Originally published in Blake 41.3 (winter 2007-08): 100-24 (excluding
reviews), and online in January 2008
Updated May 2008: list of revisions and additions
Updated March 2009: list of additions
Updated March 2010: list of additions
Updated March 2011: list of additions
Updated March 2012: list of additions
Updated July 2013: list of additions
A Bibliography for the Study of VALA/The Four Zoas
By Justin Van Kleeck
The intended purpose of this bibliography is to provide a resource for close study of Blake’s manuscript work VALA/The Four Zoas through a multitude of possible approaches: bibliographical, textual, social reception, etc. In preparing this list, I have attempted to be as comprehensive as possible in terms of the date and nature of the materials included, but also selective about what is and is not most relevant to the study of this particular Blakean production.
While in general I have tended to err on the side of liberality, I have followed several key guidelines in deciding what to include. The most important criterion is that the secondary work must be devoted to some component of VALA/The Four Zoas, whether in its entirety (as in a monograph or article), in a distinct part (as in a book or dissertation chapter), or in the course of a close investigation along with perhaps one or two other works by Blake. Thus many critical works often considered fundamental to Blake studies in general do not appear here—e.g., Frye’s Fearful Symmetry or Erdman’s Blake: Prophet against Empire. An item need not have been “published,” per se, but it must be available in some format from at least one institution (however easy or difficult obtaining the item might be). Unfortunately, papers presented at conferences passed through the critical sieve unless they later appeared in published form, due mainly to the fact that conference proceedings often do not leave detailed bibliographical trails. However, extensive monographs written by seasoned critics published by centuries-old scholarly presses do appear here alongside doctoral dissertations, master’s theses, and even a baccalaureate honors essay (these last two genres included mostly to show the ongoing activity related to VALA/The Four Zoas at all levels of scholarship). I have also included those reviews of editions and monographs devoted to VALA/The Four Zoas, largely because reviews often contain interesting arguments that are relevant to a study of the manuscript; for reviews of editions, I have cited those that focus particularly on the edited version of the manuscript. Materials may be in any format/medium—printed books and articles, videotapes, sound recordings, or librettos—as long as they satisfy the other criteria. Materials may be in any language; I have tried to identify the language when it is not English and, when possible, to provide an English translation.
As for editions of Blake’s writings as a whole or of his poems exclusively, I have not, except in one case (see below), included those that provide only a selection of the VALA/Four Zoas manuscript text. Usually selected editions do not involve a fresh version of the text prepared in direct consultation of the manuscript. Indeed, many selections often derive in some way from previous complete editions prepared by other editors. Additionally, selections may allow for a study of some particular portion of what Blake wrote, but they do not allow for a fully informed engagement with the work as a textual whole. Moreover, tracking down every selected edition of Blake’s poetry, in every revision and/or reprint, was an overwhelming prospect too daunting at this point for this bibliographer. While the editions of W. H. Stevenson and Alicia Ostriker derive from the text of David Erdman’s The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, they do represent the manuscript text in its entirety—and each has been “edited” from Erdman’s original in a multitude of ways. I have made a single exception for John Sampson’s 1905 edition, with its 1913 revised companion. I have included Sampson’s edition(s) because, first, most other editors and scholars have pinpointed Sampson’s as the first “reliable,” scholarly edition of Blake’s writings, which makes his selected text of “The Four Zoas” more relevant, perhaps, than other selected versions, and second, D. J. Sloss and J. P. R. Wallis’s Prophetic Writings (finally published in 1926) originated as a companion/follow-up to Sampson’s edition of Blake’s poems. Weighing these two particulars, I felt that Sampson’s selected text deserved a place in the list. For all editions cited, I have recorded only the first edition’s full information and then, in my comments, noted years of later reprints, revised or not, except when the revision involved a change in the title (see, e.g., Keynes, Erdman, and Stevenson) or other publication details.
My goal has been comprehensiveness, and for my bibliographical sleuthing I
have used the following databases as the main tools to compile this list:
Modern Language Association (MLA) International Bibliography, 1926 to the
present;
Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL), 1922 to the
present;
WorldCat/OCLC bibliography;
Google Scholar;
Citation Index of the National Institute of Informatics, Japan <http://ci.nii.ac.jp/en/>.
G. E. Bentley, Jr.’s Blake Books (1977), Blake Books Supplement (1995),
and subsequent checklists/updates published in this journal proved similarly
helpful for uncovering additional items. Beyond these main resources, I consulted
Bentley and Martin K. Nurmi’s A Blake Bibliography: Annotated Lists of
Works, Studies, and Blakeana (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1964), which
is occasionally cited in my comments. Further, I used the holdings of the University
of Virginia Library, information obtained from personal contacts, and my own
personal experience in the course of years of focused engagement with VALA/The
Four Zoas. But I recognize that, however many “Wonders of labour” I might
have performed, there will be at least a few(!) items I have missed. Thus,
I welcome any additional citations—past, present, and future—from
others. This bibliography is not complete in its current version; hopefully
it may remain unfinished perpetually and continue to grow year by year, so
that collaboration, as it were, can only make it stronger.
I have attempted to provide annotations, based on my own reading and the resources just mentioned, to those entries that seemed to warrant or demand commentary beyond the simple citation. These annotations range in length, in many cases only clarifying the entry’s inclusion based upon bibliographical information contained in another source. In all of them, though, I have tried to focus on the nature of the work and its contents without my own personal spin—as much as this is possible in a selected and focused bibliography. Again, my goal is to build an informational clearinghouse of materials for a study of VALA/The Four Zoas, not to highlight specific works as authoritative or especially recommended.
The entries are organized by year, beginning with the first recorded mention of VALA/The Four Zoas in William Michael Rossetti’s catalogue, part of Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake of 1863, and ending in 2007 (though I have not done a full examination beyond 2006). Within years, the entries are then organized by author’s last name; those with no author identified are listed as “anonymous.” I have also tried to describe each entry further using these categories: edition, criticism, review, biography, film, sound recording, musical score, and other.
A note on the title of Blake’s work: I have given yet another title to Blake’s manuscript in the long history of its authorial and post-authorial existence. “VALA/The Four Zoas”, as I refer to it, represents to me a title that acknowledges the full genesis of the work, from its earliest stages as “VALA” (the title that still appears in every Night’s heading in the manuscript) to its latest authorial version as “The Four Zoas” (with “VALA” still present just below on the title page, though crossed out by Blake). The subtitle(s) make the situation even more complex, though, so I have truncated the work’s latest appellation, which serves more as a mere pointer to the original in all its complexity and uncertainty than as a summation of what it is and was and will be. I have not, finally, tried to codify my previous suggestion that “Zoas” may in fact be “Zoa’s”, [1] since this possibility remains only a suggestion; I have used the common form of the title without apostrophe.
In conclusion, I would like to note that I have found perhaps most interesting the various periods of explosive activity involving VALA/The Four Zoas that become quickly visible in this bibliography. Thus, we can see how more and more brave souls, critical and otherwise, have undertaken the task of working with and through Blake’s original—to many the most daunting production of his fiery artistic forge. The late 1970s up through the 1990s seem particularly prominent in this regard. Equally compelling is the changing nature of this activity, the appearance and reappearance or disappearance of specific topics of concern and methods of approach. In compiling this bibliography to aid others in their study of VALA/The Four Zoas, I myself have been able to learn a great deal about how we can continue to puzzle and marvel and quibble over the manuscript that Blake left us … and to “enter into” it if we dare.
I am grateful to Hikari Sato of the University of Tokyo for providing me with information about Blake publications in Japan, as well as to Xinyan Chen, Weiwei Huang, and Noriko Donahue for assistance with translation of Japanese citations.
1. See Van Kleeck, “Blake’s Four … ‘Zoa’s’?” (2005).
Go to: No Date/Ongoing, 1800s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s,
1990s, 2000s, 2010s
Anon.
“‘The Four Zoas,’ by William Blake. Add. 39764.” British Library Manuscripts
Catalogue. <http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/manuscripts/HITS0001.ASP?VPath=html/33520.htm&Search=39764&Highlight=F>.
Category:
Other
Online catalogue entry for the manuscript in the British Library.
Blake, William [or Anon.?]
The Four Zoas. Sydney: Read How You Want-Objective Systems
Pty Ltd., n.d.
Category: Edition
On its web site, this company states “We markup books quickly
and cost effectively into XML from PDF, HTML, scanned images and other electronic
formats,” “We automatically generate a large number of different
formats from this XML file …” and “We help you to distribute and
sell the books.” Thus, a reader can choose from no fewer than seven
different “editions”
of The
Four Zoas, including “EasyRead Comfort” and various large-print
formats. There is no indication of where, exactly, the text of these editions
originates. At best, then, this seems to be a re-print-on-demand company
of some sort, leaving one to wonder about the legitimacy of those works purchased.
The information and ordering page for Blake’s The Four Zoas is
<http://www.readhowyouwant.com/pcsWebUI/BookDetail.aspx?BookId=10900>.
Eaves, Morris, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds.
The William Blake Archive. <http://www.blakearchive.org>.
Category:
Other
Includes an electronic version of Erdman’s text.
Hilton, Nelson, ed.
Blake Digital Text Project. <http://www.english.uga.edu/wblake/home1.html>.
Category:
Other
Includes an electronic version of Erdman’s text.
Ruegg, F. William
“Blake’s ‘The Four Zoas’ Fetishized: An Experimental Hypertext.” <http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~broglio/eromantic/blakefetish.nassr.html>.
Category:
Other
An online version of the manuscript of sorts, presenting only a few images
of manuscript pages along with some critical (and other) commentary and additional
material.
Whitmarsh-Knight, David
“William Blake’s The Four Zoas and Jerusalem Explained: Blake’s Meaning, Myth and Symbol.” <http://www.thefourzoas.com>.
Category: Criticism
This is an online publication by the author based on research
for his dissertation of 1984, which focused on textual development along with
interpretation. He states, “Because this research seems not to have been read or noted by scholars
in the field, I have been asked frequently to make the research more generally
available.” The site also includes a similar analysis of Jerusalem. [March 2010: Whitmarsh-Knight has updated this site, taking down the extensive critical material and the transcript of Jerusalem, turning the site into a catalogue of his books (with abstracts) on The Four Zoas (see the entry for “Structure as a Key to Meaning in William Blake’s The Four Zoas” [1984]), Jerusalem, and his newest book Shakespeare’s Heir. There is also a blog by the author, but most of it seems focused on discussing updates to the site, publications of his works, and other relevant publications or resources on studying Blake; that is, the blog is not in itself used for extending Whitmarsh-Knight’s critical commentaries.]
Gilchrist, Alexander
Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus.” With Selections
from His Poems and Other Writings. 2 vols. London: Macmillan and Co.,
1863.
Category: Biography
Entry no. 7 in vol. 2, list 2 (“Uncoloured Works”); listed as “Vala, or the
Death and Judgment of the Ancient Man: a Dream of Nine Nights; by William Blake” (2:
240). These lists were compiled by William Michael Rossetti.
1893
Ellis, E. J., and W. B. Yeats, eds.
The Works of William Blake: Poetic,
Symbolic, and Critical. Edited with Lithographs of the Illustrated “Prophetic Books,” and
a Memoir and Interpretation.
3 vols. London: Bernard Quaritch, 1893.
Category: Edition
Ellis and Yeats present “Vala” (their title) unveiled for the first time.
They produce their “hybrid” text by printing the latest stages of Blake’s revisions,
but also by changing the manuscript text at various points where they feel
Blake failed to create “long resounding strong heroic Verse.” They report many
of their emendations and provide some notes on the original text.
Sampson, John, ed.
The Poetical Works of William Blake: A New and Verbatim Text from the
Manuscript Engraved and Letterpress Originals with Variorum Readings and
Bibliographical Notes and Prefaces. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1905.
Category:
Edition (selections)
Sampson’s is widely hailed as the first reliable edition
of Blake’s writings. He provides selections from The Four Zoas and the other epics. A
revised version of the edition, with a different title but no changes to The
Four Zoas, was published in 1913 (see below).
1906
Ellis, Edwin J., ed.
The Poetical Works of William Blake. 2 vols.
London: Chatto & Windus,
1906.
Category: Edition
Ellis’s text of “Vala” is a reprint of that in his edition with
Yeats (1893). In Ellis’s commentary, he expresses the same views as in the earlier
edition regarding Blake’s use of traditional symbolism, mysticism, etc.
Sampson, John, ed.
The Poetical Works of William Blake: Including the Unpublished French
Revolution Together with the Minor Prophetic Books and Selections from The
Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1913.
Category:
Edition (selections)
Revised version of the 1905 edition; no changes to The Four Zoas.
1918
“Catalogue of the John Linnell Collection of Highly Important Works
by William Blake Obtained Direct from the Artist ….” London: Messrs. Christie,
Manson & Woods,
15 March 1918.
Category: Other
Lot 206, recorded as “VALA: OR, THE DEATH AND JUDGMENT OF THE ANCIENT
MAN: A DREAM OF NINE NIGHTS; by WILLIAM BLAKE, 1797” (28). A handwritten
note next to the entry indicates that the manuscript was sold to “Parsons” (not “Pearson” as
in Bentley, Blake Books p. 464) for £420. (My
sources for this annotation are the copy of the catalogue and the original
auctioneer’s
book bearing the annotation “Parsons” for lot 206
in the Christie's archives. I was provided with photocopies by Marijke Booth,
Christie’s
Archives Assistant, who verified the annotation as that of the auctioneer himself
and the reading “Parsons.” G. E. Bentley, Jr., informs me that his reading,
“Pearson,” is based on the British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings’ copy
of the sale catalogue [private correspondence, 4 February 2008].)
Keynes, Geoffrey
A Bibliography of William Blake. New York: Grolier Club of New
York, 1921.
Category: Other
Keynes revises Ellis and Yeats’s ordering of the manuscript and
briefly describes each page’s designs and the first line of text (if any).
1924
Plowman, Max
“Blake’s Bible of Hell.” Times Literary Supplement (6 November 1924):
710.
Category: Criticism
“Suggests that it may be The Four Zoas” (Bentley
and Nurmi 321).
1925
Keynes, Geoffrey, ed.
The Writings of William Blake. 3 vols. London: Nonesuch P, 1925.
Category:
Edition
This is Keynes’s first edition, following closely after his 1921 Bibliography.
Keynes breaks new ground with “Vala, or The Four Zoas” by incorporating a large
number of Blake’s revisions to the manuscript text in the edition text; his
accompanying textual notes, though not extensive, also help fill in some of
the details. While his inclusion of authorial revisions is selective, he presents
a very full representation of the text in a format that is readable.
Plowman, Max
“Blake and Hayley.” Times Literary Supplement (30 April 1925): 300.
Category:
Criticism
“The poem read to Hayley was probably The Four Zoas” (Bentley
and Nurmi 321).
1926
Pierce, Frederick E.
“Two Notes on Blake.” Modern Language Notes 41 (1926): 169-70.
Category:
Criticism
One of the notes is on The Four Zoas.
Plowman, Max
“Blake Drawings.” Times Literary Supplement (1 April 1926): 249.
Category:
Criticism
“Who rubbed out part of the drawings in The Four Zoas MS?” (Bentley
and Nurmi 321).
Sloss, D. J., and J. P. R. Wallis, eds.
The Prophetic Writings of William Blake. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon
P, 1926.
Category: Edition
Sloss and Wallis’s edition was originally begun as a companion
to Sampson’s 1905 edition, but various delays, both personal and political—such as World
War I—pushed publication back to 1926. They look very closely, even more
so than Keynes, at the bibliographical details of the VALA/Four Zoas manuscript,
including the first and only recorded instance in an edition of “The Four Zoa’s” (i.e.,
with apostrophe) as Blake’s second title. Although their text is a “clean” version
incorporating Blake’s final revisions, they have full footnotes to report textual
details. Two interesting facets of their text are that they end Night I on
p. 8, also including pp. 19-22; and they print Night VIIb (pp. 91-98) in an
appendix.
