Volume 26 · Issue 3

Critical Studies

35. Adams, Hazard, ed. Critical Essays on William Blake. Critical Essays on British Literature. Boston, MA: Hall, 1991. $40.00 boards.

—Part one of this new collection of (previously published) essays and sections of books selected by Adams from the critical literature presents “Blake in His Time.” It comprises excerpts from the writings of Cunningham, Robert Hunt, Palmer, and Crabb Robinson, and it is introduced by the reprint of the second chapter in Deborah Dorfman’s 1969 publication. Part two examines the critical understanding of “Blake in Our Time” in 10 essays. The editor has chosen reprints of articles by David V. Erdman (53-66), Robert N. Essick (175-92), Susan Fox (135-49), Thomas R. Frosch (79-89), the late Northrop Frye (39-52), Jean H. Hagstrum (67-78), W.J.T. Mitchell (111-34), Alicia Ostriker (90-110), Morton D. Paley (150-63), and Steven Shaviro (164-74). All these names will be familiar to any serious student of Blake, and they stand for a liberal selection of a variety of post-war approaches to the interpretation of Blake’s poetry. But does this alone supply sufficient reason to republish a series of excerpts in book format? Such recycling may be good for the publishers, and it may fill a requirement that arises from the teaching of Blake in the context of a general romanticism course. However, I doubt that this is particularly good promotion for that kind of reading culture that the editor himself has strongly propagated elsewhere. Adams has here contributed both an introduction (1-7) and an afterword on “The World-View of William Blake in Relation to Cultural Policy” (193-204); the latter is—and I feel that there is some irony in this—closely related to his Antithetical Essays; see Blake 25 (1991-92): 13 (#39).

36. Altizer, Thomas [J. J.]. “William Blake: El vidente, y la revolución.” Gaceta del Fondo de Cultura Económica 204 (1987): 12-14.

—This article, which presents a brief outline of Blake’s revolutionary writings, is preceded by an equally brief editorial introduction, concerned with the author and his previous contributions to Blake studies. Altizer’s text was translated by Federico Patán for publication in the Dec. 1987 issue of this Mexican journal from a short section (i.e., 184-90) in History as Apocalypse, for which see Blake 21 (1987-88): 63 (#144).

37. Ando, Kiyoshi. “Reception of Blake in Japan.” Tokai English Review 3 (1991): 1-22.

—The five parts of this account treat of “Natsume Soseki and Blake” (1-3), “The Earliest Appearance of Blake in Japan” (3-5), “Yanagi Soetsu and Shirakaba [White Birch]” (5-12), “The Later Yanagi and His Followers” (12-16), and, in an afterword, the “Current State of Blake [scholarship] in Japan” (17-19). The bibliographical backdrop to this account has recently been described in great detail by Gerald Bentley and Keiko Aoyama (see #17, above). The author, who over the past few years has emerged as a leading authority in Japanese Blake studies, here repeats Jugaku’s warnings against a “comparative study between Blake and Buddhism” as “not always useful” and possibly even “harmful” (18).

38. Ando, Kiyoshi. “[A Study of William Blake’s Illuminated Printings in the British Museum].” Jinmon-Kagaku Ronshu 48 (1991): 119-45.

—This article, published in Japanese, presents a working diary, kept by the author when studying Blake’s illuminated books at the Department of Prints and Drawings in 1990. He informs his readers about how to gain admission to the Print Room and what to do there (119-20), and then lists Blake’s titles, supplies transcriptions of some earlier ownership inscriptions, occasionally records the provenance, refers to a facsimile reproduction, and quotes the inventory number for the copies now owned by the British Museum. The most detailed of Ando’s own notes on Blake’s texts and designs are concerned with the Songs (121-24), Milton (128-36), and There is No Natural Religion (137-39). Along with an offprint, the author has also supplied the translation of the title for this article into English that is cited above. See the subsequent entry for a sequel.

39. Ando, Kiyoshi. “[A Study of Blake’s Manuscript of The Four Zoas in the British Library].” Journal of Science of Culture and Humanities [Aichi, Jap.] 49 (1992): 63-89.

