The William Blake Project presents the newest work in Blake studies by an international gathering of scholars; the collection grew out of a series of interrelated investigations of Blake’s ‘Composite Art’ through a festschrift, a symposium, an exhibition, and an exhibition catalogue. Despite more than a century of intense interest and study of Blake’s life and art, and the building of great public and private collections of his work, new materials continue to appear, ultimately resulting in a rich and diverse canon showcasing the talents of someone largely unrecognized and undervalued during his lifetime.
Topics in this seminal volume include Blake's debt to his contemporaries, new historical documents, approaches to the major texts through gender and performance studies, and Blake's relationship to modernism. Building on the material legacy of G.E. Bentley Jr., and including a contribution by Bentley himself, this special collection presents new discoveries in exhibition and reception, in cultural and book history, in performance, and in gender studies.
Over the past twenty years Blake and gender has been a very active and controversial area of study. Susanne Sklar’s close reading of Blake’s Jerusalem argues for a redefining of Blake’s presentation of women and sexuality. This article discusses why oral interpretation is appropriate to the ‘Sublime Allegory’ Blake has created, and how oral interpretation delivers us from misinterpretations of the poem's eponymous heroine. Using her own background in performance, Sklar opens up Blake’s magnificent text, giving his characters voice as dramatic presences. In doing so she argues strongly for a redaction of three widely held views of Blake’s text – his presentation of women and sexuality, the date of composition of the text, and the historical basis for one of the villains in Blake’s Jerusalem.
Blake was an interdisciplinary artist and a maker of books. The history of books and the nature of print culture have taken on a distinct scholarly identity, and it is almost as if William Blake anticipated this and invented himself for the discipline of book creation. The study of the book is vast, stretching back in time and over crisscrossing disciplines, and G.E. Bentley, Jr. shows within this volume that the only way we can manage this hydra-headed scholarly area is to work with what Blake called the ‘minute particular.’ These particulars become the building blocks leading us into the world of books as communication.
Overall, Blake has had an extraordinary influence as both an artist and thinker – some of the newest work on Blake is investigating the relationship of his practice and his ideas to science studies and to modernism and post-modernism. Cinema Studies professor Garry Leonard takes the reader into one aspect of this new territory, showing how Blake’s texts, among them The [First] Book of Urizen, anticipate revolutionary critiques of contemporary life in the works of Walter Benjamin and the earliest makers of cinema. Leonard demonstrates compelling parallelisms between Blake’s art and major early-twentieth-century cinema artists and thinkers.
This volume is the fifth instalment in The William Blake Project. This dedication to Blake and his body of work that helped to define both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Era is a testament that Blake scholarship is alive, well, and continually expanding. This collection is sure to enlighten both Blake experts and those new to his name by mixing historical artistry with contemporary scholarship.
The William Blake Project presents the newest work in Blake studies by an international gathering of scholars; the collection grew out of a series of interrelated investigations of Blake’s ‘Composite Art’ through a festschrift, a symposium, an exhibition, and an exhibition catalogue. Despite more than a century of intense interest and study of Blake’s life and art, and the building of great public and private collections of his work, new materials continue to appear, ultimately resulting in a rich and diverse canon showcasing the talents of someone largely unrecognized and undervalued during his lifetime.
Topics in this seminal volume include Blake's debt to his contemporaries, new historical documents, approaches to the major texts through gender and performance studies, and Blake's relationship to modernism. Building on the material legacy of G.E. Bentley Jr., and including a contribution by Bentley himself, this special collection presents new discoveries in exhibition and reception, in cultural and book history, in performance, and in gender studies.
Over the past twenty years Blake and gender has been a very active and controversial area of study. Susanne Sklar’s close reading of Blake’s Jerusalem argues for a redefining of Blake’s presentation of women and sexuality. This article discusses why oral interpretation is appropriate to the ‘Sublime Allegory’ Blake has created, and how oral interpretation delivers us from misinterpretations of the poem's eponymous heroine. Using her own background in performance, Sklar opens up Blake’s magnificent text, giving his characters voice as dramatic presences. In doing so she argues strongly for a redaction of three widely held views of Blake’s text – his presentation of women and sexuality, the date of composition of the text, and the historical basis for one of the villains in Blake’s Jerusalem.
Blake was an interdisciplinary artist and a maker of books. The history of books and the nature of print culture have taken on a distinct scholarly identity, and it is almost as if William Blake anticipated this and invented himself for the discipline of book creation. The study of the book is vast, stretching back in time and over crisscrossing disciplines, and G.E. Bentley, Jr. shows within this volume that the only way we can manage this hydra-headed scholarly area is to work with what Blake called the ‘minute particular.’ These particulars become the building blocks leading us into the world of books as communication.
Overall, Blake has had an extraordinary influence as both an artist and thinker – some of the newest work on Blake is investigating the relationship of his practice and his ideas to science studies and to modernism and post-modernism. Cinema Studies professor Garry Leonard takes the reader into one aspect of this new territory, showing how Blake’s texts, among them The [First] Book of Urizen, anticipate revolutionary critiques of contemporary life in the works of Walter Benjamin and the earliest makers of cinema. Leonard demonstrates compelling parallelisms between Blake’s art and major early-twentieth-century cinema artists and thinkers.
This volume is the fifth instalment in The William Blake Project. This dedication to Blake and his body of work that helped to define both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Era is a testament that Blake scholarship is alive, well, and continually expanding. This collection is sure to enlighten both Blake experts and those new to his name by mixing historical artistry with contemporary scholarship.