Newsletter
Party at Sotheran's
John Windle (he of Antiquarian Bookseller fame) invites all Blake lovers who will be in London on 3 June to a reception at Sotheran's, 2 Sackville Street, Piccadilly, from 6 to 8 pm to celebrate the opening of the Blake show, which will have items from both Windle's and Sotheran's stock. The speaker will be the novelist Tracy Chevalier. If you plan to attend the reception, please notify Chris Saunders, and if you're interested in a catalogue of the works on offer, contact John Windle.
Wings of Fire: The Illuminated Books of William Blake
Grant Scott and the students in his senior seminar on Blake
at Muhlenberg College organized and installed a multimedia
exhibition at the Martin
Art Gallery from 19 March to 19 April. There
were six original Blake works on display, as well as Muir and Trianon
facsimiles, and dance and musical performances were scheduled.
Photos are courtesy of Grant Scott,
the Martin Art Gallery, and Paul Pearson Photography.
Project Blake
Matthew Couper, the director of Project
Blake, which celebrates Blake's life in Lambeth,
has kindly provided the following details of the project's initiatives:
A visual art and sound installation in Centaur Street, near where Blake lived
in Lambeth. This will include large scale mosaics of Blake's work
and recordings of his poetry;
A community and education program;
The inaugural William Blake Festival at the Southbank Centre;
A theatre production based on the life of Blake.
Blake's Poetry and Designs (2nd ed.)
Mary Lynn Johnson posted to the NASSR email list in late November the preface from the new second edition of Blake's Poetry and Designs, which we reproduce below.
Preface to the Second
Edition
True to its title, this new edition of Blake's Poetry and Designs follows
its predecessor (1979) in emphasizing visual as well as verbal aspects of Blake's
self-published body of work in illuminated printing. This expanded edition, designed
to be used in tandem with the magnificent William Blake Archive (www.blakearchive.org)
and other online resources, presents newly annotated full texts of the illuminated
writings, including the epic-length Jerusalem; a rich sampling of images,
sixteen in color and eighty-six in black and white; and a generous selection
of Blake's most arresting poetry and prose in conventional printing and manuscript.
Appearing for the first time in any edition is a letter rediscovered in 1997,
now in the collection of Robert N. Essick. The chronology, bibliography, and
other editorial materials have been reworked in light of scholarly discoveries
of the past quarter century, and the "Criticism" section includes assessments
of Blake's work from 1809 to 2003.
As explained
in "Textual Technicalities," the thoroughly reedited—and now more lightly
punctuated—reading texts are based both on our own study of original
sources and on two distinguished editions that have won awards from the Modern
Language Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions, one in print, one
on the Internet. Texts of the illuminated writings are drawn from transcriptions
in the William Blake Archive (1996- ),
edited by Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi; texts of other
writings derive from David V. Erdman's The Complete Poetry and Prose
of William Blake (1988). Large numbers set in boxes in the right margins
of the reading texts refer to Blake's plate or page numbers, following a
standardized system discussed in "Textual Technicalities" (p. 600). Rewritten
headnotes provide brief thematic and factual introductions; revised footnotes—including
those from the first edition that have been cited in subsequent scholarship—have
been purged of interpretive material that is not strictly explanatory, in
conformity with current practice in the Norton Critical Editions series.
We
appreciate the opportunity, in this edition, to correct long-rankling 1979
glitches (which each of us secretly blames on the other) such as scrambled
biblical citations (n. 9, p. 100) and anachronistic "internal combustion
engines" (n. 9, p.
238).
Mary Lynn Johnson (Grant)
John E. Grant
ImageTexT
The online journal ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies has a special issue devoted to Blake.
Blake Discovery
Eight newly discovered prints by Blake are on display at a Tate exhibition, William Blake: "I still go on / Till the Heavens and Earth are gone." For more on the prints, see here.
Janet Warner Travel Award
The Janet Warner Travel Award to students at York University (Toronto) has been established in the name of the Blake scholar Janet Warner (1931-2006). Donations may be made by check or credit card (see here for details); please be sure to specify that you wish your gift to be allocated to the award. (Thanks to G. E. Bentley, Jr., for this information.)
Upcoming Reviews
Books, CDs, and exhibitions slated for review in the journal:
Craig Atwood. Community of the Cross: Moravian Piety in Colonial Bethlehem. Pennsylvania State UP, 2004.
David Bindman, with Darryl Pinckney. Mind-Forg'd Manacles: William Blake and Slavery. Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2007.
Blake's Shadow. Exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, January to April 2008.
Luisa Calè. Fuseli's Milton Gallery: "Turning Readers into Spectators." Clarendon P, 2006.
Steve Clark and David Worrall, eds. Blake, Nation and Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Steve Clark and Masashi Suzuki, eds. The Reception of Blake in the Orient. Continuum, 2006.
Glen Robert Gill. Northrop Frye and the Phenomenology of Myth. U of Toronto P, 2006.
Matthew J. A. Green. Visionary Materialism in the Early Works of William Blake: The Intersection of Enthusiasm and Empiricism. Palgrave, 2005.
Kevin Hutchings. Songs of William Blake. (CD) 2007.
Saree Makdisi. Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. U of Chicago P, 2003.
Martin Myrone. The Blake Book. Tate Publishing, 2007.
Hatsuko Niimi. Blake's Dialogic Texts. Keio UP, 2006.
William Pressly. The Artist as Original Genius: Shakespeare's "Fine Frenzy" in Late Eighteenth-Century British Art. U of Delaware P, 2008.
Robert Rix. William Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity. Ashgate, 2007.
Christopher Rowland. "Wheels within Wheels": William Blake and the Ezekiel's Merkabah in Text and Image. Marquette UP, 2007.
Sheila Spector. "Glorious incomprehensible": The Development of Blake's Kabbalistic Language. Bucknell UP, 2001.
W. H. Stevenson, ed. Blake: The Complete Poems. 3rd ed. Pearson/Longman, 2007.
Jason Whittaker and David Worrall, eds. Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
William Blake: "I still go on / Till the Heavens and Earth are gone." Exhibition at Tate Britain, November 2007 to June 2008.
Nicholas M. Williams, ed. William Blake Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Julia Wright. Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation. Ohio UP, 2004.
If you would like to submit a Blake-related item for inclusion in this
section, please contact Sarah Jones (sjns@mail.rochester.edu).
Last modified: Wednesday, 07-May-2008 08:35:35 EDT