (2021) and Blake’s meaning: “My over-riding sense of Blake is of a poet/painter/prophet of the imagination, directly connecting humanity (of all time) with the potential to live our greatest spiritual life: an artist of intellectual transcendence, rather than a grounded nature artist per se” (51).
McLean, Andrea. “The Making of a Mythical Shield.” 54-57. On the making of the artwork (reproduced on pp. 54-55).
Wilson, Andy. “Ecology and Blake’s Visionary Animism.” 58-59. “Where, at the beginning of industrial society, the failure of the French Revolution led Coleridge and Wordsworth to turn inwards to achieve reconciliation with nature in their thoughts, now, at the end, the threat of environmental catastrophe demands of us that we turn Blake’s fourfold vision back outward, and make it into the programme for a revived counterculture” (59).
Davis, Howard. “Stepping through the Outdoors of Perception.” 60-61. “I spend my days walking in the footsteps of William Blake. I am a gestalt therapist working experientially with clients in the wealth of open spaces London provides” (61).
Pritchard, Stephen. “Human Nature.” 62-65. “Our potential, in a Moment, is to realise our shared humanity and our true nature” (65).
Paylor, David M. “The Furnaces of William Blake.” 66-67. On the importance of furnaces in “The Tyger” and other poems.
Nicholson, Eric. “The Seductive Trap of Nature.” 68-69. “I’d like to briefly explore Blake’s attitude to nature by considering one single image of Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826)—plate 15, a black-and-white print with border inscriptions” (69).
Taylor, David. “Albion’s Ancient Druid Rocky Shore.” 70-71. “What could be more natural than nature? Yet ‘nature’ is a construct of human thought” (70).
Tebourski, Ines. “William Blake’s Jerusalem and the Rewriting of the Future.” 72-74. “The ecological poetics of Blake’s works aspired to foreground natural issues as a subject of utmost emergency” (74).
Hristova, Rumyana. “Man and Nature in Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell.’” 75-76. “A natural consequence of the integration of rational thinking and imagination is the change in man’s attitude and relationship with nature” (76).
Marchetto, Cecilia, with illustration by G. E. Gallas. “Blake’s Gothic Nature versus the Appeal-to-Nature Fallacy.” 77-78. “It would be easy to get carried away by the rediscovery of a nature-loving Blake and forget all the nuance, ambiguities and contradictions that complicated his idea of nature” (77).
Volpone, Annalisa, with illustration by Tamsin Rosewell. “Between Maker Meek & Beasts of Prey: Lyca & the Non-human World.” 79-81. “The powerful returning of the repressed recounted in the Lyca poems also enacts an ecological crisis, a necessary change of paradigm, the access to a different realm” (81).
Leveton, Jacob Henry. “Blake’s Gothic Nature as Spiritual Exercise.” 82-83. “Blake’s ecological vision was capacious” (82).
Bellarsi, Franca, with illustration by John Riordan. “‘Without Contraries is no progression’: Blake My Teacher.” 84-88. “Said differently, for the ecocritic engaging with Blake, there is no comfortable, linear road to either clear-cut biocentrism or unqualified anthropocentrism” (88).
Connolly, Tristanne, with illustration by Sally Kindberg. “The Eternal Lettuce.” 89-92. Interesting considerations of Blake, Erasmus Darwin, and “plant motility” (90).
Greasley, Sam. “Sunflower.” 93. Artwork.
Rubel, William Ilan. “‘Earth’s Answer’: Blake’s Terran Ecology.” 94-99. “For ages, I have wanted to attempt an SF (speculative fabulist) reading of William Blake. … I make this attempt now, with two footholds. The first is the image of Earth raising her head in answer to the Bard, in Songs of Experience. The second is a formula … : in Blake, the optic equals purity and the haptic equals promiscuity” (95).
Morton, Timothy, interviewed by George Laver. “Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence.” 100-03. An interview with Morton about his forthcoming book Hell on Earth.
Reviews
Pritchard, Stephen. Rev. of Jason Whittaker, Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness. 104. “This book combines a love of Blake with years of research and is likely to be of great interest not only to Blakeans, but also to a far wider readership.”
Whittaker, Jason. Rev. of S. F. Said, Tyger, illus. Dave McKean. 104-05. “Finally, this novel feels very Blakean in terms of its design: the art of Dave McKean—and the layout of the novel as a whole—makes this a particularly engrossing novel” (105).
Valtat, Jean-Christophe. “‘Cabinets de Cristal.’ Modèles techniques de l’expérience visionnaire chez Blake, Nerval et Baudelaire.” Bulletin du Centre de recherche français à Jérusalem 24 (2013): 32 pars. 10 pp. In French (abstract in French and English). “If Blake’s, Nerval’s and Baudelaire’s texts show a different approach to the visionary experience, they all resort to the use of a ‘crystal cabinet’—an immersive optical machine which is half-diorama, half-panorama and which modelizes [sic] both the visual aspect and the psychological impact of the visionary experience” (abstract).
Verlaan, Philomène. “Are Life and Nature Joined in Delight? An Exploration.” See Vala.
Volpone, Annalisa. “Between Maker Meek & Beasts of Prey: Lyca & the Non-human World.” See Vala.
Voves, Ed. Rev. of John Higgs, William Blake vs. the World. See Higgs.
W
Walker, Luke. Rev. of Linda Freedman, William Blake and the Myth of America: From the Abolitionists to the Counterculture. See Blake 55.4.
Wang, Orrin N. C. “Two Pipers and the Cliché of Romanticism.” Techno-Magism: Media, Mediation, and the Cut of Romanticism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9780823298471. Briefly discusses the “Introduction” from Songs of Innocence. (The chapter originally appeared in British Romanticism: Criticism and Debates, ed. Mark Canuel <Blake [2018]>.)
Weston, Sarah T. “Matrix, Imprint, Dot: Romantic Data by the Fingertip.” Wordsworth Circle 53.3 (2022): 395-421. “This article unites book history, disability studies, and media studies, examining what blindness and sight meant to the early Romantic poets (from poetic meditations on the subject to actual bodily struggles with vision) alongside emergent systems of writing invented for blind readers, from embossed typographies to braille. Blake’s ‘infernal method’ of relief printing particularly yields fruitful juxtapositions with these book media for the blind” (395-96).
Whittaker, Jason. Divine Images: The Life and Work of William Blake. London: Reaktion Books, 2021. <Blake (2022)>
Review
Saklofske, Jon.
European Romantic Review 33.4 (2022): 573-78 (with
William Blake: Modernity and Disaster, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Joel Faflak). “Serves as an excellent introduction to the ways in which Blake and his creative expressions are situated in and respond to the context of his particular cultural moment and would be at home equally in an undergraduate course on Blake’s work and on the bookshelves of anyone interested in diving deeper into Blake’s biographical and interpretative detail” (574).
Whittaker, Jason. “Going Global—Blake’s Afterlife.” See Murray-White in Part V.