1927
Keynes, Geoffrey, ed.
Poetry and Prose of William Blake. London: Nonesuch P, 1927.
Category:
Edition
In this edition, Keynes uses the 1925 Writings text, but he arranges
Blake’s writings thematically rather than chronologically as he did before (and
does again later in his 1957 and following editions).
Stefanovič, Svetislav, trans.
“Pesma Enitarmona nad Losom: iz poeme Četirite Zoi [The Song of Enitharmon over Los: Selection from The Four Zoas].” Letopis Matice Srpske 314.2 (Nov. 1927): 263-64.
Category: Edition (selections)
In Serbian.
1928
Percival, M. O.
Sloss and Wallis, The Prophetic Writings of William Blake (with other
books). Journal of English and Germanic Philology 27 (1928): 83-87.
Category:
Review
Percival focuses on the edition of Sloss and Wallis, paying particular
attention to their version of The Four Zoas.
1929
Lindsay, Jack
William Blake: Creative Will and the Poetic Image. 2nd ed. London
: Fanfrolico P, 1929.
Category: Criticism
“Includes an essay on Vala not published in the
1st ed.” (according
to the WorldCat citation).
Wright, Thomas
The Life of William Blake. 2 vols. Olney: Thomas Wright, 1929.
Category:
Biography/criticism
Ch. 9 (1: 143-55) is a commentary on the poem, including an
illustration of the Prester Serpent (manuscript p. 98) with names of persons
and places attributed to specific parts, such as Verulam and Bacon to the head
(1: 150).
Samuels, Jayne Newcomer
“William Blake’s Use of Color Symbolism in The Four Zoas.” Master’s
thesis. State College of Washington, 1939.
Category: Criticism
Nitchie, Elizabeth
“Blake’s ‘The Tiger.’” Explicator 1 (1943): item 34.
Category: Criticism
“Properly relates the fifth stanza to The Four Zoas” (Bentley
and Nurmi 313).
1949
Blackstone, Bernard
English Blake. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1949.
Category: Biography
Ch. 5 (79-102) in part 1 (“Life and Works”) is on The Four Zoas.
Bentley, G. E., Jr.
“The Date of Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas.” Modern
Language Notes 71 (1956): 487-91.
Category: Criticism (textual)
“Evidence that ‘all of Vala from the fourth
Night on was written or transcribed in its present state after May, 1802.’ This
dating makes the poem less of a workshop and more important in its own right” (Bentley
and Nurmi 237).
Margoliouth, H. M., ed.
William Blake’s Vala: Blake’s Numbered Text. Oxford:
Clarendon P, 1956.
Category: Edition
Margoliouth undertakes a formidable task: “to present the text
of Vala as
Blake made his fair copy of each Night before erasures, deletions, additions,
and changes of order had brought it to the state in which we know it today
as The Four Zoas” (xi). Thus, he presents the text before most of
Blake’s revisions, though some are included, Margoliouth’s main basis of exclusion
being his recovery of the “earliest” text as suggested by Blake’s line numbers.
Although at times his decisions about what to include are highly debatable,
his effort to recover “Vala” is both laudable and very useful. As
Margoliouth’s is a version of the early text, he prints much of Night I, Night
VIII, and pp. 117-19 of Night IX in appendices. He prints in order Nights VIIa
and VIIb (or “VII” and “VII bis”), arguing (for the first time) that
the first and second “Night the Seventh” fit well together before Blake’s later
revisions.
Rudd, Margaret
Organiz’d Innocence: The Story of Blake’s Prophetic Books.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956.
Category: Criticism
Ch. 2 (49-124) is on “Vala, or The Four Zoas.” “This
naïve, rather incoherent book sets out to prove that the ‘very wonderful
story’ of The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem (which ‘form
one long narrative’) is in intimate detail ‘Blake’s own psychological drama’.
It may have been Miss Rudd’s refusal to consult any Blake scholarship
during the writing of her book which allows her to conclude, inter alia,
that ‘The Four Zoas has a simple, almost naive, coherence’” (Bentley, Blake
Books #2586).
1957
Anon.
Margoliouth, William Blake’s Vala (with other books). Listener 57
(14 February 1957): 279.
Category: Review
Anon.
Margoliouth, William Blake’s Vala. Notes and Queries 202
(1957): 89-90.
Category: Review
Blackstone, Bernard
Margoliouth, William Blake’s Vala. Modern Language Review 52
(1957): 424-26.
Category: Review
Harper, George Mills
“Symbolic Meaning in Blake’s ‘Nine Years.’” Modern Language Notes 72
(1957): 18-19.
Category: Criticism
Keynes, Geoffrey, ed.
The Complete Writings of William Blake with All the Variant Readings.
London: Nonesuch P; New York: Random House Inc., 1957.
Category: Edition
Revised version of the 1925 Writings, now in one volume instead
of three.
Raine, Kathleen
“Blake’s ‘Cupid and Psyche.’” Listener 58 (21 November 1957): 832-35.
Category:
Criticism
Raine argues that “Vala and Luvah [are] from Apuleius” (Bentley and
Nurmi 325).
Tomlinson, Charles
Margoliouth, William Blake’s Vala (with other books). Poetry 90
(1957): 321-25.
Category: Review
Wahl, Jean
Margoliouth, William Blake’s Vala. Études Anglaises [English
Studies] 10 (1957): 158-60.
Category: Review
In French.
1958
Bentley, G. E., Jr.
“The Failure of Blake’s Four Zoas.” Texas Studies
in English 37 (1958): 102-13.
Category: Criticism
“Some detailed conclusions from a study of the manuscript
as to how and why The
Four Zoas went wrong” (Bentley and Nurmi 237).
Miner, Paul
“William Blake: Two Notes on Sources. (1) Blake’s Use of Gray’s ‘Fatal Sisters’
(2) A Source for Blake’s Enion?” Bulletin
of the New York Public Library 62 (1958): 203-07.
Category: Criticism
“Gray’s influence on Vala Night VIII, Milton, and Jerusalem;
a source for Enion in Drayton’s Poly-Olbion” (Bentley, Blake
Books #2229).
Nurmi, Martin K.
Margoliouth, William Blake’s Vala. Modern Language Notes 73
(1958): 297-99.
Category: Review
1959
Henn, T. R.
Margoliouth, William Blake’s Vala. Review of English Studies 10
(1959): 92-94.
Category: Review
Bloom, Harold
The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. London
: Faber and Faber, 1961.
Category: Criticism
Part 1, section 7, is “States of Being: The Four Zoas”
a revised and enlarged edition of this book was published by Cornell UP (1971).
Additionally, the section on The Four Zoas was reprinted in Blake: A Collection
of Critical Essays, ed. Northrop Frye (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall,
1966) 104-18.
Rabinovitz, Rubin
“Old Testament Influences in William Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Master’s
thesis. Columbia U, 1961.
Category: Criticism
Yasuda, Masayoshi
“Four Zoas kara Milton e (1) [From Four Zoas to Milton (1)].” Kwanseigakuin
Daigaku Eibeibungaku: Journal of the Society of English and American
Literature, Kwanseigakuin University 11th series 6, no. 6 (November
1961): 15-32.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
1962
Anderson, William
“A Study of Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Master’s thesis.
U of Texas at Austin, 1962.
Category: Criticism
Fowler, Lorraine Tulis
“The Four Zoas and The Waste Land:
Paths to Regeneration, the City of God.” Master’s thesis. Southern Methodist
U, 1962.
Category: Criticism
1963
Anon.
Bentley, Vala or The Four Zoas. Times Literary Supplement (26
July 1963): 579.
Category: Review
Bentley, G. E., Jr., ed.
William Blake: Vala or The Four Zoas: A Facsimile
of the Manuscript, a Transcript of the Poem and a Study of Its Growth and
Significance. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1963.
Category: Edition
Bentley’s facsimile, originating as a dissertation, is almost
overwhelming, both in its physical size, being a life-size reproduction of the
manuscript with accompanying apparatus, and in the information that Bentley provides.
Along with a transcription, extensive critical “study” of
the poem’s “growth and significance,” and bibliographical tables of content
and physical details (e.g., lines reused elsewhere, watermarks, etc.), Bentley’s
black-and-white facsimile is the first and only one of its kind.
Hill, Kathleen Balet
“The Role of Orc as Redeemer: A Study of Orc as a Possible Redemptive Figure
in the ‘Four Zoas’ of William Blake.” Master’s thesis. Columbia U, 1963.
Category:
Criticism
1964
Bateson, F. W.
Bentley, Vala or The Four Zoas. Review of English Studies 15
(1964): 437-39.
Category: Review
Bewley, Marius
Bentley, Vala or The Four Zoas (with other books). Hudson Review 17
(1964): 278-85.
Category: Review
Butlin, Martin
“Blake’s ‘Vala, or The Four Zoas’ and a New Water-Colour in
the Tate Gallery.” Burlington Magazine 106,
no. 737 (1964): 381-82.
Category: Other
Garlick, K. J.
Bentley, Vala or The Four Zoas. Modern Language Review 59
(1964): 642-43.
Category: Review
Grant, John E.
Bentley, Vala or The Four Zoas (with other books). Modern Language
Quarterly 25 (1964): 356-64.
Category: Review
Harper, George Mills
Bentley, Vala or The Four Zoas. Sewanee Review 72 (1964):
326-28.
Category: Review
Nurmi, Martin K.
Bentley, Vala or The Four Zoas. Journal of English and Germanic
Philology 63 (1964): 806-08.
Category: Review
1965
Abrahams, Cecil Anthony
“An Annotated Index to The Four Zoas of William
Blake.” Master’s
thesis. U of New Brunswick, 1965.
Category: Other
Adams, Hazard
Bentley, Vala or The Four Zoas. Modern Philology 62 (1965):
266-70.
Category: Review
Erdman, David V., ed.
The Poetry and Prose of William Blake. With
commentary by Harold Bloom. Garden City: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1965.
Category:
Edition
Erdman’s first (nearly “complete”) version of Blake’s writings. In his
version of The Four Zoas, Erdman conflates text on pp. 7 and 143-44 and relegates
Night VIIb to an appendix. The 1970 fourth printing, with revisions, was used
by Stevenson (1971, 1989, 2007) and Ostriker (1977) for their own complete
editions of Blake’s poems.
Harper, George Mills
“Apocalyptic Vision and Pastoral Dream in Blake’s Four Zoas.” South
Atlantic Quarterly 64 (1965): 110-24.
Category: Criticism
Osborn, Winifred
“Vates Ludens: William Blake’s ‘ The Four Zoas, sub
specie ludi.’” Master’s
thesis. Columbia U, 1965.
Category: Criticism
1966
Anderson, William Davis
“‘Awake Ye Dead’: A Study of Blake’s The Book of Urizen, The
Four Zoas, and Jerusalem.” Diss. U of Texas at Austin, 1966.
Category:
Criticism
See also Anderson ’s master’s thesis of 1962, focused solely on The Four
Zoas. This dissertation presumably incorporates that work as a distinct
part.
Keynes, Geoffrey, ed.
Blake: Complete Writings with Variant Readings. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1966.
Category: Edition
Revised version of the 1957 edition, now published by Oxford
University Press. Revised versions of this edition, with the same title and still
by Oxford, were published in 1971, 1972, 1974, 1976, and 1979; the 1979 edition
is the last before Keynes’s death in 1982.
Macdonald, Susan L.
“The Symbolic Significance of Tharmas in William Blake’s Vala or The
Four Zoas.” Master’s thesis. Memphis State U, 1966.
Category: Criticism
Schulkind, Carole
“The Structural Symbolism of The Four Zoas.” Master’s
thesis. Adelphi U, 1966.
Category: Criticism
1967
Reid, Robert Lanier
“A Study of The Four Zoas: 1) A Four-Fold Vision, 2)
Tharmas and Architecture.” Master’s thesis. U of Virginia, 1967.
Category: Criticism
Stevenson, W. H.
“Two Problems in The Four Zoas.” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 1.3
(winter 1967-68): 13-16; continued in Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 1.4
(spring 1968): 6-8.
Category: Criticism (textual)
Stevenson presents the problems of the ending of
Night I and the two Nights VII, giving his solutions based upon satisfactory
readings in light of the textual evidence. These solutions later take form in
his edition text: Night I ends on p. 8; Night VIIb is retained as part of the
edition text (rather than appearing in an appendix) and follows Blake’s directions
for reordering. He points out that since “the text is so pervaded with problems
we do well to try to avoid conjectures involving Blake’s supposed or probable
intentions where he did not make them explicit. We have to make such conjectures
too often in The Four Zoas without manufacturing them” (14).
Sugnet, Charles
“The Four Zoas: Myth in Process.” Master’s thesis.
U of Virginia , 1967.
Category: Criticism
1968
Erdman, David V.
“The Binding (et cetera) of Vala.” Library, 5th series,
19 (1964 [1968]): 112-29.
Category: Criticism (textual)
Erdman’s article, ostensibly a review of Bentley’s
Vala orThe Four
Zoas, contains his arguments about the manuscript (Blake intended it to remain
an “illuminated manuscript”) and a wealth of textual “corrections” to Bentley’s
transcription, all resulting from Erdman’s newfound concern “to perfect Blake’s
text, particularly to recover the ‘illegible’ passages” (113).
Kashiwagi, Toshikazu
“‘The Four Zoas’ ni okeru Blake [Blake in ‘The Four Zoas’].” Koyasan Daigaku
Ronso: Journal of Koyasan University 3 (1968): 1-14.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
1969
Beer, John
Blake’s Visionary Universe. Manchester: Manchester UP;
New York : Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1969.
Category: Criticism
Appendix 3 (343-52) is on “‘Vala, or The Four Zoas’, Text and Illustrations,” and
includes commentary and descriptions of many of the designs.
Erdman, David V.
“A Temporary Report on Texts of Blake.” William Blake: Essays for S. Foster
Damon. Ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld. Providence: Brown UP, 1969. 395-413.
Category:
Criticism (textual)
This is one of Erdman’s many reports on editions of Blake.
In this article, he deals with errors in printed texts in the same manner he
did with Bentley’s 1963 facsimile in “The Binding (et cetera) of Vala” (1968);
he covers The
Four Zoas on 407-10.
Nanavutty, Piloo
“Materia Prima in a Page of Blake’s Vala.” William
Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon. Ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld. Providence
: Brown UP, 1969. 293-302.
Category: Criticism
Taniguchi, Shigeru
“The Circle of Destiny no Keisei: The Four Zoas Night I no Bunseki
[The Formation of the Circle of Destiny: An Analysis of The Four Zoas Night
I].” So Takeyuki Kyoju Kanrekikinen Bunshu [Essays and Studies
in Honor of the Sixtieth Birthday of Professor So Takeyuki]. Kashiwa
, 1969. 83-112.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
Taniguchi, Shigeru
“The Four Zoas Night II ni okeru Cycle Images ni tsuite [Cycle
Images in The Four Zoas Night II].” Reitaku Daigaku Kiyo [Reitaku University Bulletin]
9 (1969): 86-98.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
Wenger, A. Grace
“Blake’s The Four Zoas, Night the Ninth.” Explicator 27
(1969): item 53.
Category: Criticism
Katsura, Fumiko
“Blake Shinwa Oboegaki—The Four Zoas wo megutte
[Notes on Blake’s Mythology—On The Four Zoas].” Kiyo: Shitennoji Joshidaigaku: Review
of Shitennoji Women’s College no. 2 (1970): 32-46.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
Laque, Carol Feiser
“A Study of Organic Form in Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Master’s
thesis. U of Cincinnati, 1970.
Category: Criticism
McNeil, Helen T.
“The Formal Art of The Four Zoas.” Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic.
Ed. David V. Erdman and John E. Grant. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970. 373-90.
