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

 

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

No Date or Ongoing

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.]

1863

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.

1905

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.

1913

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].)

1921

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).

1939

Samuels, Jayne Newcomer
“William Blake’s Use of Color Symbolism in The Four Zoas.” Master’s thesis. State College of Washington, 1939.
Category: Criticism

1943

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.

1956

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

1961

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

1970

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

1980

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.

1990

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

2000

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.”

2010

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.

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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).