Wild Blake

As Blake wrote in his Autograph, I am “very much delighted with being in good company” having been asked by Markus Poetzsch and Cassandra Falke to contribute to their absolutely amazing collection, Wild Romanticism, just out this Spring.

My chapter is titled “Human grapes in the wine presses: vegetable life and the violence of cultivation in Blake’s Milton“. It argues that Blake, in one way at least, isn’t quite as wild as you might expect. He values cultivation, both artistic and horticultural. I start with the idea of pruning — constraining, cutting, and suffering to encourage growth — with reference to a legendary grapevine in the Blakes’ own garden in Lambeth. Then I analyze the remarkable amount of “cultivation” and garden imagery in Annotations to Reynolds. Next, the essay moves to Felpham to examine the role of plants in Milton (which has a lot to do with embodiment and apocalypse) and ends up confronting the necessarily indeterminate question of violence and physical pain having a part in redemption.

Beastly Blake!

After Queer Blake and Sexy Blake, what next? Beastly Blake! It’s the third in the Palgrave trilogy edited by Helen Bruder and me. It’s part of the series Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature.

Blake’s ‘Human Form Divine’ has long commanded the spotlight. Beastly Blake shifts focus to the non-human creatures who populate Blake’s poetry and designs. The author of ‘The Tyger’ and ‘The Lamb’ was equally struck by the ‘beastliness’ and the beauty of the animal kingdom, the utter otherness of animal subjectivity and the meaningful relationships between humans and other creatures. ‘Conversing with the Animal forms of wisdom night & day’, Blake fathomed how much they have to teach us about creation and eternity. This collection ranges from real animals in Blake’s surroundings, to symbolic creatures in his mythology, to animal presences in his illustrations of Virgil, Dante, Hayley, and Stedman. It makes a third to follow Queer Blake and Sexy Blake in irreverently illuminating blind spots in Blake criticism. Beastly Blake will reward lovers of Blake’s writing and visual art, as well as those interested in Romanticism and animal studies.

Stormy Bed and Celestial Bed: Two Essays on Visions of the Daughters of Albion

I was thrilled to be invited to contribute to Christopher Bundock (University of Regina) and Elizabeth Effinger’s (University of New Brunswick, Fredericton) groundbreaking collection, William Blake’s Gothic Imagination. I am proud to be in such good company — with the editors (who wrote a very entertaining as well as illuminating introduction) and with my fellow contributors, especially Peter Otto who is one of the only other people to have written about James Graham, and Lucy Cogan whose work on Blake’s bodies I just love.

My contribution is “‘Terrible Thunders’ and ‘Enormous Joys’: Blake’s Visions and James Graham’s Celestial Bed”. Along with being a comparison of bonkers artist Blake with even more bonkers “quack” and showman Graham, it’s a vindication of Theotormon, and of masturbation, and a reading of Oothoon as sex therapist.

There is so much to say about electricity in Visions. I was also invited to contribute to the excellent collection, Romantic Bodyscapes, edited by Gerold Sedlmayr (Technische Universität Dortmund). My contribution is “‘His Stormy Bed’: Blake, Sex and Electricity”, which reads Visions, and especially the encounter between Bromion and Oothoon, through electrical theory.

Sexy Blake!

Another magnificent production of the Helen P. Bruder and Tristanne Connolly powerhouse (if we may say so ourselves) — Sexy Blake is a companion to our previous Queer Blake and along with Blake, Gender and Culture, a beautiful offspring (or monstrous progeny) of the Blake, Gender and Sexuality in the Twenty-First Century conference that we organized in July 2010.

This book lays bare the sexy Blake lately obscured in fogs of political correctness and post-feminism. Its contributors uncover, in fact, numerous sexy Blakes, arguing for both chastity and pornography, violence and domination as well as desire and redemption, and also journeying in the realms of conceptual sex and conceptual art. Fierce tussles over the body in, and the body of, Blake’s work are the book’s life-blood. Contributors differ passionately in their conclusions about the nature of Blake’s sexiness. All acknowledge Christopher Hobson’s revelation of Blake’s insistent tendency to normalize perversity – some with relish, some with alarm. We celebrate the mysteries of Blakean attractions and repulsions, and hope this volume will re-animate the lively sexual debates which once characterized Blake Studies.

Sexy Blake will come out on Hallowe’en 2013!

Herpetological Proportions

A colleague of mine, Margaret Clark at Wilfrid Laurier University, recently wrote me a few eloquently flattering lines on my Blake and Jim Morrison essay in Blake 2.0. I’m so tickled with them that I have to share them:

Though the topic alone boggled the mind at first glance, and I initially chuckled at Huxley’s assertion that Blake was of the ‘mental species’ that is ‘visionaries all the time’ (I think Huxley may have underplayed the possible influence of all those production chemicals on Blake’s poor head!), that section quickly took a dark turn with many deft transitions between Blake, Morrison, and Milton‘s verse. By the end, though you never explicitly used the term ‘ouroboros’, I was given to imagine a centuries-long self-consuming circle-jerk of decidedly herpetological proportions.

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

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).