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William Blake's Gothic imagination
Bodies of horror
By: Chris Bundock (Editor), Elizabeth Effinger (Editor)
Hardcover | 12 April 2018
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The Gothic is haunted by the ghost of William Blake. Scholars of the Gothic have long recognised Blake’s affinity with the genre, often invoking his name, characters, and images in passing. Yet, before now, there has been no major scholarly study focused on Blake’s intersection with the Gothic. William Blake’s Gothic imagination seeks to redress this disconnect and, in the words of another ghost, ‘lend a serious hearing’ to a dimension of Blake’s work we all somehow know to be vital and yet which remains understudied.
The essays in this book do not simply identify Blake’s Gothic conventions but, thanks to recent scholarship on affect, psychology, and embodiment in Gothic studies, reach deeper into the tissue of anxieties that take confused form through this notoriously nebulous historical, aesthetic, and narrative mode. The collection opens with chapters touching on literary form, history, lineation, and narrative in Blake’s work, establishing contact with major topics in Gothic studies. The volume, however, eventually narrows its focus to Blake’s bloody, nervous bodies, through which he explores various kinds of Gothic horror related to reproduction, anatomy, sexuality, affect, and materiality.
Rather than his transcendent images, this collection attends to Blake’s ‘dark visions of torment’. Drawing on the recent interest in Gothic studies on visual arts, this volume also highlights Blake’s engravings and paintings, productions that in both style and content suggest a rich, underexplored archive of Gothic invention. This collection will appeal to students of Romanticism, the Gothic, art history, media/mediation studies, popular mythography, and adaptation studies.
Industry Reviews
'These essays investigate how Blake's major texts-e.g., Jerusalem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The [First] Book of Urizen, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion-arose in conjunction with the Gothic novel in English literature. Addressing a little-recognized facet of Blake studies, the collection examines Blake's works from aesthetic, architectural, and political Gothic perspectives. A lucid and accessible introduction precedes the essays, which will stretch nonspecialist readers. Several essays focus on Blake's visual content: David Baulch's entry reads Gothic iconography in the illustrations of Blake's Jerusalem, and Jason Whittaker analyzes Blakean references in films by Ridley Scott, with an emphasis on Prometheus. Peter Otto finds the political and social upheavals of Gothic novels to be similarly contained in Blake's monstrous present with horrified reactions to the alien bodies in The Book of Urizen. Other essays address philosophical readings of Blake's Deleuzian multiplicity and his counter-Kantian sublime with sophisticated subtlety. This collection is not for the fainthearted, but neither is Blake. Psychological, mythological, and sociological, this collection will draw the reader into the many layers of Blake's verbal and visual media.'
C. L. Bandish, Bluffton University
'William Blake's Gothic Imagination is more than it promises to be - a 'major scholarly study focused on Blake's intersections with the Gothic' - it is a landmark in Blake scholarship. While many of us may be familiar with Blake's popular reception, reading Blake's art through the lens of the Gothic is a relatively new and rewarding critical undertaking.'
Sibylle Erle Bishop Grosseteste University, British Association of Romantic Studies
'An ambitious and expansive volume, Bundock and Effinger have opened a new field of enquiry relevant to Blake studies, gothic scholarship, and the broader field of aesthetic theory, particularly as it relates to political power and sexuality. It is to be hoped that their call for further scholarship into the intersection of Blakean verse and gothic horror will not go unanswered.'
Eighteenth-Century Fiction
'Such uncanny moments of uncomfortable intimacy occur throughout Bundock and Effinger's collection and point to a fascinating, if sometimes unconscious, self-reflexivity that is not often found in many historicist analyses of Blake's work.'
European Romantic Review
ISBN: 9781526121943
ISBN-10: 1526121948
Published: 12th April 2018
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Number of Pages: 312
Audience: Professional and Scholarly
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Country of Publication: GB
Dimensions (cm): 21.6 x 13.8 x 1.9
Weight (kg): 0.51
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You Can Find This Book In
This product is categorised by
- Non-FictionLiterature, Poetry & PlaysHistory & Criticism of LiteratureGeneral Literary StudiesLiterary Studies from 1800 to 1900
- Non-FictionLiterature, Poetry & PlaysHistory & Criticism of LiteratureLiterary Studies of Poetry & Poets
- Non-FictionLiterature, Poetry & PlaysPoetry
- Non-FictionLiterature, Poetry & PlaysHistory & Criticism of LiteratureLiterary Reference Works
- Non-FictionLiterature, Poetry & PlaysHistory & Criticism of LiteratureLiterary Studies of Fiction