Whittaker, Jason. Jerusalem: Blake, Parry, and the Fight for Englishness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9780192845870. A definitive and detailed reception history of the “Jerusalem” hymn and its setting by Hubert Parry in relationship to English identity from the poem’s composition in Milton to the summer of 2020.
Review and author talk
Pritchard, Stephen. See
Vala.
Whittaker, Jason. “‘Jerusalem’—A Personal History.” See Whittaker,
Zoamorphosis, in Part V.
Whittaker, Jason. “‘The Place Where Contrarieties are Equally True’: Blake and the Science-Fiction Counterculture.” See Bulletin of the John Rylands Library.
Whittaker, Jason. Rev. of Fake Blakes [Blake Archive exhibition]. See Whittaker, Zoamorphosis, in Part V.
Whittaker, Jason. Rev. of Lucy Cogan, Blake and the Failure of Prophecy. See Whittaker, Zoamorphosis, in Part V.
Whittaker, Jason. Rev. of S. F. Said, Tyger, illus. Dave McKean. See Vala.
Whittaker, Jason. “Visions of Albion in Felpham: Blake, Sussex, and the Origins of the Hymn ‘Jerusalem.’” See Blake Society in Part V.
Willer, Claudio. “William Blake, poeta e profeta.” Agulha 67 (2009): 32 pars. 15 pp. In Portuguese. The article, following Gershom Scholem, sees Blake as a revolutionary mystic, rather than a conservative one, given his refusal to accept a literal reading of scripture. Likewise, in light of Northrop Frye’s descriptions of Blake’s myths, it discusses the essential instability and delirious, oneiric character of his symbols.
“William Blake vs. the World.” An anonymous review. See Higgs.
Wilson, Andy. “Ecology and Blake’s Visionary Animism.” See Vala.
Wilson, Louise. “Printing Imperfections in William Blake’s Virgil Wood Engravings and What They Reveal.” See Blake 56.2.
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. ISBN: 9781503632769. 99-137. With some interesting comparisons to Phillis Wheatley, Wolff argues that, “for Blake, desire is configured as material constraint in the production of knowledge, often by way of a geological imaginary” (108).
Worrall, David. “‘Seen in my visions’: Klüver Form-Constant Visual Hallucinations in William Blake’s Paintings and Illuminated Books.” See Blake 55.4.
Z
Zhigala, K. G. “Tema bogoborchestva v tvorchestve U. Bleyka [The Theme of Enmity against God in the Works of W. Blake].” Chelovek i priroda: Sbornik materialov studencheskoy nauchno-prakticheskoy konferentsii [Man and Nature: Collection of Materials of the Student Scientific-Practical Conference]. Omsk, 2022. ISBN: 9785826823330. 90-92. In Russian.
Division II: William Blake’s Circle
Banks, Thomas (1735–1805)
Sculptor
O’Rourke, Stephanie. “Art after Self Evidence: Fuseli, Blake, and Banks.” See European Romantic Review under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Barry, James (1741–1806)
History painter
Chadwick, Esther Alice. “The Radical Print: British Art and Graphic Experiment in the Paper Age.” See Chadwick under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Taylor, David Francis. “Picturing Ekphrasis: Image and Text in Shakespeare Painting.” See European Romantic Review under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Basire, James, Sr. (1730–1802)
Engraver, Blake’s master
Goddard, Richard. “Basire Sr., James (1730–1802).” See Vetusta Monumenta in Division I, Part III, Section A.
Nurse, Bernard. “Commentary [to vol. 2, nos. 29-35].” See Vetusta Monumenta in Division I, Part III, Section A.
Nurse, Bernard. “‘Painful Exactness’: The Publications of the Society of Antiquaries of London during the Directorship of Richard Gough (1771–1797).” See Modern Philology under Society of Antiquaries.
Blair, Robert (1699–1746)
Poet
Romero Vallejo, Alberto Custodio. “‘Poetas que conocieron el secreto de la inspiración’: estudio comparativo de The Grave de Robert Blair (1743) y Meditaciones poéticas de José Joaquín de Mora (1826).” Cuadernos de Ilustración y Romanticismo 28 (2022): 423-53. In Spanish. An essay on how Mora assimilated Blair’s The Grave in his Meditaciones poéticas, published in 1826 by Rudolph Ackermann with Blake’s 1808 illustrations to the Blair poem.
Boehme, Jacob [Jakob Böhme] (1575–1624)
Mystic
Ito, Yuki. “Toso no Honoo to Moetsukinu Mono: Blake to Nietzsche wo Tunagu Mono tshiteno Yeats no Jacob Böhme no Juyo nitsuite [A Flame of Battle and Something That Never Burns Out: The Reception of Jacob Böhme in Yeats as a Link between Blake and Nietzsche].” Josai Daigaku Gogaku Kyoiku Kenkyu Center Kenkyu Nenpo [Annual Bulletin of the Center for Language Education in Josai University] 14 (2021): 29-50. In Japanese.
Krasny, Eric Scott. “The Archetypal Shadow: The Instinct of Selfishness in the Work of Robert Moore and Jacob Boehme.” PhD diss., Bangor University, 2021.
Bowyer, Robert (1758–1834)
Print impresario
Billingsley, Naomi. “‘The Great Bowyer Bible’: Robert Bowyer and the Macklin Bible.” Journal of Illustration 8.1 (2021): 51-80. “This article examines an iconic example of grangerizing: the Macklin Bible extra-illustrated in 45 volumes by London artist and bookseller Robert Bowyer (1758–1834) in the first quarter of the nineteenth century (Bolton Libraries and Museums, Bolton, United Kingdom)” (abstract).
Calvert, Edward (1799–1883)
Painter, printmaker
Wilson, Louise. “Printing Imperfections in William Blake’s Virgil Wood Engravings and What They Reveal.” See Blake 56.2 in Division I, Part VI.
Cosway, Maria (1760–1838)
Painter, acquaintance of Blake
Boucher, Diane. “Maria Cosway’s A Persian Going to Adore the Sun.” Burlington Magazine 162, no. 1405 (2020): 300-05. “This article will set out what is known about the painting’s history and suggest a possible source for its unusual subject” (abstract).
Cowper, William (1731–1800)
Poet, hymnist
McConkey, Matthew. “‘Still Repeated Circles’: William Cowper’s The Task and the Shape of Habit.” Cambridge Quarterly 51.3 (2022): 242-57. “For Cowper, then, the idea of habit is a means of weighing the oppositional demands of the embodied and the immaterial self” (abstract).
Nolan, Sean M. “‘Legs without the man’: Georgic, Acedia, and the Topography of Attention in William Cowper’s The Task.” “The Lodge in the Wilderness: Ecologies of Contemplation in British Romantic Poetry.” PhD diss., City University of New York, 2021. 29-64.
Oishi, Kaz. “William Cowper and Suburban Environmental Aesthetics.” Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire. Ed. Ve-Yin Tee. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9781474456470. 141-56. “Taking two poems by William Cowper, The Task (1785) and ‘Retirement’ (1782), this chapter situates their increasing awareness of the relationship between human well-being and the living environment in the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century suburbanization” (141).
Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition
Chadwick, Esther. “A Black King in Georgian London: British Art and Postrevolutionary Haiti.” See Paul Mellon Centre in Division I, Part V.
Chadwick, Esther Alice. “The Radical Print: British Art and Graphic Experiment in the Paper Age.” PhD diss., Yale University, 2016. “This dissertation examines connections between high art, printmaking and political radicalism in late eighteenth-century Britain to argue for the print as a formative site of artistic modernity” (abstract). It works from James Barry’s “Phoenix” to Blake’s Laocoön, and discusses John Hamilton Mortimer, James Gillray, and Thomas Bewick as well.
Dillard, Leigh G. “Material Intersections: Image and Text in the Eighteenth-Century Commonplace.” Journal of Illustration 8.2 (2021): 221-50. “Ranging from decorative flourishes and echoes of printers’ marks to richly scrolled title pages and evocative vignettes, the materiality of the commonplace book offered in these moments signals a heightened concern by readers to consider the visual potential of the text as part of their reading experience. This analysis looks at scattered remnants of eighteenth-century commonplace books for compelling examples of image and text relationships that reflect illustrative models from the print market” (abstract).
European Romantic Review
Volume 33, issue 4 (2022)
“Romanticism and Vision”
Ed. Terry F. Robinson and John Savarese
Robinson, Terry F., and John Savarese. “Introduction: Romanticism and Vision.” 451-60. “The essays in this issue catch sight of that variety [of scholarship on Romanticism and vision] through their focus on acts of looking; on the production of visual art; on the imaginative landscapes pictured in maps and panoramas; on the affective impact of spectatorship; and on the visuality of race” (455).
Taylor, David Francis. “Picturing Ekphrasis: Image and Text in Shakespeare Painting.” 461-78. On William Martin’s and James Barry’s paintings of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline: “Martin and Barry, I wish to suggest, show ekphrasis in order to interrogate and eschew both its rhetorical imperative (image as word) and its iconophobic implication (image as less than word)” (464).
Choi, Tina Young. “Styles of Cartographic Vision: Science, Art, and Labor in Thomas Hornor’s Surveys.” 479-95. “This essay examines a number of works—two surveys, a prospectus describing engravings of London, and the Great Panorama—by Thomas Hornor, an early nineteenth-century surveyor based in London” (abstract).
O’Rourke, Stephanie. “Art after Self Evidence: Fuseli, Blake, and Banks.” 497-513. “Considers how models of artistic neoclassicism and scientific experimental procedures shared an investment in the evidentiary authority of an idealized male body” (abstract).
Calè, Luisa. “William Blake’s Pestilence, Sympathy, and the Politics of Feeling.” 515-33. “Blake’s scene of pestilence becomes a virtual test of moral sentiments in which viewers confront an ethics of freedom built on sacrifice” (abstract).
Garcia, Humberto. “The Unsightly Spectacle of ‘Poor Houseless Wanderers’: De Quincey’s Confessions, the Malaysian Sailor, and Vagrancy.” 535-54. “To show how these noncitizens [Asian sailors] resisted their exclusion from civic life, this essay focuses on Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), which narrates the author’s anxious encounter in Grasmere with a dark-skinned Malaysian sailor who appears as his vagrant double. This encounter sheds light on the way that British citizenship was racialized as White vis-à-vis concurrent philanthropic and governmental efforts to conceal abject migrant populations from public view” (abstract).
Fitzgerald, William. The Living Death of Antiquity: Neoclassical Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9780192893963. “This book asks how the neoclassical value of simplicity serves to conjure up an epiphanic antiquity, and how whiteness, in both its literal and its metaphorical forms, acts as the ‘logo’ of neoclassical antiquity, and functions aesthetically in a variety of media” (description).
“Why Neoclassicism?” 1-61. Highlights Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s influence on neoclassicism.
“The Iliad Back-Translated: John Flaxman and Alexander Pope.” 62-119. “The two ‘Homers’ of Pope and Flaxman provide a study in contrasting neoclassicisms that helps to site the distinctive neoclassical aesthetic that is my subject as it emerges from around the middle of the eighteenth century, and particularly in the wake of Winckelmann’s writings” (66-67). There are less developed references to Flaxman throughout the book, especially in relationship to Antonio Canova.
Lahikainen, Amanda. Money and Materiality in the Golden Age of Graphic Satire. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2022. ISBN: 9781644532690. Considers the place of paper money in Georgian print satire. Slight reference to Blake and his engravings of Stedman (109), but it provides a useful context regarding the anxieties over paper money that spurred the need for Alexander Tilloch’s device preventing forgery of notes, for which Blake and other engravers signed a testimonial (BR[2] 78).
Monteyne, Joseph. Media Critique in the Age of Gillray: Scratches, Scraps, and Spectres. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. ISBN: 9781487527747. Focused on printed, visual imagery from practitioners such as James Gillray, Blake, John Thomas Smith, and Henry Fuseli, the book addresses challenges posed by reproductive technologies to traditional concepts of subjective agency.
“Form and Formlessness in Blake’s Embedded Media.” 30-65. Examines how The [First] Book of Urizen is “instructive in assessing how the artist and poet negates the page, the book, and vision itself ” (50).
Morales, Helen. “Bonnie Honig’s A Feminist Theory of Refusal with Kehinde Wiley’s After John Raphael Smith’s ‘A Bacchante (after Sir Joshua Reynolds).’” Classical Antiquity 41.2 (2022): 25-33. A review of Honig’s book that references the artist Kehinde Wiley’s portrait, which invokes and is titled after the works by Smith and Reynolds.
Darwin, Erasmus (1731–1802)
Scientist, poet
Edition
The Botanic Garden. Ed. Adam Komisaruk and Allison Dushane. 2 vols. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. <Blake (2018)>
Review
Gourlay, Alexander S. See
Blake 55.4 in Division I, Part VI.
Criticism
Cogan, Lucy. “Drunkenness, Compulsion, and the Disintegration of the Self: Erasmus Darwin’s Theory of Ebrietas in the Writings of Maria Edgeworth.” Life, Death, and Consciousness in the Long Nineteenth Century. Ed. Lucy Cogan and Michelle O’Connell. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. ISBN: 9783031133626. Blake is referenced slightly in the introduction to the book.
Connolly, Tristanne. “The Eternal Lettuce.” See Vala in Division I, Part VI.
Dauphin, Caroline. “Éros et Uranie: Passions animales et végétales dans la poésie d’Erasmus Darwin et de William Blake [Eros and Urania: The Passions of Animals and Plants in the Poetry of Erasmus Darwin and William Blake].” See Dauphin in Division I, Part VI.
