Blake, Gender and Culture: new book on its way!

Helen Bruder and I are editing a collection of essays that has grown out of our conference in Oxford in summer 2010, Blake, Gender and Culture in the Twenty-First Century.

The collection is called Blake, Gender and Culture and is forthcoming from Pickering & Chatto in summer 2012, as part of their series (edited by Lynn Botelho), The Body, Gender and Culture.

Blake, Gender and Culture displays the exuberance that comes of combining gender and sexuality studies with historicist approaches in current work on William Blake. Lifting the veil from the secrets of the past can have an erotic frisson, responding to Blake’s own sexually charged mythology of historical change. Casting an erotic gaze on history illuminates the shadows, and enlightens the broader scene of Blake’s own thought and surrounding culture, shedding new light on ours in turn.

The contents range in their interests from hermaphroditism and androgyny to masculinity and performance, from biology and reproduction to political economy and empire. Particular strengths running through the essays are a fascination with religion, spirituality, and the relationship between the body and the soul, and rich attention to Blake’s visual art.

Essay on Blake, suckling, and swaddling

For an exciting collection edited by Hatsuko Niimi and Masashi Suzuki, titled A Firm Perswasion: Essays in British Romanticism, just out from Sairyusha, I’ve written an essay, “‘Nourishd with milk ye serpents’: Blake, Infant Nursing and Family Bonds”.

It looks at the hot topics in infant care in the late eighteenth century — breastfeeding and swaddling — and argues that Blake is at odds with his fellow radical thinkers. Swaddling was considered a symbol of oppression and arbitrary power, while maternal breastfeeding was idealized as a route to individual virtue and political regeneration. Blake, however, considers suckling as constraining as swaddling — yes, ye serpents, emotional bonds are as oppressive as physical ones. If Blake sticks it to smothering mothers and tyrannical fathers, at the same time, he sees nurses, and non-biological parent figures generally, in an interestingly positive light.

Rousseau is the granddaddy of this discourse of radical childrearing, but my special focus is on Mary Wollstonecraft, including her incredibly poignant letters to that undeserving rat Gilbert Imlay, and lessons written for her young daughter Fanny, possibly just before one of her suicide attempts. I also look at poems by Ann Yearsley, and Mary Lamb (more fraught parent-child relationships there). It’s all put in the context of medical writing (as ever, read for its literary as well as its scientific and cultural juicyness), particularly William Cadogan’s (hilarious) Essay upon Nursing, and a book by Benjamin Lara that Wollstonecraft reviewed (quite positively), An Essay on the Injurious Custom of Mothers not suckling their own Children.

Out now! Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture

Blake 2.0 has just been published by Palgrave, edited by Steve Clark, Jason Whittaker, and myself. It’s a collection of essays on the reception of Blake beyond the traditionally literary.

It has my essay on Blake and Jim Morrison in it (to accompany the posts on the subject on Jason’s Zoamorphosis blog), along with many other choice pieces: particularly in the realm of Blake and pop music, there are essays on Blake and Bob Dylan; Nick Cave, Julian Cope, the Libertines and Billy Bragg; as well as Blake set to music, and ‘covers’ of  ‘Jerusalem’ (aka ‘And did those feet…).

Blake said of his designs, ‘Tho’ I call them Mine I know they are not Mine’. Then who owns Blake? Where does his work begin and end? There is something about reading and viewing Blake’s multimedia which spurs creation in response. His reception goes far beyond academic criticism because he is more than just a literary figure: artist, printmaker, philosopher, revolutionary, visionary, Blake has always been more than words on a page. This volume follows some of his digital and analog regenerations in the fields of comics, cultural criticism, copyright; sculpture, surrealism, art history, art therapy; film, folk, rock, pop, and the afterlife of Blake’s own music and lyrics. A variety of virtual selves has been created for Blake, his works, and his audience by the twentieth-century dissemination across a wide variety of media, and the more recent interactive possibilities raised by Web 2.0 as technology and as concept.

‘A ground-breaking series of essays on the widely-spread and dynamic influence of Blake’s composite art on the artistic practices of the twentieth century, right up to the emerging digital age.’ – Professor Edward Larrissy, Queen’s University Belfast, UK

Grey Zone Book Series Launch!