Category:
Criticism
Simonson, Paul
“The Lost Traveler’s Dream: A Study of ‘The Four Zoas’ by William Blake.” Master’s
thesis. Hartford Seminary Foundation, 1970.
Category: Criticism
Taniguchi, Shigeru
“The Four Zoas ni okeru Kozo to Giko no Ichikosatsu—Night
the First wo Chushin to shite [A Survey of the Structure and Technique in The Four
Zoas—Centering on Night the First].” Reitaku Daigaku Kiyo [ReitakuUniversity Bulletin]
10 (1970): 53-67.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
1971
Stevenson, W. H., ed.
The Poems of William Blake. Longman Annotated English Poets. London
: Longman Group Limited, 1971.
Category: Edition
In this edition, the text comes from Erdman’s Poetry and Prose (1970),
since—according to Stevenson—Blake’s text has been virtually settled by Erdman
and Bentley. Stevenson’s main task, then, is to provide the first thoroughgoing
set of annotations to Blake’s writings. As he puts it, he has “tried in this
edition not to interpret or expound any ‘system’ in B.’s [Blake’s] works, but
to give whatever information is necessary for the exposition of each poem or
passage, so that the reader may be able to interpret more easily for himself” (xi).
Thus, Stevenson becomes the first editor to make an intentional shift away
from textual scrutiny to annotative/interpretive comprehensiveness. However,
he does make a fair number of revisions to his base text (Erdman). In The
Four Zoas in particular, he orders Nights I and II in the same way as
Sloss and Wallis, ending I on p. 8 (with pp. 19-22 added) and beginning II
on p. 9, and he prints Nights VIIa and VIIb in their manuscript order (though
with Blake’s revisions to VIIb) rather than relegating VIIb to an appendix.
Taniguchi, Shigeru
“‘The Four Zoas’ to ‘ Milton ’ ni okeru Spectres no ichi kosatsu: Counterpart
to Negation no mondai [A Study of Spectres in ‘The Four Zoas’ and ‘Milton’:
The Problem of Counterpart and Negation].” Reitaku Daigaku Kiyo [ReitakuUniversity Bulletin]
12 (1971): 140-58.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
1972
Evans, James C.
“The Apocalypse as Contrary Vision: Prolegomena to an Analogical
Reading of The
Four Zoas.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 14.2
(1972): 313-28.
Category: Criticism
Many of the problems in critical interpretations of The Four Zoas arise
from a duality inherent in the poem itself: it is simultaneously an account
of an individual moving from restricted to totally free (imaginative)
perception and a history of human consciousness, the former requiring a linear
plot and the latter a moment of revelation (so that there is no prescribed
progression) (314-15). Thus, “the persona of the author of The Four Zoas is
dual: he is both a prophet to a culture and a more hermetic visionary” (315).
Evans bases his “alternative principle of structural organization” for the
poem on the Circle of Destiny.
Opalenik, Mary Susan
“The Dislocation of Energy in The Four Zoas.” Master’s
thesis. San Francisco State College, 1972.
Category: Criticism
Smith, Catherine F.
“Pictorial Language in The Four Zoas by Blake.” Diss.
U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1972.
Category: Criticism
Stevenson, Warren
Divine Analogy: A Study of the Creation Motif in Blake and Coleridge.
Salzburg Studies in English Literature: Romantic Reassessment 25. Salzburg
: U of Salzburg, 1972.
Category: Criticism
Ch. 4 (114-47), “The Four Zoas: From Creation to Re-Creation.”
Stilwell, Derek P.
“The Shadow in Eternity: A Reading of William Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Master’s
thesis. Dalhousie U, 1972.
Category: Criticism
Tsuchiya, Shigeko
“Vision no hizumi—‘Four Zoas’ o megutte [The Warp of Vision—On ‘The
Four Zoas’].” Critica 16
(1972): 2-13.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
1973
Bromberg, Pamela Starr
“Blake and the Spectre of Milton .” Diss. Yale U, 1973.
Category: Criticism
“‘This dissertation attempts to study Blake’s poetic relationship
with Milton ’ in the Marriage, Europe, Vala, and Milton” (Bentley, Blake
Books #A2743).
Essick, Robert N.
Keynes, Blake: Complete Writings with Variant Readings (rev. ed.
1972). Blake Studies 6.1 (fall 1973): 103-06.
Category: Review
Grant, John E.
“Visions in Vala: A Consideration of Some Pictures
in the Manuscript.” Blake’s
Sublime Allegory: Essays on The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem . Ed.
Stuart Curran and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. Madison: U of Wisconsin
P, 1973. 141-202.
Category: Criticism
Grant examines Blake’s illustrations on pp. 2, 13, 19, 22,
25, 26, 43-76, 35, 37-42, and 117-40. He argues that while it is often possible
to speak meaningfully about “early” and “late” alterations to the text, no similar
principle extends to the pictures, nor is it possible to make a priori inferences about
relationships between text and picture based on the critical (i.e., Bentley’s)
belief that Blake moved from illustration to illumination in his later career
(143).
Hagstrum, Jean H.
“Babylon Revisited, or the Story of Luvah and Vala.”
Blake’s Sublime Allegory: Essays on The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem
. Ed. Stuart Curran and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. Madison: U of Wisconsin
P, 1973. 101-18.
Category: Criticism
Much of Hagstrum’s discussion focuses on Luvah and Vala, who
appear together mostly (indeed, almost exclusively) in The Four Zoas.
Johnson,
Mary Lynn, and Brian Wilkie
“On Reading The Four Zoas: Inscape and
Analogy.” Blake’s Sublime
Allegory: Essays on The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem . Ed. Stuart
Curran and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1973.
203-32.
Category: Criticism
Marshall, Jerry
“A Jungian Analysis of William Blake’s The Four Zoas:
A Thesis.” Master’s
thesis. Appalachian State U, 1973.
Category: Criticism
Paley, Morton D.
“The Figure of the Garment in The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem.” Blake’s
Sublime Allegory: Essays on The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem . Ed.
Stuart Curran and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. Madison: U of Wisconsin
P, 1973. 119-39.
Category: Criticism
1974
Gibb, Peter Lloyd
“From Satire to Apocalypse in William Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Master’s
thesis. U of British Columbia, 1974.
Category: Criticism
Hamilton, Lee T.
“Energy and Archetype: A Jungian Analysis of The Four Zoasby
William Blake.” Master’s thesis. North Texas State U, 1974.
Category: Criticism
Lento, Thomas V.
“The Epic Consciousness in Four Romantic and Modern Epics by Blake, Byron,
Eliot, and Hart Crane.” Diss. U of Iowa, 1974.
Category: Criticism
Includes a chapter on The Four Zoas.
Mellor, Anne Kostelanetz
Blake’s Human Form Divine. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974.
Category:
Criticism
Ch. 5 (165-213) is on “Vala, or The Four Zoas:
Blake’s Concept of Form, 1795-1810.”
Phillips, Quitman E.
“William Blake’s The Four Zoas: His Vision of
Artistic Growth and Purpose.” BA honors thesis. Harvard U, 1974.
Category: Criticism
Sanders, Jon Barry
“The Desire of Man: A Reading of Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Diss.
U of Oregon, 1974.
Category: Criticism
Schotz, Myra Glazer
“The Altering Eye: William Blake and the Art of Parallax,
an Approach to The
Four Zoas.” Diss. Brandeis U, 1974.
Category: Criticism
1975
DiSalvo, Jackie
“Blake Encountering Milton: Politics and the Family in Paradise Lost and The
Four Zoas.” Milton and the Line of Vision. Ed.
Joseph Anthony Wittreich. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1975. 143-84.
Category: Criticism
Kaplan, Nancy A.
“William Blake’s The Four Zoas: The Rhetoric of Vision.” Diss.
Cornell U, 1975.
Category: Criticism
Kobayashi, Keiko
“Vala or The Four Zoas—Blake
ni okeru shisoteki hensen [Vala or The Four Zoas—The
Development of Blake’s Thought].” Osaka Daigaku
Daigakuin Eibungaku Danwakai: Osaka Literary Review no.
14 (1975): 14-26.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
Lincoln, A. W. J.
“A History of the Composition of William Blake’s Vala, or The
Four Zoas as Revealed by a Study of the Surviving Manuscript.” Diss.
U of Wales, Bangor, 1975.
Category: Criticism (textual)
Nurmi, Martin K.
William Blake. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1975.
Category: Biography
Ch. 7 (119-45) is on The Four Zoas.
Sanders, Jon Barry
“Humanity Divine Incomprehensible: The Cosmology of The Four Zoas.” Otaru
Syouka Daigaku Zinnbunn Kenkyu [Journal of the
Review of Liberal Arts in Otaru University of Commerce] 50 (1975): 99-113.
Category: Criticism
Starer, Robert
Images of Man . For soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, and baritone soloists,
mixed chorus, flute (piccolo), horn, cello, harp, and percussion. Melville:
MCA Music, 1975.
Category: Musical score
The music is accompanied by selected text from Blake’s
poem.
Taniguchi, Shigeru
“‘The Four Zoas,’ Night the Third no bunseki: Zoa-Emanation kankei no kaifuku
e no mosaku [An Analysis of ‘The Four Zoas,’ Night the Third—A Search
for the Restoration of the Zoa-Emanation Relationship].” Reitaku Daigaku Kiyo [ReitakuUniversity Bulletin]
18 (1975): 40-48.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
1976
Benzel, Michael Arnold
“Vision and Revision in The Four Zoas: The
Evidence of the Manuscript.” Diss.
U of Toledo, 1976.
Category: Criticism (textual)
Bullard, William Fleming
“Embodied Semblances: A Comparative Study of William
Blake’s The Four
Zoas and D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow.” Diss. Boston College
, 1976.
Category: Criticism
Gallant, Christine Condit
“Regeneration through Archetype: William Blake’s
Changing Myth in The
Four Zoas.” Diss. U of Minnesota, 1976.
Category: Criticism
Lindsay, D.
“The Resurrection of Man: A Short Commentary on Night Nine of Blake’s Vala or The
Four Zoas.” UCT Studies in English 6 (1976): 14-23.
Category: Criticism
McClellan, Jane Martha
“William Blake’s Concept of Man in The Four Zoas, Milton,
and Jerusalem.” Diss. Florida State U, 1976.
Category: Criticism
Sugnet, Charles J.
“The Role of Christ in Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Essays in Literature 3.2
(1976): 167-80.
Category: Criticism
1977
Ault, Donald
“Incommensurability and Interconnection in Blake’s Anti-Newtonian
Text.” Studies
in Romanticism 16 (1977): 277-303.
Category: Criticism
This essay was reprinted in Essential Articles for the Study of William
Blake, 1970-1984, ed. Nelson Hilton (Hamden: Archon Books, 1986) 141-73.
Bellas, Ralph A.
“The Four Zoas.” William Blake.
Ed. Victor N. Paananen. Twayne's English Authors Series 202. Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1977. 88-112.
Category: Criticism
An “updated edition” of this collection of
critical essays was published in 1996.
Bentley, G. E., Jr.
Blake Books: Annotated Catalogues of William Blake’s Writings in Illuminated
Printing, in Conventional Typography and in Manuscript, and Reprints Thereof,
Reproductions of His Designs, Books with His Engravings, Catalogues, Books
He Owned, and Scholarly and Critical Works about Him. Oxford: Clarendon
P, 1977.
Category: Other
Bentley provides bibliographical information on the manuscript
(along with practically all of Blake’s other “books” in various genres), which
is also contained in Bentley’s earlier facsimile edition (1963).
Bidney, Martin
“Urizen and the Comedy of Automatism in Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Philological
Quarterly 56 (1977): 204-20.
Category: Criticism
DiSalvo, Jacqueline Anne
“War of Titans: Blake’s Confrontation with Milton; The Four Zoas as
Political Critique of Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition.” Diss.
U of Wisconsin–Madison,
1977.
Category: Criticism
Lemieux, Gerard Alfred
“The Mantle of Mystery: Its Growth from Vala to The Four Zoas.” Diss.
Southern Illinois U, Carbondale, 1977.
Category: Criticism (textual)
Myers, Victoria
“The Dialogue as Interpretive Focus in Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Philological
Quarterly 56 (1977): 221-39.
Category: Criticism
Ostriker, Alicia, ed.
William Blake: The Complete Poems. Penguin English Poets. Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1977.
Category: Edition
Ostriker approaches editing Blake in a manner similar to Stevenson
(1971), using Erdman’s 1970 Poetry and Prose as the basis for her
own edition. However, she turns to Keynes as an additional editorial model, especially
when it comes to the arrangement and handling of Blake’s writings: she uses
a similar set of editorial symbols in the text to represent Blake’s revisions.
Highly attuned to the need for editorial precision, she is careful to distinguish
Blake’s printed poems from his manuscript texts. She is equally aware,
however, of the difficulties Blake’s poetry presents to readers, and so
offers interpretive and explanatory notes in the back of her edition, along
with a dictionary for various names, places, etc. A reprint of this edition,
without revision, was published in 2004.
Sanders, Jon Barry
“The Eternal Mind Bounded: Psychological Organization in The Four Zoas.”
Otaru Syouka Daigaku Zinnbunn Kenkyu [Journal
of the Review of Liberal Arts in Otaru University of Commerce] 53 (1977):
35-55.
Category: Criticism
Schotz, Myra Glazer
“On the Frontispiece of The Four Zoas.” Blake/An Illustrated
Quarterly 10.4 (spring 1977): 126-27.
Category: Criticism
Taniguchi, Shigeru
“‘The Four Zoas,’ Night the Fourth no bunseki: Enion no kaifuku o mezasu Tharmas
no saku [An Analysis of ‘The Four Zoas,’ Night the Fourth: Tharmas’s Attempts
to Restore Enion].” Reitaku Daigaku Kiyo [ReitakuUniversity Bulletin]
23 (1977): 27-34.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
Taniguchi, Shigeru
“On the Alliance of Tharmas and Urizen in The Four Zoas:
A Clue to the Role of Tharmas.” Reitaku Daigaku Kiyo [ReitakuUniversity Bulletin]
24 (1977): 1-16.
Category: Criticism
1978
Bentley, G. E., Jr., ed.
William Blake’s Writings. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1978.
Category:
Edition
For his text of “Vala, or The Four Zoas”, Bentley uses
a revised version of the transcription from his 1963 facsimile. Particularly
noteworthy is that in this edition, Bentley has gone further than mere transcription
by adding editorial punctuation and revising portions of text (with or without
Blake’s directions)—all along with a version of the revision symbols
in the text that appeared in the 1963 transcription. Added to many, and often
extensive, footnotes, Bentley’s is a heavily compacted bibliographical version
of the manuscript text.
Brisman, Leslie
Romantic Origins. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978.
Category: Criticism
Ch. 6 (224-75), “Re: Generation in Blake,” includes a section
on The Four
Zoas. It was partially reprinted as “The Four Zoas: First
Things” in Modern Critical Views: William Blake, ed. Harold Bloom
(New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985) 145-57.
Erdman, David V.
“The Four Zoas: New Text for Pages 5, 6, and
7, Night the First.” Blake/An
Illustrated Quarterly 12.2 (fall 1978): 96-99.
Category: Criticism (textual)
Erdman adopts Lincoln ’s hypothesis (see below)
about the text on these pages in relation to the fragments (pp. 143-44) and thus
revises his edition text.
Erdman, David V.
“Night the Seventh: The Editorial Problem.” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 12.2
(fall 1978): 135-39.
Category: Criticism (textual)
Erdman adopts the solution to the Nights VII problem
proposed by Mark Lefebvre (see below) and thus revises his edition text, conflating
Nights VIIa and VIIb.
Gallant, Christine
Blake and the Assimilation of Chaos. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978.
Category:
Criticism
Focuses on The Four Zoas from the interpretive perspective of Jungian
psychology.