Patsoura, Elliot. “Toward a Genealogy of Geoengineering: Erasmus Darwin and the Little Ice Age.” Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities. Ed. Jeremy Chow. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2023. ISBN: 9781684484294. “I explore how Darwin gives expression to the incapacity of nature to be fully domesticated, precisely in and among a proposal propounding the very necessity of its domestication.”
d’Éon, Chevalier (1728–1810)
Spy
Siviter, Clare. “Celebrity across Borders: The Chevalier d’Eon.” Celebrity across the Channel, 1750–1850. Ed. Anaïs Pédron and Clare Siviter. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2021. ISBN: 9781644532126. 157-78. On the celebrity of the Chevalier d’Éon in the French and English press, including depictions of their gender.
Flaxman, John (1755–1826)
Sculptor, friend of Blake
Bindman, David. “Flaxman the Accidental Revolutionary.” See Transactions of the Romney Society, vol. 23, under Romney.
Fitzgerald, William. “The Iliad Back-Translated: John Flaxman and Alexander Pope.” See Fitzgerald under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
A Museum of Relationships: The Correspondence of William Hayley (1745–1820). See Museum of Relationships under Hayley.
Fuseli, Henry [Johann Heinrich Füssli] (1741–1825)
Painter, friend of Blake
Exhibitions
Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism. Courtauld Gallery, London, 14 October 2022 to 8 January 2023; Kunsthaus Zürich, 24 February to 21 May 2023. Curated by David Solkin and Ketty Gottardo. The Courtauld’s webpage includes three YouTube videos showing the exhibition space and highlighting the works on display; see the catalogue under Criticism, below.
Reviews and curator talk
Adams, Alexander. “
Henry Fuseli at the Courtauld: Between Blue Velvet and Brothel.”
Whynow (n.d.): 12 pars. “The odours of ladies’ perfume and witches’ sulphur emanate from every battered sheet in this memorable exhibition” (par. 12).
Baker, Christopher. “
The Fetishistic Side of Henry Fuseli.”
Apollo (4 Nov. 2022).
Borrelli-Persson, Laird. “
How the Eighteenth-Century Drawings of Henry Fuseli Speak to Our Decadent Age.”
Vogue (25 Oct. 2022): 8 pars.
Ding, Claire. “
Fuseli and the Perceptions of Womanhood.”
Argonaut (8 Feb. 2023): 4 pars. “The exhibition ultimately opens a broader discussion of womanhood and who has the power to define it” (par. 4).
Donoghue, Christina, and Hetty Mahlich. “
The Historical Allure of the Coiffure.”
ShowStudio: The Home of Fashion Film (2 Dec. 2022): 6 pars.
Frankel, Eddy. “
Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism.”
TimeOut (21 Oct. 2022): 7 pars.
“
Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism.”
All about Women: A Magazine for Women and about Women (n.d.): 7 pars.
“
Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism.”
Salterton Arts Review (30 Nov. 2022) (with Helen Saunders: Modernist Rebel, also at the Courtauld Gallery).
“Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism Review—Small and Select with Very Silly Hairdos.”
Times (13 Oct. 2022). Behind a paywall.
“
Fuseli and the Modern Woman Review: A ‘charming oddity’ of an Exhibition.”
Week (28 Oct. 2022): 4 pars.
Ip, Nigel. “
Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism—Courtauld Gallery, London.”
Nigel Ip | Visual Arts Writer & Art Historian (4 Jan. 2023): 8 pars. “I’m just going to say it; this was Fuseli’s porn stash” (par. 3).
Jamil, Miriam Al. “
Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism.”
British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (11 Jan. 2023): 6 pars. “These drawings are as much about the artist as his subject, exploring his obsessions and insecurities” (par. 1).
Jones, Jonathan. “
Fuseli and the Modern Woman Review—A Dark, Perverse Mindset Laid Bare.”
Guardian (14 Oct. 2022): 9 pars. “Sex, suggests Fuseli, is not a physical activity but pure brainwork” (par. 9).
Lloyd, Joe. “
Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism.”
Studio International (11 Nov. 2022): 10 pars. “It is almost as if, like many present-day conservatives, Fuseli himself cannot comprehend what it is he fears” (par. 10).
Marchini, Lucia. “
Shock and Awe: The Imaginative Work of Henry Fuseli.”
Minerva Magazine (13 Dec. 2022): 22 pars.
McDonagh, Melanie. “
Mesmerising and Eye-Opening: Courtauld Gallery’s Fuseli and the Modern Woman Reviewed.”
Spectator (3 Dec. 2022): 9 pars. (with Helen Saunders: Modernist Rebel, also at the Courtauld Gallery). “Much of this is high-class pornography—and the way an earnest bespectacled young American girl was pointing out to her companion the detail of the filthiest drawing of three nymphs pleasuring a recumbent male (his face invisible) suggests that it retains its titillating effect. But it would be doing Fuseli an injustice to see his work merely as erotic” (par. 6).
McEwan, Olivia. “
The Private Passions of Henry Fuseli.”
Hyperallergic (29 Dec. 2022): 7 pars. “Undermining the display, however, is a fundamentally muddled thesis” (par. 1).
Mead, Rebecca. “
The Swiss Painter Whose Muse Was His Nightmare.”
New Yorker (5 Jan. 2023): 6 pars.
Moss, Richard. “
Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism: The Private Sketches of Henri Fuseli.”
Museum Crush (2 Dec. 2022): 15 pars. “Often featuring extraordinarily bizarre hairstyles, the exhibition reveals one of the finest Romantic-period draughtsmen at his most innovative and exciting and unpicks Fuseli’s fascination with female sexuality in the Romantic period” (par. 6).
“
Open Courtauld Hour: The Modern Woman and Fuseli.” YouTube. 6 Dec. 2022. A Zoom discussion of Fuseli and the exhibition by the curators, David Solkin and Ketty Gottardo, and of eighteenth-century sex workers by the scholar Kate Lister.
Portman, Alfred. “
The Gothic Erotica of Henry Fuseli at the Courtauld Gallery.”
gowithyamo.com (23 Nov. 2022): 7 pars.
Prodger, Michael. “
Fashion and Fetishism: The Drawings of Henry Fuseli.”
New Statesman (26 Oct. 2022). “The artist’s renderings of women’s hair depict both the chic and the suggestive” (subtitle).
Revely-Calder, Cal. “
Fuseli and the Modern Woman.”
World of Interiors (23 Sept. 2022): 5 pars.
Ross-Southall, Mika. “
Complex, Brilliant, Unsettling Works by an Artist Obsessed with Sex.”
Telegraph (13 Oct. 2022). Behind a paywall.
Salatino, Kevin. “
Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism.”
Burlington Magazine 165, no. 1438 (Jan. 2023): 11 pars. “Of Henry Fuseli’s many ‘shockingly indelicate’ drawings, as John Flaxman described them, none is more shocking or more indelicate than his study [not in the exhibition] of a dominatrix using an elaborate strap-on dildo on a figure bent over a chair (Museo Horne, Florence)” (par. 1).
Stuart, Eva. “
Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism.”
Isis Magazine (7 Feb. 2023): 7 pars. “The exhibition is unsettling but exceptional” (par. 7).