An urban centre for the study of culture and the city

Book Series Launch Invitation Culture, Disease and Well-Being When:  Friday September 23rd, 2011  5-8pm   Where: The 41 Gastropub, 41 King Street West, Kitchener ON N2G 1A3    MAP IT! In conjunction with the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts SLSA 2011 Annual Conference on the PHARMAKON Sept. 22-25, and the Faculty of Arts, University of Waterloo, The Culture of Cities Centre would like to cordially invite you to the book series launch at the 41 Gastropub in downtown Kitchener, ON. Please join us for some hors d’oeuvres and the opportunity to preview and purchase our books at a special publisher’s price of $35.00 The Grey Zone in Health and Illness by Alan Blum Spectacular Death   Edited by Tristanne Connolly Alan Blum – Kieran Bonner – Tristanne Connolly -  Morgan Tunzelmann – Jan Plecash – Mike Follert – Marta Marin-Domine – Stephen Svenson & Cory Ruf – Elke Grenzer- Kevin Dowler – Diego Llovet – Saeed Hydaralli – Ariane Hanemaayer – Elizabeth C. Effinger – Peter McHugh

http://www.cultureofcities.ca 561 Bloor St. W., 3rd Floor Toronto, ON M5S 1Y6 Canada

“Get Away From Me”: Canadian Pop Music on American Culture

Tokyo, June 11: The conference at Sophia University rocked! Suitably for an event at the Institute of American and Canadian Studies, it was about Canadian pop music’s relationship to, and perspectives on, American culture. If you look closely at the poster… you can see we had a pleasingly random collection of talks with each speaker’s own desired take on the theme, while intriguing threads came up between the papers (such as the perhaps unexpected civicmindedness of both Rush and Peaches! “Let them all make their own music” takes on rich meaning…) Here are some photos.

Blake and Jim Morrison

I’ve been working on an essay on Blake and Jim Morrison for the collection Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture (forthcoming from Palgrave), which I have the privilege and pleasure of co-editing with Jason Whittaker and Steve Clark. (In fact, it is also a privilege and pleasure to write about Mr. Mojo Risin — it’s like a teenage dream come true, combining scholarly and musical obsessions, on the subject of one of my favourite intellectual rock gods…)

I threw myself into it and, inevitably, the essay was bursting at the seams about as much as Jim himself (and several Blake characters too, as I argue…) so I’m using some of the material for postings on the Zoamorphosis blog. One on Blake, Morrison, and prophecy, and another on tracing what the Lizard King might have read by the Mental Prince. (But, for the bulging analysis, you’ll have to wait for the book…)

Update, March 2012: the book is out!

A review of Queer Blake on two fine blogs

Check out Roger Whitson’s review of QB: it’s posted on his blog and on Zoamorphosis (where the book was also noticed before it came out: see the “Two New Publications from Palgrave” post from back in May 2010).

Queer Blake reviewed in TLS

In the 6 August issue of The Times Literary Supplement, in the ‘In Brief’ section, there is a good review of Queer Blake which praises Helen Kidd’s poem and shows how well it works as a frame for the collection. The review, by Max Fincher, highlights the connections made between Blake and contemporary artists, the challenge Blake presents to Foucault (from Chris Hobson’s essay), and the link between heterosexuality and colonization in Visions (from Bethan Stevens’ essay about slavery and voyeurism). Unfortunately they credit Mark Crosby’s essay on Hayley and Paiderastia to Susan Matthews — but I suppose that’s one way of noticing two fine studies on Hayley, the classics and sexuality in one fell, erroneous, swoop. Nonetheless, happy that this labour of forbidden love has received TLS‘s blessings.

Spectacular Death adorns Intellect catalogue

To my great delight, the cover image for Spectacular Death graces the cover of Intellect Books’ Autumn 2010 catalogue. Between this and the (if I may say so myself) glory that is the cover of Queer Blake, maybe I missed a career in graphic design? (haha) Aesthetics are (slightly) important to me so I am thrilled — more importantly, I’m gratified when images that strike me strongly come across so effectively. Yay for the designers at Intellect (and Palgrave too for QB).

Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability (how’s that for a title? glad I snuck by those postmodern parentheses) is a collection of essays I’ve edited, comprising work from the Grey Zone research group (Link to the side here…). It’s part of Intellect’s series, Culture, Disease, and Well-Being: The Grey Zone of Health and Illness.

previously…

Being as this is a new blog to note my Research Activities, I thought I’d begin by catching up. You can read about what I’ve done — before finally at length shedding my ancient lizard skin (as if!) and evolving to Web 2.0 here (ha) — on the research page of my good old fashioned U of Waterloo website.