Glausser, Wayne Edward
“Blake and the Daughters of Memory.” Diss. Yale U, 1978.
Category: Criticism
Glausser focuses on The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem.
See also his article on a similar topic solely on The Four Zoas (1985).
Hilton, Nelson
“The Sweet Science of Atmospheres in The Four Zoas.” Blake/An
Illustrated Quarterly 12.2 (fall 1978): 80-86.
Category: Criticism
Hirst, Désirée, and G. M. Matthews
Blake’s Long Poems. London: Audio Learning, 1978.
Category: Sound
recording
Hirst and Matthews provide instructional material on this recording.
Track A is entitled “Some Difficulties of Approach: Vala, or, The Four
Zoas and Milton Considered.”
Hoagwood, Terence Allan
“The Four Zoas and ‘The Philosophick
Cabbala.’” Blake/An Illustrated
Quarterly 12.2 (fall 1978): 87-90.
Category: Criticism
Kilgore, John
“The Order of Nights VIIa and VIIb in Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Blake/An
Illustrated Quarterly 12.2 (fall 1978): 107-13.
Category: Criticism (textual)
Kilgore points out two (overlapping) aspects of
the “scholarly puzzle” of
two Nights VII: 1) “the editorial problem of finding the least imperfect arrangement
of the two Nights within the text of the poem” and 2) “the interpretive problem
of deciding what imaginative place each Night has in the poem as a whole” (107).
He then argues for the conflation of Nights VIIa and VIIb based upon a supposed
better “fit,” ignoring Blake’s directions to reorder VIIb but inserting it,
in the original order, into VIIa at that Night’s original ending on p. 85.
Lefebvre, Mark
“A Note on the Structural Necessity of Night VIIb.” Blake/An Illustrated
Quarterly 12.2 (fall 1978): 134.
Category: Criticism (textual)
Lefebvre argues for the conflation of Nights VIIa
and VIIb based upon better “fit”:
follow Blake’s instructions for reordering VIIb and insert it into Night VIIa
at that Night’s original ending on p. 85. This is the proposal that Erdman
adopts and implements in his 1982 edition text.
Lincoln, Andrew
“The Four Zoas: The Text of Pages 5, 6, and
7, Night the First.” Blake/An
Illustrated Quarterly 12.2 (fall 1978): 91-95.
Category: Criticism (textual)
Lincoln argues against Bentley’s view that text
found on the fragments (pp. 143-44) represents later versions of corresponding
text in Night I, returning instead to the previous opinion that the fragmentary
text is earlier material. Erdman agrees and revises his text in the 1982 edition.
Lincoln, Andrew
“The Revision of the Seventh and Eighth Nights of The Four Zoas.” Blake/An
Illustrated Quarterly 12.2 (fall 1978): 114-33.
Category: Criticism (textual)
In this article, Lincoln offers “a textual arrangement which will allow the
two Nights [VII] to be read as a single and reasonably coherent narrative” (115).
Since Blake left VIIb in the manuscript, Lincoln says that he was never committed
to excluding it and feels that a coherent order can be formed by inserting
all of VIIa between the transposed halves of VIIb (132).
Lindsay, David W.
“Prelude to Apocalypse: A Short Commentary on Night VIII
of Blake’s Vala or The
Four Zoas.” DurhamUniversity Journal 70
(1978): 179-85.
Category: Criticism
Magno, Cettina
“The Four Zoas for Italy .” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 12.2
(fall 1978): 140-41.
Category: Criticism
Naschak, Bruce Stephen
“William Blake and the Tradition of Inspired Poetry.” Master’s
thesis. San Diego State U, 1978.
Category: Criticism
Naschak focuses on The Four Zoas in particular.
Taniguchi, Shigeru
“The Four Zoas, Night the Fifth no bunseki—saikuru
no aratana kaiten [An Analysis of The Four Zoas, Night the Fifth—A
New Revolution of the Cycle].” Reitaku Daigaku Kiyo [Reitaku University Bulletin]
25 (1978): 131-37.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
Wilkie, Brian, and Mary Lynn Johnson
Blake’s Four Zoas: The Design of a Dream. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1978.
Category: Criticism
The first monograph devoted entirely to The Four Zoas.
Wilkie and Johnson’s interpretation is based on their “basic premise about the poem’s firmness of
meaning and its subtle but demonstrable coherence” (ix). Their case for this
reading “rests mainly on internal evidence: the pattern of meaning, imagery,
structure, and story that emerges when one reads the poem closely” (xiv). In
their view, much of the difficulty of The Four Zoas arises from its
forbiddingly complex, non-contextualized verbal texture, which reflects how “Blake
was trying something more than either ordinary discursive communication or (which
is less obvious) other kinds of mythic or allegorical narrative” (2).
1979
Kilgore, John Dodge
“The Human Universal: Studies in the Structure of The Four Zoas.” Diss.
U of California, Irvine, 1979.
Category: Criticism
Murphy, Karleen Middleton
“The Emanations of the Four Zoas: Ahania, Enion, Vala, Enitharmon.” Diss.
U of Toledo, 1979.
Category: Criticism
Ault, Donald D.
Wilkie and Johnson, Blake’s Four Zoas. Eighteenth-Century Studies 13
(1980): 352-56.
Category: Review
Banerjee, Tilak
“Pope’s Epic and the Hebraic Tradition from Thomson to Blake.” Diss.
York U, 1980.
Category: Criticism
Includes a chapter on Blake and The Four Zoas (“Blake and the Prophet
Hero”).
De Luca, V. A.
Wilkie and Johnson, Blake’s Four Zoas. University of
Toronto Quarterly 50 (1980-81): 242-46.
Category: Review
Imamura, Yukiko
“A Study of the Variant Versions of the Fall of Man in William
Blake’s Four
Zoas.” Master’s thesis. Kent State U, 1980.
Category: Criticism
Leader, Zachary
Wilkie and Johnson, Blake’s Four Zoas. Essays in Criticism 30
(1980): 243-47.
Category: Review
MacLean, R. L.
“William Blake’s Vala, or The Four Zoas: A
Consideration of the Text, Critical Estimates, Literary Background and Relationship
to Blake’s Other Work, Together with a Reading of the Poem.” Diss. U of Edinburgh,
1980.
Category: Criticism (textual)
Mann, Paul
“A Preface to William Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Diss. U of
California, Santa Cruz, 1980.
Category: Criticism
Because “perception constitutes a world” in - The Four Zoas,
and in the same sense “criticism would constitute (and not merely explain) a text,” Mann
believes that “one’s task as a reader” of Blake’s work “is …, and in larger
part than one might at first assume, to come to terms with the structures and
goals of criticism itself” (iv).
Okuma, Akinobu
“Blake no ‘yottsu no Zoas’—genshi no seisei shigaku: Blake’s ‘The Four Zoas’—The
Generative Poetics of Vision.” Kenkyu Kiyo, Saga Daigaku Kyoyobu: Journal
of the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Saga University no. 12 (1980): 19-72.
Category:
Criticism
In Japanese.
Taniguchi, Shigeru
“The Four Zoas, Night the Sixth no bunseki—Urthona
no dokutsu [An Analysis of The Four Zoas, Night the Sixth—Urthona’s
Cave].” Reitaku
Daigaku Kiyo [Reitaku University Bulletin]
30 (1980): 1-7.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
1981
Beer, John
Wilkie and Johnson, Blake’s Four Zoas (with other books). Modern
Language Review 76 (1981): 676-82.
Category: Review
Butlin, Martin
The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake. 2 vols. Studies in
British Art. New Haven: Yale UP, 1981.
Category: Other
Butlin gives very brief descriptions of sketches and other illustrations
on the manuscript pages.
Ginsberg, Allen
Nineteenth Century Poetry—Allen Ginsberg. Boulder: Naropa Institute,
29 October 1981; 3, 5, 10 November 1981.
Category: Sound recording
These are recordings of Ginsberg lectures (individual
dates each on its own cassette tape) focusing on, or dealing extensively with, The Four Zoas,
as well as other works (in relation to this work and otherwise).
Lincoln, Andrew
“Blake’s Lower Paradise: The Pastoral Passage in The Four Zoas,
Night the Ninth.” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 84 (1981):
470-78.
Category: Criticism
Mann, Paul
“Editing The Four Zoas.” PacificCoast Philology 16.1
(1981): 49-56.
Category: Criticism (textual)
Mann discusses the resistance of Blake’s manuscript
to (traditional) editing. According to Mann, The Four Zoas is “unfinished,” which “makes life
hard for the editor, who believes he must produce a text as close to the author’s
final intentions as possible” (50).
Singh, Gurbhagat
“Lacan, Lévi-Strauss and William Blake: A Note on The Four Zoas.” Literary
Criterion 16.2 (1981): 56-65.
Category: Criticism
Starling, Roy
“The Ellis and Yeats Edition of William Blake’s Vala:
Text and Commentary.” Diss.
Florida State U, 1981.
Category: Criticism (textual)
Tsuchiya, Shigeko
“The Four Zoas dai nanaya—futatsu no
bijon [The Four Zoas Night
Seven—On the Two Visions].” Albion: Albion ns no. 27 (1981): 42-59.
Category:
Criticism
In Japanese.
Yoshihara, Fumio
“‘Yogensho’ ni okeru enkan shinborizumu—Yottu no Zoas ni
tsuite: Cycle Symbolism in the Prophetic Books—Part 2,The Four Zoas.” Gengo
Bunka Ronshu, Nagoya Daigaku Sogo gengo Senta: Studies in Language
and Culture, Language Center, Nagoya University no. 2 (1981): 59-73.
Category:
Criticism
In Japanese.
1982
Ackland, Michael
“The Embattled Sexes: Blake’s Debt to Wollstonecraft in The Four Zoas.” Blake/An
Illustrated Quarterly 16.3 (winter 1982-83): 172-83.
Category: Criticism
Erdman, David V., ed.
The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. With commentary
by Harold Bloom. Rev. ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1982.
Category: Edition
This “complete” edition by Erdman derives from his first edition, Poetry
and Prose (1965), now including newly discovered texts and additional
material. Of particular importance are Erdman’s two major revisions to The
Four Zoas text: his de-conflation of the text on pp. 7-8 and 143-44
and his conflation of Nights VIIa and VIIb into one “Night the Seventh” (following
the discussion in the fall 1978 issue of Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly).
A “newly revised” version of this 1982 edition was published in paperback
in 1988 by Anchor-Doubleday; the only change to The Four Zoas text
is Erdman’s page numbering, which he alters in order to coincide with the
pagination in his and Magno’s 1987 facsimile edition.
Ide, Nancy Marie
“Patterns of Imagery in William Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Diss.
Pennsylvania State U, 1982.
Category: Criticism
Loudon, Michael Douglas
“The Story in William Blake’s The Four Zoas:
A Guide to the Events of the Epic.” Diss. State U of New York at Buffalo, 1982.
Category:
Criticism
Punter, David
Blake, Hegel and Dialectic. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1982.
Category:
Criticism
Ch. 4 (170-209) is on The Four Zoas, with the following sections: “Abstract
and Concrete,” “The Fragmentation of Consciousness,” and “Mind and Body.”
Taniguchi, Shigeru
“The Four Zoas, Night the Eighth no bunseki [An Analysis of The
Four Zoas, Night the Eighth].” Reitaku Daigaku Kiyo [ReitakuUniversity Bulletin]
34 (1982): 1-9.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
Taniguchi, Shigeru
“The Four Zoas, Night VII (a) no bunseki—Los
no jikohenkaku [An Analysis of The Four Zoas, Night VII (a)—Self-Reformation
of Los].” Reitaku
Daigaku Kiyo [Reitaku University Bulletin]
33 (1982): 37-45.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
Whitehead, Fred
“Visions of the Archaic World.” Sparks of Fire: Blake in a New Age.
Ed. James Bogan and Fred Goss. Richmond: North Atlantic Books, 1982. 231-43.
Category:
Criticism
“An attempt to ‘reconstruct … [Vala’s] plot by collecting and
analyzing passages scattered throughout the ms’ [p. 232]” (Bentley, Blake Books Supplement 419).
1983
Ackland, Michael
“Blake’s Critique of Enlightenment Reason in The Four Zoas.” Colby
Library Quarterly 19 (1983): 173-89.
Category: Criticism
Blondel, Jacques, ed. and trans.
Vala , ou, Les Quatre Vivants ;
Annotations à divers ouvrages.
Oeuvres de William Blake 4. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1983.
Category: Other
An edition (?) of the poem including both English and French text.
Blondel, Jacques
Wilkie and Johnson, Blake’s Four Zoas. Études
Anglaises [ English
Studies ] 36 (1983): 82-83.
Category: Review
In French.
Brown, James Boyd
“The History of an Illusion: The Meaning of the Four Zoas
in Blake’s The
Four Zoas.” Diss. York U, 1983.
Category: Criticism
Cushing, James Byers
“The Figure of the Poet: Self-Representation in Young, Blake, and Wordsworth.” Diss.
U of California, Irvine, 1983.
Category: Criticism
Includes a chapter on Blake and The Four Zoas.
Deen, Leonard W.
Conversing in Paradise: Poetic Genius and Identity-as-Community in Blake’s
Los. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1983.
Category: Criticism
Ch. 5 (123-65), “Priest and Poet, Serpent and Human Form,
in The Four
Zoas.”
DiSalvo, Jackie
War of Titans: Blake’s Critique of Milton and the Politics of Religion.
Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1983.
Category: Criticism
DiSalvo deals extensively with The Four Zoas in this book, the published
version of her dissertation (1977).
Dowdey, Landon, ed.
The Four Zoas: The Torments of Love and Jealousy in the Death and Judgment
of Albion the Ancient Man by William Blake. Chicago: Swallow P, 1983.
Category:
Edition
Dowdey’s “edition,” if one can use that word in its commonly understood sense,
is a highly personal, unusual, and therefore compelling version of Blake’s
manuscript. The prose translation of Blake’s (mostly) poetic text and the inclusion
of Blakean illustrations from various other works—early and late, illuminated
and not—most immediately distinguish Dowdey’s production, inspired in
and by the spirit of Blake as poet and illuminator. Further, Dowdey at first
takes a markedly anti-scholarly stance and encourages his readers to worry
less about understanding what Blake says than about letting Blake’s vision
inspire their own visions as they read and behold. Yet, in the accompanying
appendices, Dowdey presents explanatory notes and other ancillary material
that could have come directly from a traditional scholarly edition. All together,
Dowdey’s illuminated text and its apparatus reveal the extent to which Dowdey
has approached Blake in the spirit that Blake approached Milton, enacting,
as it were, Blake’s citation on the title plate of Milton: “Would
to God that all the Lords people were Prophets.”
Erdman, David V.
“Redefining the Texts of Blake (Another Temporary Report).” Blake/An Illustrated
Quarterly 17.1 (summer 1983): 4-15.
Category: Other
Erdman’s corrections and changes to his text of The Four Zoas (as
reflected in his 1982 edition) are on 7-8.
Himy, Armand
“Un Symbole de Blake: Le Sparagmos.” Bulletin de
la Société d’Études
Anglo-Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles[Bulletin
of the Society of Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Anglo-American Studies]
16 (June 1983): 89-107.
Category: Criticism
In French.
Lee, Judith
“Ways of Their Own: The Emanations in Blake’s Vala, or The Four
Zoas.” ELH 50 (1983): 131-53.
Category: Criticism
Storch, Margaret
“The ‘Spectrous Fiend’ Cast Out: Blake’s Crisis at Felpham.” Modern Language
Quarterly 44 (1983): 115-35.
Category: Criticism
On The Four Zoas and Milton.