Füssli, entre rêve et fantastique [Fuseli, the Realm of Dreams and the Fantastic]. Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris, 16 September 2022 to 23 January 2023. Curated by Christopher Baker, Andreas Beyer, and Pierre Curie. The museum’s webpage includes photos of the exhibition space and animations of works. See the press release; see the catalogue under Criticism, below.
Reviews
Bellet, Harry. “
Paris: At the Musée Jacquemart-André, the Dreamlike World of Johann Heinrich Füssli.”
Le Monde (22 Oct. 2022).
D., Cécile, and Laurent P. “
Füssli, the Painting Exhibition at the Musée Jacquemart-André—Last Days.”
Sortir à Paris (30 Dec. 2022): 7 pars. A last call for visitors, but it also includes photos of the exhibition.
Kozuchowska, Agata Ida. “
Review: Füssli, entre rêve et fantastique at the Musée Jacquemart-André.”
Dépaysants (23 Nov. 2022): 7 pars. “The exhibition abounds in Füssli’s enigmatic visions, theatrical scenes imbued with drama, ghostly pale faces in grimaces of shock, and arrays of twisting, stylized bodies. Not for the faint-hearted, this retrospective focuses on a specific terrible beauty, tracing the origins of Füssli’s uncanny compositions to various literary sources such as English folk tales, Shakespearean tragedies, German epics, and Scandinavian legends” (par. 2).
Platzer, David. “
Drafts of Dreams.”
New Criterion (18 Jan. 2023): 9 pars. “‘Füssli: The Realm of Dreams and the Fantastic’ is well presented, exploring not only the art itself, but also the cultural values and tastes that Fuseli was so keenly aware of” (par. 9).
Poirier, Simon. “
Derniers jours: Füssli, le ‘peintre de l’étrange’ au Musée Jacquemart-André.”
L’Objet d’art (26 Dec. 2022): 3 pars. In French.
Criticism
Baker, Christopher, Andreas Beyer, and Pierre Curie. Füssli, entre rêve et fantastique [Fuseli, the Realm of Dreams and the Fantastic]. Paris: Musée Jacquemart-André, 2022. In French. The catalogue for the 2022–23 Paris exhibition (detailed above).
Baker, Christopher. “Füssli: une vie d’artiste tissé de rêves et de contradictions.” 21-34.
Beyer, Andreas. “Sublime pathos: l’antiquité de Johann Heinrich Füssli.” 35-42.
Myrone, Martin. “Les spectres de Füssli.” 43-50.
Brown, David Blayney. “Füssli dessinateur.” 51-60.
Curie, Pierre. “Un siècle de ténèbres.” 61-67.
Bucknell, Clare. “How Henry Fuseli Turned Poems into Paintings.” Apollo (Dec. 2022).
Choe, Sharon. “Deformed, Dismembered, and Disembodied: Reinventing the Body Politic in William Blake.” See Choe in Division I, Part VI.
Engel, Manfred. “The Nightmare around 1800 (Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest; Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare; E. T. A. Hoffmann, Die Elixiere des Teufels; Charles Nodier, Smarra; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown).” Typologizing the Dream / Le rêve du point de vue typologique. Ed. Bernard Dieterle and Manfred Engel. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2022. Cultural Dream Studies, 5. “We might call The Nightmare a Classicist representation of a definitively non- or even anti-Classicistic motif ” (97).
McPartland, Perry. “Titania and Bottom and a Vitruvian Fairy: A New Reference to the Work of Leonardo da Vinci in Henry Fuseli’s Titania and Bottom.” ANQ 35.1 (2022): 35-38. “The aim of this note, though, is not to pursue the aporias of interpretation but simply to demonstrate to the reader that in Fuseli’s reimagined Dream, the bower of Titania harbours a Vitruvian fairy” (38).
Monteyne, Joseph. Media Critique in the Age of Gillray: Scratches, Scraps, and Spectres. See Monteyne under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Myrone, Martin. “The Haunted Eighteenth Century: Fuseli’s The Nightmare.” See Paul Mellon Centre in Division I, Part V.
O’Rourke, Stephanie. “Art after Self Evidence: Fuseli, Blake, and Banks.” See European Romantic Review under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Phillips, Catherine, with contributions by Natalia Sepman. “Drawings in the Hermitage from the Collection of Johann Caspar Füssli of Zurich.” Master Drawings 59.4 (2021): 499-528. On paintings and drawings once owned by Fuseli’s father (including some by him or other members of Fuseli’s family) that are now in the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.
Solkin, David H., with Jonas Beyer, Mechthild Fend, and Ketty Gottardo. Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism. London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2022. The catalogue for the 2022–23 exhibition at the Courtauld, London, and Kunsthaus Zürich (detailed above).
Solkin, David H. “Drawing in an Age of Luxury: Fuseli’s Women in Their Time.” 14-45.
Fend, Mechthild. “Making Drawings—Doing Hair. Fetishism, Artifice and the Pleasures of Display.” 46-65.
Beyer, Jonas. “The Rise in Henry Fuseli’s Reputation as a Draughtsman.” 66-73.
Gottardo, Ketty, with technical analysis by Kate Edmondson. “Tracing, Revising and Mirroring: Fuseli’s Pleasure in Drawing.” 74-89.
Solkin, David H. “I. The Medusas of the Hearth.” 90-113.
Solkin, David H. “II. The Other Side of Venus.” 114-29.
Solkin, David H. “III. Dangerous Liaisons.” 130-54.
Gough, Richard (1735–1809)
Director of the Society of Antiquaries
Nurse, Bernard. “‘Painful Exactness’: The Publications of the Society of Antiquaries of London during the Directorship of Richard Gough (1771–1797).” See Modern Philology under Society of Antiquaries.
Sweet, Rosemary. “Gough, Richard (1735–1809).” See Vetusta Monumenta in Division I, Part III, Section A.
Hayley, William (1745–1820)
Man of letters, patron of Blake
Edition
A Museum of Relationships: The Correspondence of William Hayley (1745–1820). Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. A pilot project displaying the letters of William Hayley owned by the Fitzwilliam. Currently (as of 23 Feb. 2023) there are three digital exhibitions available: Hayley’s correspondence with his wife, Eliza Hayley (née Ball); with Anna Seward; and with John Flaxman, which includes Flaxman’s correspondence with Hayley’s son, Thomas Alphonso.
Criticism
Scobie, Ruth. “Breakfast with ‘Her inky Demons’: Celebrity, Slavery, and the Heroine in Late Eighteenth-Century British Fiction.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 34.4 (summer 2022): 415-40. Argues that Hayley’s The Triumphs of Temper offers “a formulaic scene,” “in which a young white woman experiences sudden unwanted celebrity by reading about herself in a morning newspaper” before being “inevitably rescued from … a newspaper sphere in which older discourses of blackness, and metropolitan unease at the commodification of humans, were tightly but implicitly associated” (abstract).