Taniguchi, Shigeru
“The Four Zoas, Night the Ninth no bunseki—keiji
no joju [An Analysis of The Four Zoas, Night the Ninth—Accomplishment
of Revolution].” Reitaku
Daigaku Kiyo [Reitaku University Bulletin]
35 (1983): 41-50.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
Taniguchi, Shigeru
“The Four Zoas, Night the Seventh (b) no
bunseki—Vala no honsho
[An Analysis of The Four Zoas, Night the Seventh (b)—The Nature
of Vala].” Reitaku Daigaku Kiyo [Reitaku University Bulletin]
36 (1983): 29-36.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
Webster, Brenda S.
Blake’s Prophetic Psychology. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1983.
Category:
Criticism
Ch. 6 (203-49) is on “Vala and The Four Zoas.”
1984
Hearn, Michael Patrick
Dowdey, The Four Zoas . American Book Collector 5.3 (1984):
56.
Category: Review
Howard, John
Infernal Poetics: Poetic Structures in Blake’s Lambeth Prophecies.
Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1984.
Category: Criticism
Ch. 11 (206-27), “The Four Zoas: Epic Prophecy.”
Kilgore, John
“On Reading The Four Zoas: Some Basic Principles.” Yongo Yongmunhak [Journal
of English Language and Literature] 30 (1984): 687-99.
Category: Criticism
Lagomarcino, Leslie Karen
“Apocalyptic Art and William Blake’s The Four Zoas: ‘Night the Ninth.’” Master’s
thesis. U of Virginia, 1984.
Category: Criticism
Santa Cruz Blake Study Group
Erdman, The Complete Poetry and Prose of
William Blake. Blake/An
Illustrated Quarterly 18.1 (summer 1984): 4-31.
Category: Review
As part of their extensive and pointed review, the Santa Cruz
Blake Study Group take Erdman to task about his conflation of the two Nights
VII in particular in part 5, “Further [Insoluble?] Problems” (13-16).
Whitmarsh-Knight, David Edward
“Structure as a Key to Meaning in William Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Diss.
U of New Brunswick, 1984.
Category: Criticism
1985
Blanchard, George A.
“Threefold Vision as Structural Vehicle in William Blake’s ‘The Four Zoas.’” Master’s
thesis. George Mason U, 1985.
Category: Criticism
Essick, Robert N.
“The Four Zoas: Intention and Production.” Blake/An Illustrated
Quarterly 18.4 (spring 1985): 216-20.
Category: Criticism (textual)
For Essick, the physical condition of the manuscript,
with its deletions, erasures, marginal insertions, and designs, “immediately suggests” that it
is “the signifier of an unrealized intention to produce the poem in some other
form” (216). Especially helpful are his proposed three stages of manuscript
composition/revision: “(1) a manuscript and production mockup for a poem (Vala?)
intended for publication of text and designs as intaglio etchings/engravings …,
tentatively dated c. 1796-1800; (2) a manuscript and production mockup for
a poem (The Four Zoas?) intended for publication as a letterpress
text accompanied by intaglio etched and/or engraved designs surrounding selected
pages of text …, tentatively dated c. 1800-1804; (3) a working manuscript unrelated
to any specific publication intentions (i.e., The Four Zoas manuscript
as we know it today), tentatively dated c. 1804-1807” (219).
Glausser, Wayne
“The Gates of Memory in Night VIIa of The Four Zoas.” Blake/An
Illustrated Quarterly 18.4 (spring 1985): 196-203.
Category: Criticism
Gori, Michela
“Dalla visione al mito: The Four Zoas di William Blake [From Vision
to Myth: The Four Zoas of William Blake].” Diss. U of Florence, 1985.
Category:
Criticism
In Italian.
Kamusikiri, Sandra Darlene
“‘A Building of Magnificence ’: Blake’s Major Prophecies and Eighteenth-Century
Conceptions of the Human Sublime.” Diss. U of California, Riverside, 1985.
Category:
Criticism
Mann, Paul
“The Final State of The Four Zoas.” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 18.4
(spring 1985): 204-15.
Category: Criticism (textual)
Mann’s purpose in considering Blake’s possible intentions
for The Four
Zoas is to offer his view that “Blake might have been experimenting
with a compromise between his customary copperplate methods and the strictures
of commercial publishing, a more conventional means of production which could
enable him to reach a wider audience than his copperplate method permitted.” Thus,
if Mann’s theory is correct, “we would have to revise our sense of Blake’s
project as an absolute rejection of normal publishing practice” (204). Particularly
provocative is his suggestion that Blake may have received additional Night
Thoughts copperplates from Edwards and used them for other purposes.
Mitchell, W. J. T.
Dowdey, The Four Zoas. Library Quarterly 55 (1985): 115-17.
Category:
Review
Mitchell has little positive to say about Dowdey’s version of the manuscript,
seriously questioning its reliability as a useful edition.
Otomo, Mikaeru
“William Blake no ‘Yonin no Zoas’ ni okeru chikara no byoshutsu
ni tsuite: Description of Power in Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas.” Dohto
Daigaku Kiyo, Kyoyobu: Bulletin of Dohto University, General Education no.
4 (1985): 11-20.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
Taniguchi, Shigeru
“The Four Zoas dai nanaya ni kansuru shomondai to doko [Issues
and Trends in Recent Criticism of The Four Zoas Night the Seventh].” Reitaku
Daigaku Kiyo [Reitaku University Bulletin]
39 (1985): 85-96.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
Tsuchiya, Shigeko
Bijon no hizumi: Blake no ‘Yonin no Zoa’ [His
Twisted Vision: Blake’s ‘Four Zoas’]. Kyoto, 1985.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
1986
Ault, Donald
“Re-Visioning The Four Zoas.” Unnam’d Forms: Blake and Textuality.
Ed. Nelson Hilton and Thomas A. Vogler. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.
105-39.
Category: Criticism
This essay, which appears as a postscript to Ault’s Narrative
Unbound (1987),
was reprinted online in ImageText 3.2 (2007) <http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v3_2/ault/>.
Berger, Susan
“William Blake’s Perception of the Human Mind.” Master’s thesis.
U of Iowa, 1986.
Category: Criticism
Deals with The Four Zoas and Jerusalem.
Erdman, David V.
“Improving the Text of The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake.” Blake/An
Illustrated Quarterly 20.2 (fall 1986): 49-52.
Category: Criticism (textual)
Another report and errata list by Erdman for his
edition; the corrections and changes to his Four Zoas text are on 50.
Ide, Nancy M.
“Patterns of Imagery in William Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Méthodes
quantitatives et informatiques dans l’étude des textes/Computers in
Literary and Linguistic Research: En hommage à Charles Muller.
Ed. Étienne Brunet. 2 vols. Travaux de linguistique quantitative 35.
Geneva: Slatkine, 1986. 2: 495-505.
Category: Criticism
Lee, Judith
“Scornful Beauty: A Note on Blake and Ariosto.” English Language Notes 23.4
(1986): 34-38.
Category: Criticism
Lee discusses the influence of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso on
Blake’s epic.
Lincoln, Andrew
“Blake and the Natural History of Creation.” Essays and Studies 39
(1986): 94-103.
Category: Criticism
Lincoln deals with The Four Zoas and relationships
to Milton—Paradise Lost in
particular.
Matsushima, Shoichi
“Blake no ‘Yon Zoas’ [Blake’s ‘Four Zoas’].” Walpurgis
‘ 86, Kokugakuin Daigaku Gaikokugo Kenkyushitsu Kiyo [Walpurgis ‘ 86,
Periodical of Kokugakuin University] (1986): 35-47.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
Otomo, Mikaeru
“‘The Four Zoas’ no chikara no tokushitsu ni tsuite: Some Features of the
Power in ‘The Four Zoas.’” Hokkaido Eigoeibungaku:English
Literature in Hokkaido 31 (1986): 1-9.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
Sanders, Jon Barry
“A Dream of Nine Nights—The Narrative Structure of The Four
Zoas.” Fuji Joshi Daigaku, Fuji Joshi Tanki Daigaku Kiyo, Daiichibu [Bulletin
of Fuji University of Women and Fuji Junior College of Women, Part 1]
23 (1986): 1-27.
Category: Criticism
Watanabe, Mitsuru
“Senteki sekai kara mozaikuteki sekai e—‘yottu no Zoa’ to Blake no jikan [From
a World of Line to One of Mosaic—‘The Four Zoas’ and Blake’s Time].” Osaka Daigaku
Daigakuin Eibungaku Danwakai: Osaka Literary Review no. 25 (1986): 44-54.
Category:
Criticism
In Japanese.
1987
Ault, Donald
Narrative Unbound: Re-Visioning Blake’s The Four Zoas. Barrytown:
Station Hill P, 1987.
Category: Criticism
Ault’s monumental (and quite forbidding) study is a “relentless interrogation
of similarities and differences, of anomalous exclusions and inclusions, [that]
emphasizes the positive function of a large number of textual details that
have been previously disregarded by critics because these details 1) have been
assumed to result from the ‘unfinished’ manuscript state of The Four Zoas or
2) have appeared to be anomalies or discrepancies that interfere with, even
contradict, traditional models of poetic coherence” (xi). “The extent of the
revisions and rearrangements of The Four Zoas text indicates that
its narrative difficulties are part and parcel of Blake’s compositional/philosophical
situation, not an obfuscation of it” (xii), so that Ault takes all Blake’s
revisions as strategic gestures or psychological/ontological revisions. As
these comments suggest, Ault does not deal extensively with the composition
of the manuscript text but instead treats it mostly as an organic whole (of
sorts), any inconsistencies or problems arising from Blake’s revisions being
interpreted as meaningful. Of particular importance are Ault’s discussions
of Blake’s unique narrative techniques: “perspectival transformation,” “aspectual
interconnection,” “text as flight,” and “text as pattern.” Equally interesting
are Ault’s marginal comments—references, elucidations, counter-perspectives,
etc.
Bowman, Clay M.
“The Divine Family in Blake’s The Four Zoas: A Comparison
of the Divine Family Motif in Blake and the Kabbalah.” Master’s thesis. U of
Houston, 1987.
Category: Criticism
Dawson, P. M. S.
“Blake and Providence: The Theodicy of The Four Zoas.” Blake/An
Illustrated Quarterly 20.4 (spring 1987): 134-43.
Category: Criticism
Haigney, Catherine
“Reply to Andrew Lincoln.” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 21.2 (fall
1987): 77.
Category: Criticism
A reply to Lincoln ’s fall 1987 response to “Vala’s Garden in Night the Ninth” (spring
1987).
Haigney, Catherine
“Vala’s Garden in Night the Ninth: Paradise Regained or
Woman Bound?” Blake/An
Illustrated Quarterly 20.4 (spring 1987): 116-24.
Category: Criticism
Ide, Nancy M.
“Image Patterns and the Structure of William Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Blake/An
Illustrated Quarterly 20.4 (spring 1987): 125-33.
Category: Criticism
Contrary to most critics, Ide finds the powerful effect of The Four Zoas coming
not only from the narrative, but also from the relationships and repetitions
of key images, so that “individual images in the Zoas can be seen
as isolatable conceptual elements with identifiable [traditional] connotations
for most readers” (125). Ide identifies 196 “image categories” (listed on 126)
and then uses a computer program to generate frequency distributions across
the text for each category.
Lewis, Linda Marlene
“Titanic Rebellion: The Promethean Iconography of Milton, Blake and Shelley.” Diss.
U of Nebraska–Lincoln, 1987.
Category: Criticism
Examines Paradise Lost, The Four Zoas, and Prometheus
Unbound, with a chapter devoted to each.
Lincoln, Andrew
“Vala’s Garden.” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 21.2 (fall 1987):
77.
Category: Criticism
A response to Haigney’s spring 1987 article.
Magno, Cettina Tramontano, and David V. Erdman, eds.
The Four Zoas by William Blake: A Photographic Facsimile of the Manuscript
with Commentary on the Illuminations. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1987.
Category:
Edition
Magno and Erdman provide a facsimile of the manuscript derived from infrared
photographs, thus revealing a wealth of detail not available in Bentley’s 1963
facsimile, though, unlike Bentley’s, their reproductions are much reduced in
size from the original. Still, Magno and Erdman’s reproductions reveal much
that previously had not been visible (especially if used along with a magnifying
glass!); their various tracings in the introduction are equally helpful in
this regard, as are the few color reproductions they include. Before the facsimile
itself, the editors provide extensive and often illuminating commentary on
each page’s designs, focusing on the visual narrative with relevant references
to the text. Part of this narrative depends on their reordering of manuscript
pages to follow Erdman’s Complete Poetry and Prose, here executed
visually with the manuscript reproductions.
Otomo, Mikaeru
“Blake, ‘The Four Zoas’ no sekai to entoropi no hosoku: The Cosmic View in
Blake’s ‘The Four Zoas’ and the Entropy Law.” Higashi Nippon Gakuen Daigaku
Kyoyobu Ronshu: Higashi Nippon Gakuen Journal of Liberal Arts and Science no.
13 (1987): 17-27.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
Otto, Peter
“Final States, Finished Forms, and The Four Zoas.” Blake/An
Illustrated Quarterly 20.4 (spring 1987): 144-46.
Category: Criticism
Contrary to virtually all other critical views, Otto finds “cogent thematic
and contextual reasons to entertain the possibility at least that when Blake
finally stopped working on the manuscript he believed that the form taken by
the work [at that time] was the only one that the subject matter could assume,” i.e., “the
(unfinished) form of the work embodies the poem’s insights about the nature
of the fallen world and of fallen perception” (144).
Otto, Peter
“The Spectrous Embrace, the Moment of Regeneration, and Those Two
Seventh Nights.” Colby Library Quarterly 23 (1987): 135-43.
Category:
Criticism
Pierce, John Benjamin
“Blake’s Writing of Vala or The Four Zoas:
A Study of Textual Development.” Diss. U of Toronto, 1987.
Category: Criticism
(textual)
See Pierce’s monograph, Flexible Design (1998).
Rosso, George Anthony, Jr.
“Blake’s Prophetic Workshop: Narrative, History,
Apocalypse in The Four
Zoas.” Diss. U of Maryland, 1987.
Category: Criticism
See Rosso’s monograph with the same title (1993).
Sanders, Jon Barry
“Textual Problems, Poetic Solutions—The Two Nights 7 in The
Four Zoas.” Fuji
Joshi Daigaku, Fuji Joshi Tanki Daigaku Kiyo, Daiichibu [Bulletin
of Fuji University of Women and Fuji Junior College of Women, Part 1]
24 (1987): 1-35.
Category: Criticism
Singh, Charu Sheel
“The Hindu Contexts of William Blake’s The Four Zoas and Walt Whitman’s Song
of Myself: A Study of Primal Man Archetype.” Journal of Literature
and Aesthetics 1.4 (September 1987).
Category: Criticism
Suzuki, Masashi
“Senso to Uzumaki: The Four Zoas Ni Okeru Chikara [War and Vortex: Power
in The Four Zoas].” Eibungaku Kenkyu [Studies
in English Literature] 64.1 (1987): 3-18.
Category: Criticism
1988
Brooks, Harold F.
“Blake and Jung: Blake’s Myth of the Four Zoas and Jung’s
Picture of the Psyche.” Aligarh Critical
Miscellany 1.1 (1988): 47-74.
Category: Criticism
Brooks deals with The Four Zoas, along with The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell, in his comparisons of Blake and Jung.
Fuller, David
Blake’s Heroic Argument. London: Croom Helm, 1988.
Category: Criticism
Most of ch. 2 (88-161), “Creation and Redemption and Judgement,” is
on The
Four Zoas.
Ide, Nancy Marie
“Identifying Semantic Patterns: Time Series and Fourier Analyses.” Revue
Informatique et Statistique dans les Sciences Humaines [Computing
and Statistical Review in the Humanities] 24 (1988): 193-200.
Category: Criticism
“A study of ‘images of labor’ and ‘pastoral images’ in The Four Zoas is
said to show that ‘the pattern of image distribution in the Zoas is
both rhythmic and simple’” (Bentley, Blake Books Supplement 519).
Pierce, John B.