Johnson, Joseph (1738–1809)
Bookseller, employer of Blake
Hay, Daisy. Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9780691243962. An engaging and detailed book on Joseph Johnson and his circle. Blake is a minor but recurrent player. There are well-told accounts regarding the many members of Blake’s circle with ties to Johnson. These include Erasmus Darwin, John Gabriel Stedman, and William Cowper (and William Hayley’s relationship to him), with Henry Fuseli and Mary Wollstonecraft given extensive attention.
Reviews and author talk
Forbes, Malcolm. “
Dinner with Joseph Johnson Review: Host to Radical London.”
Wall Street Journal (23 Dec. 2022).
Hay, Daisy. “Dinner with Joseph Johnson.” See
Blake Society in Division I, Part V.
Hone, Joseph. “
Echo Chamber: Dinner Parties in the ‘Revolutionary Age’ with the Publisher Joseph Johnson.”
History Today 72.4 (2022): 104.
Nersessian, Anahid. “
Liberty’s Bookseller.”
New Left Review 137 (Sept.- Oct. 2022).
Peacock, Francesca. “
Dinner with Joseph Johnson—Portrait of a Revolutionary Bookseller.”
Financial Times (7 Apr. 2022). Behind a paywall.
Publishers Weekly (22 Aug. 2022): 60.
§ Sutherland, Kathryn. “
Among the Free Enquirers.”
TLS: Times Literary Supplement (13 May 2022). Behind a paywall. Sutherland also appears on the
TLS podcast, which is freely accessible, on 11 May 2022.
Willes, Margaret. “
Dinner with Joseph Johnson.”
London Historians’ Blog (13 June 2022).
Wu, Duncan. “
Homage to Joseph Johnson, the Radical Eighteenth-Century Publisher.”
Spectator (2 Apr. 2022). “Hay omits all mention of Blake [in her discussion of the Gordon Riots], despite his being a principal actor in her story—a shame, because he could have brought her account to life.”
Kauffman, Angelica [Angelika Kauffmann] (1741–1807)
Painter
Spies-Gans, Paris. “Establishing a Female Lineage at the Royal Academy’s Show: Eliza Trotter, Angelica Kauffman and the Intrigues of Lady Caroline Lamb.” See Paul Mellon Centre in Division I, Part V.
Lamb, Lady Caroline (1785–1828)
Writer
Spies-Gans, Paris. “Establishing a Female Lineage at the Royal Academy’s Show: Eliza Trotter, Angelica Kauffman and the Intrigues of Lady Caroline Lamb.” See Paul Mellon Centre in Division I, Part V.
Lawrence, Thomas (1769–1830)
Painter
Hallett, Mark. “Making an Impact: Thomas Lawrence’s Arthur Atherley (1792).” See Paul Mellon Centre in Division I, Part V.
Linnell, John (1792–1882)
Painter, Blake’s friend and patron
Wilson, Louise. “Printing Imperfections in William Blake’s Virgil Wood Engravings and What They Reveal.” See Blake 56.2 in Division I, Part VI.
Macklin, Thomas (1752/53–1800)
Publisher
Billingsley, Naomi. “‘The Great Bowyer Bible’: Robert Bowyer and the Macklin Bible.” See Billingsley under Bowyer.
Mora, José Joaquín de (1783–1864)
Polymath, politician
García Castañeda, Salvador, and Alberto Romero Ferrer, eds. José Joaquín de Mora o la inconstancia. Periodismo, política y literatura. Madrid: Visor Libros, 2018. In Spanish. A collection of essays on Mora, including his London exile and experience there as editor, journalist, and man of letters in the 1820s.
§ Medina Calzada, Sara. José Joaquín de Mora and Britain: Cultural Transfers and Transformations. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2022. 262 pp. ISBN: 9783631879245. In English. The volume “explores the connections that José Joaquín de Mora (1783–1864) established with Britain, where he was exiled from 1823 to 1826” (publisher’s summary).
Review
Romero Vallejo, Alberto Custodio.
Cuadernos de Ilustración y Romanticismo 28 (2022): 717-19.
Romero Vallejo, Alberto Custodio. “‘Poetas que conocieron el secreto de la inspiración’: estudio comparativo de The Grave de Robert Blair (1743) y Meditaciones poéticas de José Joaquín de Mora (1826).” See Romero Vallejo under Blair.
Mortimer, John Hamilton (1740–79)
Painter
Chadwick, Esther Alice. “The Radical Print: British Art and Graphic Experiment in the Paper Age.” See Chadwick under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Reynolds, Joshua (1723–92)
Painter
Apesos, Anthony. “Visionary Anatomy: Blake’s Bodies.” See Apesos in Division I, Part VI.
Hopkins, David. “The General and the Particular: Paradox and the Play of Contraries in the Criticism of Pope, Johnson, and Reynolds.” A Clubbable Man: Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture in Honor of Greg Clingham. Ed. Anthony W. Lee. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2022. 22-38.
McGeary, Thomas. “Music, Men and Masculinity on the Grand Tour: British Flautists in Italy.” Early Music 49.1 (2021): 101-28.
Postle, Martin. “The Artist as Intellectual: Joshua Reynolds’s Self-Portrait as President of the Royal Academy (c. 1780).” See Paul Mellon Centre in Division I, Part V.
Potter, Elizabeth. “Manuscript Manifestations: Reassessing William Blake’s Marginalia in the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1798).” See Potter in Division I, Part VI.
Waintraub, Deborah. “Portrait et théorie des arts en Grande-Bretagne: le rôle de Sir Joshua Reynolds [Portrait and Theory of Arts in Great Britain: The Role of Sir Joshua Reynolds].” PhD diss., Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2022. In French.
Romney, George (1734–1802)
Painter
Paley, Morton D. “George Romney’s Death of General Wolfe.” Romantik: Journal for the Study of Romanticisms 6 (2017): 51-62. On the lost painting.
Robbins, Nicholas. “George Romney in the Prison-World of Europe.” See Paul Mellon Centre in Division I, Part V.
Transactions of the Romney Society
Volume 21 (2016)
Ed. Alex Kidson
Montgomery, Janelle. “Every Picture Tells a Story: A Family Chronicle in George Romney’s Lady Mary Every.”
Jeffares, Neil. “Romney’s Mrs. Gardner.”
Isepp, Rose. “Arcadia by Design: A Preparatory Drawing for The Clavering Children.”
Paley, Morton D. “George Romney’s Serena Reading.”
Transactions of the Romney Society
Volume 22 (2017)
Ed. Alex Kidson
Kidson, Alex, ed. “The Letters of George Romney.”
Transactions of the Romney Society
Volume 23 (2018)
Ed. Alex Kidson
Fisher, Peter. “George Romney and the Mary Stuart Story.”
Derbyshire, Val. “The Horror of the Abyss: The Feminine Sublime in the Portraiture of George Romney and The Young Philosopher (1798) by Charlotte Smith.”
Lax, Lucinda. “A Portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie by Allan Ramsay.”
Bindman, David. “Flaxman the Accidental Revolutionary.”
Transactions of the Romney Society
Volume 24 (2019)
Ed. Alex Kidson
Ghosh, Olivia. “Damsels Playing with Timbrels: George Romney’s Four-Leaved Screen.”