“The Shifting Characterization of Tharmas and Enion in Pages
3-7 of Blake’s Vala or The
Four Zoas.” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 22.3 (winter 1988-89):
93-102.
Category: Criticism (textual)
This material reappears in Pierce’s Flexible Design (1998).
1989
Ando, Kiyoshi
“The Textual Problems of The Four Zoas (1).” Jinmon-Kagaku Ronshu 43
(1989): 21-47; Part 2, Jinmon-Kagaku Ronshu 44 (1989): 1-27; Part
3, “The Textual Problems of Pages 5 and 6 of the MSS [sic].” Tokai
English Review 2 (1990): 1-19; Part 4, Jinmon-Kagaku Ronshu 45
(1990): 13-46.
Category: Criticism (textual)
In Japanese. “‘The … textual confusion of Night the First is to be the major
theme of this serial study’ …. Part 3 ‘also tries to re-evaluate the existing
texts of The Four Zoas’ (p. 1). Part 4 is concerned with pp. 7, 143,
with a new transcript of pp. 5-7, 143-4” (Bentley, Blake Books Supplement 338).
Ide, Nancy M.
“Meaning and Method: Computer-Assisted Analysis of Blake.” Literary Computing
and Literary Criticism: Theoretical and Practical Essays on Theme and Rhetoric.
Ed. Rosanne Potter. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1989. 123-41.
Category:
Criticism
Ide, Nancy M.
“A Statistical Measure of Theme and Structure.” Computers and the Humanities 23.4-5
(August-October 1989): 277-83.
Category: Criticism
Lincoln, Andrew
Magno and Erdman, The Four Zoas by William Blake. Blake/An Illustrated
Quarterly 22.4 (spring 1989): 116-20.
Category: Review
Lincoln’s detailed, insightful, and useful review showers great
praise on the editors for their work as commentators. However, he does question
some of Magno and Erdman’s decisions, such as reordering manuscript pages and
the facsimile reproductions themselves—reduced in size, black and white or color,
etc.
Luening, Otto
Lines from “The First Book of Urizen” and “Vala, or, A Dream
of Nine Nights.” SATB
a cappella. New York: C. F. Peters Corp., 1989.
Category: Musical score
The music is accompanied by selected text from the two
Blake poems.
Mann, Paul
“Finishing Blake.” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 22.4 (spring 1989):
139-42.
Category: Criticism
Mann responds to Otto’s “Final States, Finished Forms” (1987)
in this discussion article, followed by Otto’s reply.
Naylor, Kathryn L.
“Blake’s Quest for Unity in The Four Zoas.” Master’s
thesis. St. Cloud State U, 1989.
Category: Criticism
Otto, Peter
“Is There a Poem in This Manuscript?” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 22.4
(spring 1989): 142-44.
Category: Criticism
Otto’s response to Mann’s “Finishing Blake,” the preceding
discussion article.
Pierce, John B.
“The Changing Mythic Structure of Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas:
A Study of the Manuscript, Pages 43-84.” Philological Quarterly 68
(1989): 485-508.
Category: Criticism (textual)
Stevenson, W. H., ed.
Blake: The Complete Poems. 2nd ed. Longman Annotated English Poets.
London: Longman Group UK Limited, 1989.
Category: Edition
Revised version of the 1971 edition without significant changes
to The
Four Zoas. Stevenson does give a nod to the textual discussion over
Blake’s manuscript in the fall 1978 issue of Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly,
and Erdman’s subsequent editorial revisions, but does not alter his text
to go along with the revised Erdman text. Indeed, in this edition, the text
is no longer “By | David V. Erdman” as it was in 1971.
Bidney, Martin
“Urizen and Orc, Cortés and Guatimozin: Mexican History
and The
Four Zoas VII.” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 23.4 (spring
1990): 195-98.
Category: Criticism
Freeman, Kathryn Sue
“The Four Zoas: Apocalypse According to
Blake’s Sleeper.” Diss.
Yale U, 1990.
Category: Criticism
See Freeman’s monograph, Blake’s Nostos (1997).
Hubley, Emily, dir.
Blakeball. 1988. Hubley Studios. Pyramid Film & Video,
1990.
Category: Film
An animated film (originally produced in 1988) based on Blake’s
poem. According to the abstract in the WorldCat citation, it “explores the world
of poet and painter William Blake using a baseball game’s nine innings as a metaphor
for the nine nights of Blake’s poem.”
Ima-Izumi, Yoko
“Blake ni okeru byoki to jyoshei: Pickering kohon to Yon Zoa: Illness
and the Women in Blake’s Pickering Manuscript and The Four Zoas.” Bungeigengo
Kenkyu, Bungei Hen, Tsukuba Daigaku, Bungei Gengogakukei:Studies
in Language and Literature: Literature: Institute of Literature and Linguistics,
University of Tsukuba 19 (1990): 29-56.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
Rosso, G. A.
“History and Apocalypse in Blake’s The Four Zoas: The
Final Nights.” Spirits
of Fire: English Romantic Writers and Contemporary Historical Methods.
Ed. G. A. Rosso and Daniel P. Watkins. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP,
1990. 173-88.
Category: Criticism
Traylen, Maryanne
“‘Sol’ and ‘Luna,’ ‘Burn in water and wash in fire’: Some
Instances of Contraries at Work in Blake’s Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem in
the Light of Jung’s Thought and His Alchemical Understanding in Mysterium
Coniunctionis.” Diss. U of Wales, Swansea, 1990.
Category: Criticism
1991
Bizzaro, Patrick
“The Symbol of the Androgyne in Blake’s The Four Zoas and Shelley’s Prometheus
Unbound: Marital Status among the Romantic Poets.” Joinings and
Disjoinings: The Significance of Marital Status in Literature. Ed.
JoAnna Stephens Mink and Janet Doubler Ward. Bowling Green: Bowling Green
State U Popular P, 1991. 36-51.
Category: Criticism
De Luca, Vincent Arthur
Words of Eternity: Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1991.
Category: Criticism
Ch. 4 (“Narrative Sequences: Modes of Organization”), section 2 (113-24), “Interpolation,
or the Text as Palimpsest: The Example of Vala.”
Hibino, Mami
“Blake no shi ni okeru kyoki: The Four Zoas kenkyu: Madness
in Blake’s Poetry—A Study of The Four Zoas.” Machikane Yama Ronso:Bungaku
hen: Osaka Daigaku Bungakubu: [Machikane Yama Bulletin]:
Literature: Faculty of Letters, Osaka University no. 25 (1991): 1-15.
Category:
Criticism
In Japanese.
Otto, Peter
“The Multiple Births of Los in The Four Zoas.” SEL: Studies
in English Literature, 1500-1900 31.4 (1991): 631-53.
Category: Criticism
The material in this article reappears in ch. 5 of his Blake’s Critique
of Transcendence (2000).
Sanders, Jon Barry
“Fortuitous Concourse of Incoherent Discordant Principles
of Love and Hate—Sexual Organization in The Four Zoas (1).” Fuji
Joshi Daigaku, Fuji Joshi Tanki Daigaku Kiyo, Daiichibu [Bulletin
of Fuji University of Women and Fuji Junior College of Women, Part 1]
28 (1991): 1-55.
Category: Criticism
Yamazaki, Yusuke
“[The Role of the Four Zoas: Emanations Based on Blake’s Idea
of ‘Contraries.’]” Nagasaki Wesleyan
Tanki Daigaku Kiyo [Bulletin of Nagasaki Wesleyan Junior College]
14 (1991): 11-21.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
Yogev, Michael
“Covenant of the Word: The Bible in William Blake’s Late Prophetic Poems.” Diss.
U of Washington, 1991.
Category: Criticism
1992
Ando, Kiyoshi
“[A Study of Blake’s Manuscript of The Four Zoas in
the British Library].” Journal of Science of Culture and Humanities 49
(1992): 63-89.
Category: Criticism (textual)
In Japanese.
Bidlake, Steven
“Blake, the Sacred, and the French Revolution: Eighteenth-Century Ideology and
the Problem of Violence.” European Romantic
Review 3.1 (1992): 1-20.
Category: Criticism
Focuses on The Four Zoas.
Cox, Stephen
Love and Logic: The Evolution of Blake’s Thought. Ann Arbor: U
of Michigan P, 1992.
Category: Criticism
Cox covers The Four Zoas in ch. 9 (167-81), “The
Ruins of The
Zoas,” and ch. 10 (183-203), “Love among the Ruins.”
Kang, Sun Koo
“William Blake Yi The Four Zoas [A Survey of William Blake’s The
Four Zoas].” Yongo Yongmunhak [Journal of English Language
and Literature] 38 (1992): 453-76.
Category: Criticism
In Korean, with a summary in English.
Mounsey, C. F.
“William Blake’s The Four Zoas: A Reassessment of Its
Implied Metaphysics.” Diss.
U of Warwick, 1992.
Category: Criticism
Sanders, Jon Barry
“Fortuitous Concourse of Incoherent Discordant Principles
of Love and Hate—Sexual Organization in The Four Zoas (2).” Fuji
Joshi Daigaku, Fuji Joshi Tanki Daigaku Kiyo, Daiichibu [Bulletin
of Fuji University of Women and Fuji Junior College of Women, Part 1] 29 (1992): 1-46.
Category: Criticism
1993
Georgelos, Peter
“Mother Outline: A Critique of Gender in Blake’s Aesthetics and The Four
Zoas.” Diss.
U of Western Ontario, 1993.
Category: Criticism
Hobson, Christopher Z.
“Unbound from Wrath: Orc and Blake’s Crisis of Vision
in The Four Zoas.” SEL:
Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 33.4 (1993): 725-54.
Category: Criticism
Richey, William
“‘One must be master’: Patronage in Blake’s Vala.” SEL:Studies
in English Literature, 1500-1900 33.4 (1993): 705-24.
Category: Criticism
Rosso, George Anthony, Jr.
Blake’s Prophetic Workshop: A Study of The Four Zoas. Lewisburg:
Bucknell UP, 1993.
Category: Criticism
According to Rosso, Blake’s narrative technique in The Four Zoas is
one of kerygma, which aims actively to engage its readers so as to
induce vision and transform them. Further, Blake conflates traditions, and
also internal subjectivity and political history, to emphasize that internal
redemption must extend out into social redemption for a true apocalypse to
occur. Rosso’s book, the published version of his dissertation (1987), is the
first devoted to the manuscript that includes a close look at its composition
history as part of an interpretation.
Vine, Steven
Blake’s Poetry: Spectral Visions. Basingstoke: Macmillan P; New
York: St. Martin ’s P, 1993.
Category: Criticism
Ch. 6 (96-126), “Excesses of Joy and Grief: The Veil, Sexuality
and Apocalypse in The Four Zoas.”
1994
Cox, Philip
“‘Among the Flocks of Tharmas’: The Four Zoas and the
Pastoral of Commerce.” Historicizing Blake. Ed. Steve Clark and David
Worrall. Basingstoke: Macmillan P; New York: St. Martin ’s P, 1994. 86-104.
Category:
Criticism
Kruger, Kathryn Sullivan
“Weaving the Word: The Metaphorics of Weaving and Female Textual Production.” Diss.
U of Miami, 1994.
Category: Criticism
On Blake’s The Four Zoas, as well as Tennyson.
Lansverk, Marvin D. L.
The Wisdom of Many, the Vision of One: The Proverbs of William Blake.
New York: P. Lang, 1994.
Category: Criticism
Ch. 7 (131-60), “The Four Zoas: Blake’s Vision
of Ecclesiastes.”
Romero, Milena
“The Fourfold Circle of Jerusalem .” Textus: English Studies in Italy 7
(1994): 23-40.
Category: Criticism
Romero’s article on the numerological and symbolic significance
of Jerusalem covers both Jerusalem and The Four Zoas.
Smith, Elizabeth Leigh
“William Blake’s The Four Zoas: Romantic Poetry
in the Epic Tradition.” Master’s
thesis. U of Houston, 1994.
Category: Criticism
1995
Ando, Eiko
“The Four Zoas: Blake’s Jesus.” Centre and Circumference:
Essays in English Romanticism. Ed. Kenkishi Kamijima and Yasuo Deguchi.
Tokyo : Kirihara Shoten for the Association of English Romanticism in Japan,
1995. 114-26.
Category: Criticism
Bentley, G. E., Jr.
“A Fifth Zoa.” Aligarh Journal of English Studies 17.1-2
(1995): 25-28.
Category: Criticism
Freeman, Kathryn S.
“Narrative Fragmentation and Undifferentiated Consciousness
in Blake’s The
Four Zoas.” European Romantic Review 5.2 (1995): 178-92.
Category:
Criticism
Freeman argues that in The Four Zoas, Blake revises traditional
dream-vision narrative techniques in order to represent his most challenging
idea: the contemporaneity of Eternity and the fallen world that appears to
have been divided from it. He accomplishes this by making the “dream” that
of the single authorial consciousness itself, in which the fallen characters
become the narrators at times in order to emphasize the vulnerabilities of
the fallen mind projecting/creating them. Thus, textual inconsistencies are
resolved by Night IX, where a continuous narrative of dawning reintegration
exposes the fragmentary and delusional perceptions of a divided consciousness
that are found in the previous Nights. By making every aspect of existence
within the poem the creation of a single “sleeping” consciousness, Blake suggests
that human divinity resists all attempts to divide the human from the divine.
Most of the content of this article is included in Freeman’s 1997 monograph.
Lincoln, Andrew
Rosso, Blake’s Prophetic Workshop. Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 29.3
(winter 1995-96): 95-96.
Category: Review
Lincoln, Andrew
Spiritual History: A Reading of William Blake’s Vala or The
Four Zoas. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1995.
Category: Criticism
Lincoln ’s thesis is that Blake begins The Four Zoas with
a reinterpretation of history using Enlightenment-era methods of philosophy,
sociology, and theology. Through several stages of revision, he moves first towards
a (revised) history of Jesus that allows for the casting off of error and for
brotherhood, then towards a particularly nationalistic myth; it is at this point
that he abandons the poem. Although the poem is complex, to judge it as a “ruin” is
a critical recoiling from, rather than engaging with, these complexities. Lincoln
bases his interpretation upon the growth of the manuscript as he believes it
occurred.
Sato, Hikari|
“Religion of Rationalism: A Reading of the Story of Urizen in The
Four Zoas.” Albion 41 (1995): 1-22.
Category: Criticism
Suh, Kang Mok
“William Eui Yeoksa Dasi Sseugi: Ne Zoa Deul Ggajieui Han Ilgi [William
Blake’s Re-Writing of History: A Reading up to The Four Zoas].” Diss.
Seoul National U, 1995.
Category: Criticism
I believe this work to be in Korean rather than English.
Wada, A.
“The Evolution of Blake’s Vala/ The Four Zoas: Its
Formation, Collapse and Regeneration.” Diss. Durham U, 1995.
Category: Criticism
(textual)
1996
Baulch, David Monroe
“‘Forms Sublime’: William Blake’s Aesthetics of the Sublime
in The Four
Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem.” Diss. U of Washington
, 1996.
Category: Criticism
Brachfeld, Jennifer
“The State of the Union: Bi-Gendered Redemption in William
Blake’s The
Four Zoas.” Master’s thesis. Florida Atlantic U, 1996.
Category: Criticism
Cox, Philip
Rosso, Blake’s Prophetic Workshop. Review of English Studies 47
(1996): 425-26.
Category: Review
Csikós, Dóra
“Is He the Divine Image? Blake’s Luvah and Vala.” AnaChronist (1996):
162-84.
Category: Criticism
Richey, William
Blake’s Altering Aesthetic. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1996.
Category:
Criticism
Ch. 3 (75-109), “The Rise and Fall of Blake’s Classicism: Vala and The
Four Zoas.”
Storch, Margaret
Rosso, Blake’s Prophetic Workshop. Yearbook of English Studies 26
(1996): 292.
Category: Review
Wada, Ayako
“Blake’s Vala/The Four Zoas: The Genesis of Night
1 as a Preludium.” Essays in English Romanticism 19-20 (1996):
5-14.
Category:
Criticism
1997
Clark, Steve
Lincoln, Spiritual History. Times Literary Supplement (5
December 1997): 26-27.
Category: Review
Csikós, Dóra
“Narrative Techniques in The Four Zoas.” AnaChronist (1997):
29-38.
Category: Criticism
Csikós, Dóra
“‘Urizen Who Was Faith and Certainty Is Changed
to Doubt’: The Changing Portrayal of Urizen.” Hungarian Journal of English
and American Studies 3.2
(1997): 131-59.
Category: Criticism
Freeman, Kathryn
Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism inThe
Four Zoas. Albany : State U of New York P, 1997.
Category: Criticism
Developing her earlier (1995) article on this subject, Freeman
here presents Blake as deliberately and meticulously crafting The Four Zoas in
order to give an entirely cognizant mythic representation, albeit complex,
of the human consciousness. The dream within a dream within a dream structure
is the vehicle for Blake to dramatize the fallacies of fallen/fragmented consciousness.
This structure also allows Blake to portray the progressive movement from dualism,
a state of complete externalization of the divine self that is all things,
to non-dualistic wholeness, when the universe and God are recognized as being
one’s true center. Thus, Blake is able to show that wholeness is an ever-present,
underlying reality that is simply not recognized by the various parts of the
one eternal consciousness. Like Blake’s myth, then, existence is a quest towards
wholeness in which the quester and the goal are the same thing; the distinction
is mere illusion. According to Freeman, The Four Zoas is a representation
of that mind as it goes on its quest to itself, and the poem’s complexity dissolves
due to the freedom to backread such a perspective gives: linearity of narrative
structure, like time itself, is an illusion. Freeman’s is a psychological reading
drawing extensively on Eastern and Western sources.
James-Hansen, Jeanne A.
“The Universal Female: Female Characters as Catalysts
in William Blake’s Vala or The
Four Zoas.” Master’s thesis. South Dakota State U, 1997.
Category: Criticism
Larrissy, Edward
Lincoln, Spiritual History. Notes and Queries 242 (ns 44)
(1997): 282-83.
Category: Review
Pierce, John B.
Lincoln, Spiritual History. Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 31.1
(summer 1997): 35-38.
Category: Review
Spector, Sheila A.
Freeman, Blake’s Nostos. Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 31.3
(winter 1997-98): 97-102.
Category: Review
Wada, Ayako
“Blake’s Vala/The Four Zoas: The Myths of the
Fall and Creation in Two Nights I.” Tottori Daigaku Kyoikugakubu Kenkyu
Houkoku, Jinbun Shakai Kagaku [Research
Report of Department of Education, Tottori University, Human Social Science]
48.2 (1997): 265-76.
Category: Criticism
Wada, Ayako
“The Fluctuating Myth of the Fall: Four Zoas versus Spectre and
Emanation in Night 3 of Blake’s Vala/The Four Zoas.” Essays
in English Romanticism 21 (1997): 5-18.
Category: Criticism
1998
Cox, Philip
Lincoln, Spiritual History. Review of English Studies 49
(1998): 92-93.
Category: Review
Fay, Elizabeth
Freeman, Blake’s Nostos (with other books). College English 61.2
(1998): 214-18.
Category: Review
Otto, Peter
Lincoln, Spiritual History. Modern Philology 96 (1998):
117-22.
Category: Review
Pierce, John B.
Flexible Design: Revisionary Poetics in Blake’s Vala or The
Four Zoas. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1998.
Category: Criticism
Pierce’s “essential argument is that the synoptic and synchronic tendencies
of Blake’s poetics are the result of conscious revision and correction of an
essentially diachronic narrative” in Vala (xvii-xviii). He particularly
highlights Blake’s changing of the poem’s subtitle to “The torments of Love & Jealousy” as
applying to each set of characters and to Blake’s (late) method of analogous
or syncretistic characterization that focuses on such “torments.” Pierce is
consistently and helpfully attentive to the development of the manuscript as
he presents his argument.
1999
Baulch, David M.
“Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas: Hypertext
and Multiple Plurality.” Wordsworth Circle 30.3 (1999): 154-60.
Category:
Criticism
The fact that Blake created a “multiple plural” (or redundancy) by adding “s” to
the already plural Greek “zoa” suggests two interpretive possibilities: “Either
the multiple plural is bad Greek or the manuscript that follows embodies what
its title grammatically implies, many sets of four zoas” (154). The manuscript
has not yet benefited from a hypertext version, so that its editorial history
is one of extracting a single, coherent narrative from the tangle of revisions—this
has in turn largely influenced its interpretive history. However, such a Newtonian
imposition of singularity is directly opposed by Blake’s counter-Newtonian
theme, of which the multiple plurality of the “zoas” is an intrinsic part.
In contrast, “hypertext can preserve the integrity of the manuscript of The
Four Zoasas a total of its narrative possibilities,” since hypertext
allows for asynchronous and non-linear relationships—the many possible
worlds of The Four Zoas that constitute it.
Hobson, Christopher Z.
The Chained Boy: Orc and Blake’s Idea of Revolution. Lewisburg:
Bucknell UP, 1999.
Category: Criticism
Ch. 4 (151-210), “Rethinking Social Agency in The Four Zoas.” This
chapter incorporates Hobson’s article “Unbound from Wrath” in SEL (1993).
Johnson, Mary Lynn
Freeman, Blake’s Nostos, and Lincoln, Spiritual History. Journal
of English and Germanic Philology 98 (1999): 122-27.
Category: Review
Kang, Ok-Sun
[“A Study of the Image of Father in William Blake’s Poems: Focusing
on The
Songs of Experience and The Four Zoas.”] Yongo Yongmunhak [Journal
of English Language and Literature] 45 (1999): 117-36.
Category: Criticism
In Korean, with a summary in English.
Persyn, Mary Kelly
Freeman, Blake’s Nostos. European Romantic Review 10.3
(1999): 391-97.
Category: Review
Vogler, Thomas A.
Pierce, Flexible Design. Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 33.2
(fall 1999): 51-62.
Category: Review
Vogler’s is a substantial review of Pierce’s book, in which he
makes some strong arguments about the composition of the manuscript and how that
process is represented by Pierce, and the issues involved for anyone who tries
to do likewise.
Wada, Ayako
“Encountering One's Own Spectre: Tharmas as Urthona/Blake’s Alter
Ego in Vala/The
Four Zoas.” Essays in English Romanticism 23 (1999): 19-31.
Category: Criticism
Wada, Ayako
“[Explaining the Manuscript Status of Blake’s Vala/The
Four Zoas.]” Eigogaku Eibei Bungaku Ronshu [Journal
of Study of English Language, British and American Literature] 25 (1999):
15-29.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
Yoder, R. Paul
Freeman, Blake’s Nostos. Criticism 41.1 (1999): 145-48.
Category:
Review
Hobson, Christopher Z.
Blake and Homosexuality. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
Category: Criticism
Ch. 3 is on “Homosexuality, Resistance, and Apocalypse: The Four Zoas.”
James-Cavan, Kathleen
Pierce, Flexible Design. Canadian Book Review Annual 1999 (2000):
#3295.
Category: Review
Otto, Peter
Blake’s Critique of Transcendence: Love, Jealousy, and the Sublime inThe
Four Zoas. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
Category: Criticism
Otto argues that rather than urging sublime transcendence
(whether through the invocation of a transcendent or of an immanent power) in The Four Zoas,
Blake hopes to thwart it. Part of that effort takes place as “the poem deconstructs
dominant cultural forms (religion, commerce, science, art) in order to uncover
their ‘real’ content (the suffering body of Albion )” (345). However, this
necessary precursor to “step[ping] forward into a living Eternity rather than
a bodiless heaven” does not actually occur in the poem. Blake’s critique involves
a conversation with Swedenborg, Young, and Locke, in which the poem’s text
speaks as/for the spirit and the illustrations speak as/for the body.
Sturrock, June
“Urizen as Ceres in Blake’s The Four Zoas, Night the
Ninth.” English
Language Notes 38.1 (2000): 50-58.
Category: Criticism
Valentine, Stephen James
“The Clod and the Pebble: An Adaptation of William
Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Master’s
thesis. U of Virginia, 2000.
Category: Other
Williams, Nicholas M.
Pierce, Flexible Design. English Language Notes 37.3 (2000):
82-84.
Category: Review
2001
Bentley, G. E., Jr.
Pierce, Flexible Design. English Studies in Canada 36 (2000
[2001]): 502-05.
Category: Review
Heringman, Noah
Pierce, Flexible Design. Revue Canadienne de
Littérature
Comparée [Canadian Review of Comparative Literature] 28.1
(2001): 108-12.
Category: Review
Kang, Ok-Sun
[“William Blake’s Prophetic Poems and His Social Consciousness:
Focusing on The
Four Zoas and Jerusalem.”] Yongo Yongmunhak [Journal
of English Language and Literature] 47 (2001): 755-73.|
Category: Criticism
In Korean, with a summary in English.
Kruger, Kathryn Sullivan
Weaving the Word: The Metaphorics of Weaving and Female Textual Production.
Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 2001.
Category: Criticism
Ch. 4 is on “The Loom of Language and the Garment of Words
in William Blake’s The
Four Zoas.” See also her dissertation with the same title (1994).
Nakayama, Fumi
“[The Mythicization of Vala, or The Four Zoas.]” Hiroshima
Jogakuin Daigaku Daigakuin Gengo Bunka Ronshu [Journal of Language
and Culture, Hiroshima Jogakuin University Graduate School] 4 (2001): 29-43.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
Otto, Peter
“A Pompous High Priest: Urizen’s Ancient Phallic Religion in The Four
Zoas.” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 35.1 (summer 2001):
4-22.
Category: Criticism
Otto’s article includes and expands upon material in his Blake’s Critique
of Transcendence (2000).
2002
Lussier, Mark
“‘Rest before Labour’: The Pre-Text/s of Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Romanticism
on the Net 27 (2002). <http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2002/v/n27/006563ar.html>.
Category:
Criticism
Nicholson, Alan
Otto, Blake’s Critique of Transcendence. Literature and Theology 16.2
(2002): 223-26.
Category: Review
Otto, Peter
“From the Religious to the Psychological Sublime: The Fate of Young’s Night
Thoughts in Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Prophetic Character:
Essays on William Blake in Honor of John E. Grant. Ed. Alexander S.
Gourlay . West Cornwall: Locust Hill P, 2002. 225-62.
Category: Criticism
Otto, Peter
“A Sublime Allegory: Blake, Blake Studies, and the Sublime.” Eighteenth
Century: Theory and Interpretation 43 (2002): 61-84.
Category: Criticism
Otto devotes much of his discussion to The Four Zoas.
Pritchard, Gwyn
Enitharmon. For mezzo-soprano and piano. 1973 (revised 1984-85).
Birmingham: Camerata, 2002.
Category: Musical score
The music is accompanied by selected text from Blake’s
poem.
Ripley, Wayne C.
Otto, Blake’s Critique of Transcendence. Romanticism on the Net 27
(2002). <http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2002/v/n27/006567ar.html>.
Category:
Review
Risden, E. L.
“William Blake and the Personal Epic Fantastic.” Journal of the Fantastic
in the Arts 12.4 (2002): 417-24.
Category: Criticism
Risden’s article examines Blake’s treatment of personal epiphany
in The
Four Zoas and Milton.
So, Tat Sang
“Eternal Death in William Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Diss.
U of Dallas, 2002.
Category: Criticism
2003
Ankarsjö, Magnus
“‘Bring Me My Arrows of Desire’: Gender Utopia in Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Diss.
Göteborg U, 2003.
Category: Criticism
Baulch, David M.
“Time, Narrative, and the Multiverse: Post-Newtonian Narrative
in Borges’s The
Garden of the Forking Paths and Blake’s Vala or The Four
Zoas.” Comparatist 27 (2003): 56-78.
Category: Criticism
Csikós, Dóra Janzer
“Four Mighty Ones Are in Every Man”:
The Development of the Fourfold in Blake. Philosophiae Doctores 15.
Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó,
2003.
Category: Criticism
Hoshino, Eriko
“Vala,moshikuwa Four Zoas Dai Ichiya
ni okeru Tharmas to Enion no Kankei no Hokai—Gnosis teki Kenchi kara
[The Disruption of Relations between Tharmas and Enion in Night the First in Vala, or The
Four Zoas—From a Viewpoint of Gnosis].” Saitama Junshin Joshi Tanki
Daigaku Kiyo [Bulletin of Saitama Junshin Women’s Junior College]
19 (2003): 89-95.
Category: Criticism
In Japanese.
Pierce, John B.
The Wond’rous Art: William Blake and Writing. Madison: Fairleigh
Dickinson UP, 2003.
Category: Criticism (textual)
Ch. 4 is on “Vala or The Four Zoas and
the Archaeology of Writing.”
Ripley, Wayne C.
“Erdman’s Pagination of The Four Zoas.” Blake/An Illustrated
Quarterly 36.4 (spring 2003): 140-43.
Category: Criticism (textual)
Ripley gives an extremely helpful tabulation of
page numbers in Erdman’s Complete
Poetry and Prose and the Magno-Erdman facsimile (1987), pointing out
how problematic the editorial renumbering of manuscript pages ends up being
for both the editors and readers (hence the need for a table of correspondences).
Rutland, Laura Ellen
“Hindrance, Act, and the Scapegoat: William Blake, Kenneth Burke, and the
Rhetoric of Order.” Diss. U of Tennessee, 2003.
Category: Criticism
Covers Blake’s three epics.
Walker, David
Otto, Blake’s Critique of Transcendence. British Journal for
Eighteenth-Century Studies 26 (2003): 294-96.
Category: Review
Weir, David
Brahma in the West: William Blake and the Oriental Renaissance.
Albany: State U of New York P, 2003.
Category: Criticism
Along with Weir’s sustained focus on The Four Zoas,
appendix B is a “Synopsis of The Four Zoas,” which, the author says, “is intended
mainly for novice students who need a rough guide to the poem” (133).
2004
Ankarsjö, Magnus
Bring Me My Arrows of Desire: Gender Utopia in Blake’s The
Four Zoas. Gothenburg Studies in English 87. Göteborg: Göteborg U,
2004.
Category: Criticism
This is the published version of Ankarsjö’s 2003 dissertation.
Blake, William [or Anon.?]
The Four Zoas. Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing Co., 2004.
Category:
Edition (selections)
Unfortunately, I can say very little about this work, other
than that it appears to contain the text of Nights I and II only.
It would appear to be a reprint from some other unnamed edition, as
Kessinger is in the business of reprinting previously published
works under its own name. To quote the company’s web site: “Kessinger
Publishing utilizes advanced technology to publish and preserve thousands of
rare, scarce, and out-of-print books. We search worldwide for hard-to-find
books and publish them in affordable editions. Once we place a title into print,
it stays in print” <http://www.kessinger.net>.
The web site also has an entire page dedicated to copyright infringement—i.e.,
what authors or publishers should do if they suspect unauthorized reproduction.
Interestingly enough, copies can be purchased on Amazon.com!
Davies, Keri
Otto, Blake’s Critique of Transcendence. Studies in Romanticism 43.3
(2004): 492-97.
Category: Review
Lussier, Mark
Otto, Blake’s Critique of Transcendence (with other books). Wordsworth
Circle 35.4 (2004): 168-69.
Category: Review
2005
Beer, John
William Blake: A Literary Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005.
Category: Biography
Ch. 8 (109-21), “‘Vala’ and the Fate of Narrative Epic,” is
devoted to The
Four Zoas.
Feldman, Travis
“The Contexts and Production of William Blake’s The Four Zoas:
Towards a Theory of the Manuscript.” Diss. U of Washington, 2005.