Knight, Emily. “Portraiture as Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century Britain.”
Paley, Morton D. “George Romney’s Visit to the Robert Udney Collection.”
Moore, Lauren. “Copying George Romney.”
Kidson, Alex. “In Search of James Cranke the Younger (1746–1826).”
Transactions of the Romney Society
Volume 25 (2020)
Ed. Alex Kidson
Kidson, Alex. “George Romney: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings, Supplement 2015–2020.”
Transactions of the Romney Society
Volume 26 (2021)
Ed. Alex Kidson
Lintala, Derek. “Unshackled: A Technical Study of the Portrait of Lady Willoughby de Broke.”
Carroll, Heather. “Jane, Duchess of Gordon, Hated Rival of the Whig Duchess of Devonshire.”
Busiakiewicz, Adam. “The Mystery of the Warwick Romney and His Father.”
Miller, Stephen. “Mother and Child Reunion, George Romney’s Portrait of Mrs. Thomas Carwardine and Her Son Thomas, and Romney’s Abiding Friendship with the Revd. Thomas Carwardine.”
Society of Antiquaries
Modern Philology
Volume 120, number 1 (August 2022)
“Ancient Objects and New Media”
Heringman, Noah, and Crystal B. Lake. “Antiquarian Media Ecologies in the Eighteenth Century.” 1-23. “Situate[s] the Society’s work in relation to the larger field of antiquarian visual culture explored by the contributors to this special issue” (abstract).
Calè, Luisa. “William Blake’s ‘Fourfold Vision’: A Practical Antiquary’s Visionary Contemplations among the ‘Couches of the Dead.’” 24-48. “This essay argues that the artisanal problems of the ‘practical antiquary’ shaped William Blake’s physiological aesthetics and his experience of ‘fourfold vision’” (abstract).
Nurse, Bernard. “‘Painful Exactness’: The Publications of the Society of Antiquaries of London during the Directorship of Richard Gough (1771–1797).” 49-64. “This essay examines, specifically, the revival of the Society’s print series Vetusta Monumenta in the 1780s and the issue of a new series of large format publications, known as the Cathedral Series” (abstract).
Arnold, Dana. “Visual Ekphrasis and the Articulation of the Past.” 65-88. “This essay focuses on examples of graphic representations of architecture as they appear in architectural treatises and published studies of particular buildings or sites. I argue that these images are a form of writing, as they have syntactical and linguistic qualities” (abstract).
Frazier Wood, Dustin. “‘The Face of Antiquity’: Script, Manuscript, and Facsimile in Early Eighteenth-Century Antiquarian Culture.” 89-112. “The article challenges the distinctions between text and images or objects often assumed to define eighteenth-century antiquarian visual culture” (abstract).
Boehm, Katharina. “Popular Antiquarianism, New Media, and the Book: The Cultural Transmission of the Past at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century.” 113-37. “I show that [Ann Radcliffe’s] Gaston de Blondeville and [Walter Scott’s] Kenilworth are deeply concerned with the status of the book at a time when modish new media produced immersive spectacles that offered audiences a definite, concrete picture of the past” (abstract).
Southcott, Joanna (1750–1814)
Prophet
Nicholson, Michael. “More than Eve: Women and Superior Secondariness in English Poetry, 1751–1810.” Eighteenth-Century Life 46.1 (2022): 79-108. “Mary Leapor, Mary Scott, Joanna Southcott, Lucy Aikin, and their peers collectively articulate what I call women’s ‘superior secondariness[,]’” which “posited the secondary not as inferior or less, but as a necessary, often highly desirable, condition of women’s belatedness” (abstract).
Stedman, John Gabriel (1744–97)
Soldier, writer, friend of Blake
Mok, Ineke, and Eric Heuvel. Trans. Jonathan Reeder and University of Sheffield students. Quaco: My Life in Slavery. Oosterhout, Netherlands: Uitgeverij L, 2022. ISBN: 9789088867484. An English translation of a Dutch graphic novel, Quaco: Leven in slavernij (2015), that dramatizes the life of Quaco, whose enslavement is depicted by Stedman. The students also translated a teacher’s guide aimed at eleven- to fourteen-year-old students.
van Oostrum, Duco. “How the Story of an Enslaved Boy Transformed into a Shared Dutch History.” Low Countries (27 Sept. 2022). “I will trace and unpick Stedman’s descriptions of Quaco and argue that Stedman may give Quaco a voice in his diary, but that he too commits an act of ‘literary colonialism’ when he sacrifices Quaco’s individuality to adhere to 18th-century literary conventions.”
Stothard, Thomas (1755–1834)
Painter, illustrator, Blake’s friend/enemy
Jung, Sandro. “Dominant Visual Narrative, the Competitive Marketing and Metacritical Functions of Illustrations, and Robert Morison’s 1793 Edition of James Thomson’s The Seasons.” AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 46.1 (2021): 43-72. “Offering a book-historical contextualisation of the competitive marketing of illustrated editions of James Thomson’s best-selling modern classic, The Seasons (1730), as well as the role of illustrations in a multi-medial reading history of the poem, the article examines the formation of a dominant-paradigmatic eighteenth-century visual narrative of the poem that is deliberately countered by the Perth bookseller, Robert Morison” (abstract).
Van De Walle, Kwinten. “The Visual Criticism of Thomas Stothard’s Designs of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe for the Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas (1821).” AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 46.1 (2021): 93-116. “Rather than simply serving a decorative function in a fashionable print medium, then, the illustrations can, and should, be read as acts of visual literary criticism” (abstract).
Swedenborg, Emanuel (1688–1772)
Mystic
Sánchez Tierraseca, Mónica. “La concepción de un Dios antropomorfo eterno y universal en Swedenborg y William Blake.” See Sánchez Tierraseca in Division I, Part VI.
Wainewright, Thomas Griffiths (1794–1847)
Blake collector, poisoner
Exhibition
Paradise Lost: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 11 June to 3 October 2021. Curated by Jane Stewart. In addition to art by Wainewright and other items from his collection, it included works by Blake, Fuseli, and Flaxman. A digital tour is available at YouTube; see the catalogue under Criticism, below.
Review and curator talks
Eshrāghi, Léuli.
memoreview.net (7 Oct. 2021) (with one other exhibition).
Fitzgerald, Michael. “
Notes on a Scandal: The Strange Case of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright.”
Art Monthly Australia 330 (summer 2021–22): 63-67. An interview with the curator of the exhibition, Jane Stewart.
Stewart, Jane. “
Listen to Jane Stewart Speak about the Life of Convict Artist, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright.”
Friends of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (1 July 2021).
Criticism
§ Stewart, Jane, with Peter Hughes and Jacobus van Breda. Paradise Lost: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. Hobart: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, 2021. The catalogue for the exhibition held from 11 June to 3 October 2021 at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (detailed above).
Review
Hansen, David. “
Artist Unsettled.”
TLS: Times Literary Supplement (8 Oct. 2021).