Category: Criticism
(textual)
Serres, Nicholas Gorman
“Soteriology in the Poetry of William Blake: The Turn
from Fall to Salvation in The Four Zoas and Jerusalem.” Master’s
thesis. U of Montana, 2005.
Category: Criticism
Tambling, Jeremy
Blake’s Night Thoughts. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Category:
Criticism
Ch. 4 (71-96), “Night Dreams: The Four Zoas.”
Tambling, Jeremy
Pierce, The Wond’rous Art: William Blake and Writing. Modern
Language Review 100 (2005): 488.
Category: Review
Van Kleeck, Justin
“Blake’s Four … ‘Zoa’s’?” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 39.1 (summer
2005): 38-43.
Category: Criticism (textual)
Van Kleeck suggests that the mark resembling an
apostrophe above “Zoas” in
Blake’s added title on the title page most likely is an intentional punctuation
mark by Blake, so that editions should include it or editors should at least
provide some commentary upon it.
Van Kleeck, Justin
“‘Tenderness & Love Not Uninspird’: Blake’s Re-Vision
of Sentimentalism in The Four Zoas.” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 39.2
(fall 2005): 60-77.
Category: Criticism
According to Van Kleeck, Blake (characteristically) both criticizes
and adopts for adaptation some of the key features of sentimentalism as a literary
and a cultural phenomenon. Of particular importance are sentimentalism’s gender
stereotypes and divisions these create between and within the sexes, producing
a social “system” further fragmenting the fragmented identity of the Universal
Man Albion. Blake’s re-vision of sentimentalism replaces a weakened/weakening
sentimentality with inspired vision, the catalyst for true apocalypse that
reunites the divided sexes at the poem’s end.
2006
Ankarsjö, Magnus
“Blake’s Four ‘Zoas’!” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 39.4 (spring
2006): 189-90.
Category: Criticism (textual)
Ankarsjö responds to Van Kleeck’s suggestion in “Blake’s Four … ‘Zoa’s’?” (2005)
about the possible title apostrophe; he argues that it is not a punctuation
mark (based, in part, upon a comparison to other apostrophes in illuminated
works).
Ankarsjö, Magnus
William Blake and Gender. Jefferson: McFarland & Co.,
2006.
Category: Criticism
Includes a chapter on “The Gender Utopia of The Four Zoas.” See
also his Bring Me My Arrows of Desire (2004).
MacLean, Robert
“The Methodology of Night—William Blake and Edward Young’s Night Thoughts [part 1].” Ritsumeikan Eibei Bungaku [Ritsumeikan (University) English and American Literature]
15 (2006): 6-27.
Category: Criticism
A “comparative study of Night Thoughts vis-a-vis The Four Zoas” (9).
Mauger, Matthew
“‘He Turns the Law into a Castle!’: Blake’s Use of Eighteenth-Century
Legal Discourse in The Four Zoas.” Romanticism: Journal
of Romantic Culture and Criticism 12.3 (2006): 165-76.
Category: Criticism
Michael, Jennifer Davis
Blake and the City. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2006.
Category: Criticism
Includes a chapter on “Prophetic Labor and Creation of Space:
Lambeth and The
Four Zoas.”
Słomczyński, Maciej, ed.
Czterej Zoa: męki miłowania i zazdrości, gdy umarł i był osądzony Albion
pradawny człowiek. Arcydzieła Literatury Światowej. Kraków:
Zielona Sowa, 2006.
Category: Edition
A translation of the poem in Polish.
Van Kleeck, Justin
“‘mark ye the points.’” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 39.4 (spring
2006): 190-91.
Category: Criticism (textual)
Van Kleeck replies to Ankarsjö’s response (“Blake’s Four ‘Zoas’!”)
regarding the possible title apostrophe with counterarguments in support of his
original claim.
Van Kleeck, Justin Scott
“The Veils of VALA: A Critical Survey of Full Editions
of William Blake’s Four Zoas Manuscript.” Diss. U of Virginia, 2006.
Category:
Criticism (textual)
Van Kleeck undertakes the first review of all (textually and/or
imagistically) complete editions of Blake’s manuscript, focusing in particular
upon the ways each editorial persona (or personae) influences the nature of his/her
edition, both for good and for bad. Van Kleeck is also interested in what he
perceives to be a recurring editorial discordia concors between subjective
interpretation and “objective” textual editing. This tense harmony, in his
view, proves to be equally problematic and fruitful in its effect upon the
nature of editions, thus making the edited versions of Blake’s work at once “veils” and
tools for new insight.
2007
Erdman, David V., ed.
The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake.
With commentary by Harold Bloom. Newly rev. ed. Princeton: Recording for the
Blind and Dyslexic,
2007.
Category: Sound recording
This recording of Erdman’s entire edition includes a reading of his Four Zoas text, etc.
Ishizuka, Hisao
“The Zoas’ Kingdom: William Blake and Eighteenth-Century Natural History.” Poetica: An International Journal of Linguistic-Literary Studies 67 (2007): 73-95.
Category: Criticism
MacLean, Robert
“The Methodology of Night—William Blake and Edward Young’s Night Thoughts [part 2].” Ritsumeikan Eibei Bungaku [Ritsumeikan (University) English and American Literature]
16 (2007): 16-37.
Category: Criticism
See part 1 under 2006, above.
Pejčinova, Ana, trans.
Četirite Zoi: Son na Devet Noki [The Four Zoas: A Dream of Nine Nights]. Skopje: Kniževna mladina na Makedonija, 2007.
Category: Edition
In Macedonian (ISBN: 9789989685187).
Prather, Russell
“William Blake and the Problem of Progression.” Studies in Romanticism 46.4 (2007): 507-40.
Category: Criticism
Prather sets out “to demonstrate, first, how Aristotelian logic influences William Blake’s fourfold conception of the human and, second, how his manuscript epic The Four Zoas uses the figure of synecdoche to confound that logic” (507). He moves from the early binary “contraries” in Marriage to the set of fourfold contraries and sub-contraries in The Four Zoas and their interaction in the epic’s narrative, focusing especially on the struggle of Urizen and Urthona.
Quinney, Laura
“Escape from Repetition: Blake versus Locke and Wordsworth.” Ritual,
Routine, and Regime: Repetition in Early Modern British and European Cultures.
Ed. Lorna Clymer. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. 63-79.
Category: Criticism
Quinney focuses on The Four Zoas when discussing Blake in relation
to Locke and Wordsworth.
Stevenson, W. H., ed.
Blake: The Complete Poems. 3rd ed. Longman Annotated English Poets.
Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2007.
Category: Edition
Revised version of the 1971/1989 editions without significant
changes to The
Four Zoas, though other important changes have been made since the
second edition, such as the inclusion of the prose tracts All Religions
are One and There is No Natural Religion, as well as a rearrangement
of Milton to accord with Blake’s ordering of the later copies.
Williams, Patrick B.
“Re-Envisioning Romanticism as Postmodern Fantasy: A Case Study of William
Blake and Robert Jordan.” Master’s thesis. University of North Carolina–Wilmington, 2007.
Category: Criticism
Williams undertakes a “case study” of Blake and Jordan, using Blake’s The Four Zoas and Jordan’s The Eye of the World.
2008
Miner, Paul
“Blake: Four Unrecognized Allusions.” Notes and Queries 55.1 (March 2008): 29-31.
Category: Criticism
Two of Miner’s four “unrecognized allusions” are from The Four Zoas: 1) The comparison in Night III of Man’s globular branching eyes to “sea jellies,” which Miner says alludes to Philosophical Transactions (1773); and 3) Tirzah’s statement in Night VIII that the male’s eyes are “bound down with a hot iron,” which he believes references 1 Timothy 4.1-2.
2009
Hopkins, Stephen P.
“‘I Walk Weeping for Pangs of a Mothers Torments for Her Children’: Women’s Laments in the Poetry and Prophecies of William Blake.” Journal of Religious Ethics 37.1 (2009): 39-81.
Category: Criticism
Hopkins “argue[s] for the close connection between the female laments and the possibility of redemption, though in Blake such ‘redemption’ comes at the cost of the very voices of witness themselves” (39). While he looks at some of the main female protagonists throughout Blake’s works, he discusses in particular “the performative function of Enion, Jerusalem, Vala, and Erin in … The Four Zoas and Jerusalem.”
Quinney, Laura
William Blake on Self and Soul. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009.
Category: Criticism
In her book, Quinney argues that “Blake’s essential topic is the unhappiness of the subject within its own subjectivity, or to use a more plangent idiom, the loneliness of the soul” (11). This experience results from empiricist/materialist philosophies that cause “a kind of schizophrenia in which it has to treat as phantasmal (the inner life) what at the same time presses upon it with the utmost urgency,” separating an individual from his/her own inner life and from other individuals—an “ontological wound” that Blake “seeks to repair” in his works. Chapter 3 is titled “The Four Zoas: Transcendental Remorse.”
Whitmarsh-Knight, David
Shakespeare’s Heir: Blake’s Doors of Perception in Jerusalem and The Four Zoas. Cambridge: William Blake P, 2009.
<http://www.thefourzoas.com>.
Category: Criticism
“Through the lens of Shakespeare’s use of different space/times on and off the stage, we see Blake’s figures move in and out of four unique space/times or doors of perception not unlike the multi-level dimensions of Shakespeare’s stage.”
Anderson, Daniel Gustav
“‘Sweet Science’: A Proposal for Integral Macropolitics.” Integral Review 6.1 (March 2010): 10-62. Accessed 6 March 2011.
<http://integral-review.org/documents/Anderson,%20Sweet%20Science,%20Proposal%20for%20Integral%20Macropolitics,%20Vol.%206%20No.%201.pdf>.
Category: Criticism
Anderson seeks to promote “becoming-responsible as a basis for integral micropolitics, defined as taking active responsibility for the well-being of the totality of living beings without exception, for the sake of that well-being alone” (10). To do this, he juxtaposes The Four Zoas with the Popular Unity period in Chile (1970-73) for examples and points of criticism (14-15).
The Four Zoas. Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2010.
Category: Edition
This may be a new version of the Kessinger edition from 2004.
Greene, Patrick
“Night of the Four Zoas: Movement III, Urthona.” Composer Recital Series #14. Composer Recital Series 14 [compositions by Boston Conservatory students]. 2 discs. N.p., 2010.
Category: Sound recording
Hobby, Blake
“Urizen and the Fragmentary Experience of the Divine in The Four Zoas.” The Sublime. Ed. Harold Bloom and Blake Hobby. Bloom’s Literary Themes. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2010. 55-64.
Category: Criticism
Because “the text [of The Four Zoas], through the figure of Urizen (‘your reason’), who tries to gain mastery of the sublimity of creation, parodies any attempt to gain access to the sublime through Blake’s text,” Hobby argues that “readers confront, through Blake’s interpreter/creator, Urizen, the external and internal worlds with all of their sublime contradictions” (55, 56).
Otto, Peter
“Drawing Lines: Bodies, Sexualities and Performance in The Four Zoas.” Queer Blake. Ed. Helen Bruder and Tristanne Connolly. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 50-62.
Category: Criticism
Otto explores the importance of the bounding line, which articulates “a set of primary oppositions (mind and body, active and passive, male and female and so on),” concluding that “one can escape from the fallen world’s sexual machine only through what at first seems to preserve it, namely the bounding line” (51).
Van Kleeck, Justin
“Editioning William Blake’s VALA/The Four Zoas.” Editing and Reading Blake. Romantic Circles Praxis Series. 2010. Accessed 6 March 2011.
<http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/editing_blake/vankleeck/vankleeck.html>.
Category: Criticism
“This article discusses how the editors of William Blake's VALA/Four Zoas manuscript have adopted particular methodologies, based upon personal biases and unique contexts, in creating their editions. In turn, these editions have shaped the reception and understanding of Blake's original work, which makes it crucial for users of the editions to engage with them in a fully informed, critical, and self-aware manner” (abstract). Van Kleeck also argues that an electronic edition provides “methods for achieving … these goals, with its processes of marking up original works and its tools for critical usage of the editions. As an example of this, I discuss the electronic edition of Blake’s manuscript that I am currently preparing in collaboration with The William Blake Archive, which will be the first complete electronic edition when published.”
2011
Miner, Paul
“Blake: An Unrecognized Allusion to Plato.” Notes and Queries 58.1 (2011): 61-63. Accessed 6 March 2011. <http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/content/58/1/61.extract>.
Category: Criticism
Miner argues that “the initial lines of Night the First of The Four Zoas (3: 4-11, E 300), where Blake in addressing the aspects of Creation speaks of the elemental ‘Four Mighty ones’ that form a ‘Perfect Unity’” (Miner’s emphasis) constitute an allusion to Plato’s Timaeus, where the four elements are identified as “living creatures” (61).
Mounsey, Chris
Understanding the Poetry of William Blake through Dialectic of Contraries: A Study of the Philosophical Contexts within Which Blake Developed His Ideas. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen P, 2011.
Category: Criticism
Mounsey uses Blake’s idea of dialectical contraries as inspiration for his exegesis of Blake’s writing, including five chapters (chapters 5 to 9) devoted to The Four Zoas.
2012
Cauchi, Francesca
“The Cash Nexus of Blood and Iron in William Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Southern Humanities Review 46.2 (March 2012): 126-41.
Category: Criticism
Cauchi places Blake in the midst of an age of industrialization and war, with The Four Zoas serving as his account of “The derailment of reason” (128) and subsequent fall from the humanitarian ideal of the enlightenment. Cauchi identifies three images representing the consequences of this “fall”: blood (signifying war), iron (industrialization), and gold (“the cash nexus between the two”). Her article “analyze[s] the interrelationship among these three images through the characters with whom they are associated.”
Lee, Sung Bum
“William Blake and the Network of Knowledge: Centering on the Communication of Poetry and Science.” English Language and Literature 58.4 (2012): 723-52. Papersearch <http://www.papersearch.net>. Accessed 30 June 2013. [이성범. “윌리엄 블레이크와 지식의 네트워크 -시와 과학의 소통을 중심으로.” 영어영문학 58 권: 4 호 (2012): 723-52.]
Category: Criticism
Focusing on The Four Zoas and Jerusalem, Lee examines Blake’s poetic attempts to “display strong conflicts among different systems of knowledge”—the systems in these two works being “Newtonian thought, Romantic thought, and postmodern thought.” In Korean.
Yang, Byung Hyun
“Prophetic Irony in William Blake’s Poem The Four Zoas.” Literature and Religion 17.2 (2012): 127-56. Papersearch <http://www.papersearch.net>. Accessed 30 June 2013.
Category: Criticism
Yang uses Harold Bloom’s concept of “prophetic irony” as a unifying force in The Four Zoas, as it brings together the separated four Zoas (the four faculties of the Divine Man) in “the apocalyptic vision of divine humanity.” In Korean.
Go to: No Date/Ongoing, 1800s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s
Updates
May 2008: Revised Linnell (1918), Bellas
(formerly Paananen) (1977); added Anon. (2001), Blake (No Date or Ongoing,
2004), Erdman (2007), Mauger (2006), Quinney (2007), Sanders (1975, 1977, 1986,
1987, 1991, 1992), Sato (1995), Tambling (2005), Wada (1996, 1997 [2], 1999 [2]),
Williams (2007), Yamazaki (1991).
March 2009: Added Ishizuka (2007), Prather (2007), Miner (2008), Hopkins (2009).
March 2010: Revised Whitmarsh-Knight (No Date or Ongoing); added MacLean (2006, 2007), Quinney (2009), Whitmarsh-Knight (2009).
March 2011: Added Anderson, Greene, Hobby, Otto, Van Kleeck (all 2010), Miner (2011).
March 2012: Added Stefanovič (1927), Pejčinova (2007), Mounsey (2011).
July 2013: Added Cauchi, Lee, Yang (all 2012).