West, Benjamin (1738–1820)
Painter, president of the Royal Academy
Horton, Mairead. “Benjamin West’s Mohawk Warrior in the Middle Ground: Tracing Native American-European Contact in a Bag and Its Painted Manifestation.” Immediations 19 (2022). “This paper discusses the life of a bag that was produced by a Native American, came into the possession of Benjamin West by 1770, and was acquired by the British Museum in 1991. … I argue that traditional understandings of West’s The Death of General Wolfe rely upon a faulty premise: its Mohawk warrior, though often read as a ‘noble savage,’ is instead a figure that bears signs of Native Americans’ active negotiations with European presence in North America” (abstract).
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim (1717–68)
Aesthetic theorist
Fitzgerald, William. “Why Neoclassicism?” See Fitzgerald under Cultures and Technologies of Display and Exhibition.
Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759–97)
Author, radical, known in Blake’s circle
Bergès, Sandrine, and Alan Coffee. “Cocks on Dunghills—Wollstonecraft and Gouges on the Women’s Revolution.” SATS 23.2 (2022): 135-52. “This essay looks at how Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges theorised the new tyranny that grew out of the French Revolution, that of ‘petty tyrants’ who found themselves like ‘cocks on a dunghill’ able to wield a new power over those less fortunate than themselves” (abstract).
Dumler-Winckler, Emily. Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9780197632093. An account of Wollstonecraft’s thought regarding virtue.
Review
Darr, Ryan.
Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 42.2 (2022): 457-58.
Gallagher, Megan. “Wollstonecraft’s Gothic Violence.” Polity 54.3 (2022): 457-77. “This paper introduces the concept of gothic violence in order to better theorize how domination operates in Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria” (abstract).
Hulbert, Annette. “Teaching Mary Wollstonecraft’s Travelogue of Historical Trauma.” ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830 12.2 (2022). “In this essay, I describe a metacognitive exercise in which students reflected on Wollstonecraft’s meditation on survival in an era of environmental catastrophe with their own ‘travelogues’ written from where they logged into the Zoom classroom” (abstract).
Johnson, Nancy E., and Paul Keen, eds. Mary Wollstonecraft in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. <Blake (2021, 2022)>
Reviews
Cross, Ashley.
European Romantic Review 33.4 (2022): 578-84 (with Sylvana Tomaselli,
Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics). An “invaluable compendium of essays” (579).
Maione, Angela.
Eighteenth-Century Studies 55.4 (2022): 553-55 (with Sylvana Tomaselli,
Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics). These two books “bode well for the future place of Wollstonecraft in eighteenth-century studies and beyond” (555).
Ramos, Adela.
Eighteenth-Century Fiction 34.3 (spring 2022): 370-72. “These collected essays succeed at nuancing Wollstonecraft’s life and work while unfolding new avenues for investigation” (372).
Kirkley, Laura. “Across Disciplines, Languages, and Nations: Recent Scholarship on Mary Wollstonecraft.” Literature Compass 19.10 (2022): 12 pp. Surveys twenty-first-century scholarship on Wollstonecraft.
Kirkley, Laura. “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Translational Afterlife: French and German Rewritings of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in the Revolutionary Era.” European Romantic Review 33.1 (2022): 1-24. “I argue that Wollstonecraft’s feminist thought was reshaped by its passage into different national and cultural contexts” (abstract).
Lambrianou, Nickolas. “Monumental Failures: The Contested Bodies and Sites of Public Art under Lockdown.” Sculpture Journal 31.1 (2022): 75-92. “This article reads the events of June 2020 surrounding Bristol’s Colston statue and Maggi Hambling’s monument to Mary Wollstonecraft as examples of the tensions emerging around the idea of the monument under lockdown. If lockdown is understood as the suspension of personal and social freedoms, then it is not simply individual movement which is at stake, but the shared space of representation too” (abstract).
Makarova, Elena. “Zhizn' i sud'ba Meri Uolstonkraft (1759–1797): poverkh bar'erov [The Life and Destiny of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797): Over the Barriers].” Istoriya [History] 13.5 (2022). In Russian (abstract in Russian and English).
Philp, Mark. Radical Conduct: Politics, Sociability and Equality in London, 1789–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. <Blake (2022)>
Review
Claeys, Gregory.
International Review of Social History 67.1 (2022): 156-59.
Ryndina, M. E. “Vzglyady Olimpii de Guzh i Meri Uolstonkraft kak otrazhenie dvizheniya feminizma [The Views of Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft as a Reflection of the Feminist Movement].” XXIV vserossiyskaya studencheskaya nauchno-prakticheskaya konferentsiya Nizhnevartovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta [XXIV All-Russian Student Scientific and Practical Conference of Nizhnevartovsk State University]. Vol. 5. Nizhnevartovsk, 2022. ISBN: 9785000476482. 290-95. In Russian.
Shchuka, Virlana M. “‘Nursed under his own Eye’: Co-nursing Fathers and the Spectacle of Breastfeeding in the British Romantic Period.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 34.4 (2022): 441-69. On representations of fathers watching breastfeeding, with a consideration of “the works of several Romantic-period women writers, particularly Mary Wollstonecraft and Frances Burney” (446).
Shunina, Z. S. “Brak kak vyzov obshchestvu: Meri Uolstonkraft i Uil'yam Godvin [Marriage as a Challenge to Society: Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin].” Protsessy integratsii i differentsiatsii v mire: sotsial'no-gumanitarnyy aspekt: materialy Vserossiyskoy studencheskoy nauchnoy konferentsii [Processes of Integration and Differentiation in the World: Social and Humanitarian Aspect: Materials of the All-Russian Student Scientific Conference]. Ekaterinburg, 2022. ISBN: 9785799635237. 276-86. In Russian (abstract in Russian and English).
Sibo, Alex. “Mary Wollstonecraft: Social Reproduction Pedagogy.” PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2022.
Tomaselli, Sylvana. Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. <Blake (2022)>
Reviews
Cross, Ashley.
European Romantic Review 33.4 (2022): 578-84 (with
Mary Wollstonecraft in Context, ed. Nancy E. Johnson and Paul Keen). “A readable, meticulously-researched, intellectual biography and introduction to Wollstonecraft’s work that underscores her unwavering desire to create a better, more just world for all humans, not just women” (579).
Maione, Angela. See
Johnson and Keen.
Murray, Julie.
Review of Politics 84.1 (2022): 140-42.
Weiss, Deborah. The Female Philosopher and Her Afterlives: Mary Wollstonecraft, the British Novel, and the Transformations of Feminism, 1796–1811. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan-Springer Nature, 2017. <Blake (2019, 2020)>
Review
Wharton, Joanna.
Romanticism 28.1 (2022): 107-09.
White, Willow. “Feminist Sensibilities: The Feud of Elizabeth Inchbald and Mary Wollstonecraft.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 55.3 (2022): 299-315. “This article examines the acrimonious relationship between Elizabeth Inchbald and Mary Wollstonecraft through the lens of their differing approaches to feminism and sensibility” (abstract).