—This article, written and published in Japanese, supplements the author’s textual and editorial studies of Blake’s manuscript epic in London (see Blake 23 [1989-90]: 124 [#23]; 25 [1991-92]: 13 [#41], as well as the two subsequent entries). As Ando has pointed out in correspondence, the present publication is primarily concerned with the deletions and corrections in the manuscript for Nights I and II which he studied at the Department of Manuscripts of the British Museum in 1990 (65-80). This report is followed by a section of brief notes (in the style of a diary, complete with dates and times of study) on the Job designs (81-84), the London examples from the Dante watercolors and engravings (85-86), and a number of Blake’s prints (86-89). As a whole, then, the publication forms the second part to the article listed in the preceding entry.

40. Ando, Kiyoshi. “The Textual Problems of The Four Zoas [3]: Pages 5 and 6 of the MSS.” Tokai English Review 2 (1990): 1-19.

—The “present paper . . . tries to reconsider pages 5 and 6 . . . and it also tries to re-evaluate the existing texts of The Four Zoas” (1). In order to do so, Ando describes the manuscript in some detail and sums up the editorial decisions made by Ellis and Yeats, Sloss and Wallis, Keynes, Margoliouth, in Bentley’s reproduction of the manuscript and in his edition of the Writings, by Erdman in his edition and in the volume of reproductions of the manuscript edited in collaboration with Cettina Tramontano Magno, and by Stevenson. Ando draws on the 1978 articles by Erdman and Lincoln on “Night the First” that were published in Blake, and from the materials thus gathered together, he then attempts to reconstruct Blake’s own process of writing and re-writing Vala into The Four Zoas. Though, “on the whole, we [i.e., Ando] arrive at the same conclusion as Lincoln,” the author is right in stressing that this result was reached by following different lines of reasoning (15). He suggests a new critical “edition with facsimiles and transcriptions faithful to Blake’s MSS,” modeled on the Cornell Wordsworth as “the best example,” or Erdman and Moore’s “excellent” edition of Blake’s Notebook (15-16). For parts 1 and 2 of this serialized study of Blake’s manuscript and the author’s earlier comparisons of the “seven editions . . . and the editors’ treatments” (1) of Blake’s text see Blake 23 (1989-90): 124 (#23), and 25 (1991-92): 13 (#41); for their sequel, see the subsequent entry in the present checklist.

41. Ando, Kiyoshi. “The Textual Problems of The Four Zoas (4).” Jinmon-Kagaku Ronshu 45 (1990): 13-46.

—This part of Ando’s study of the various layers of text in Blake’s illustrated manuscript is devoted to pages 7 and 143. The author’s minute comparisons of the text from these pages in the various editions of the epic are here charted on three concordance tables (18-31), and new (computer-processed) transcripts of pages 5-7 and 143-44 are included (32-39). For parts 1-3 of this study see the preceding entry and its annotation; for other studies of the Vala manuscript see #114, 191, and 211, below.

42. Ault, Donald. “Where’s Poppa? or, The Defeminization of Blake’s ‘Little Black Boy.’” Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism. Ed. Laura Claridge and Elizabeth Langland. Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 1990. 75-91. $42.50 boards, $16.95 paper.

—In Ault’s view “the surface plot of racial difference and theological rationalization [in ‘The Little Black Boy’] obscures both the issue of gender and its relation to the text’s grammatical destabilization.” The poem itself, by “emphasizing the way racial, geographical, and cultural differences are transformed into ontotheological differences,” is said to divert “attention from its most fundamental movement—a turning away from a (bodily, present, ‘real’) mother toward a (utopian, absent, ‘imaginary’) father.” Following the “mother’s speaking voice [as a] medium of exchange between males” (76) through the poem “metonymically, piece by piece” (77), the author constructs and deconstructs various “perspectives” from which the poem, the semantics of its words, and their grammatical interrelations can be read and viewed. This is close reading at its best, systematically unsystematic, and directed against the grain of the “machinery of phallocentric thinking” (86). In a “Postscript” (86-88) Ault reflects on some of the theoretical problems encountered when writing the essay. He ends with a note for which I truly envy him: “In a dream I showed this manuscript to Blake, who told me that he was ‘not uncomfortable’ with my reading of ‘The Little Black Boy.’” This of course is just wonderful, and creative, too. I hardly ever dream of Blake myself, yet I have always assumed that he would probably hate most of what I (like any other scholar, male or female) write about him anyway.

43. Bagchee, Shyamal. “On Blake and O’Neill.” Eugene O’Neill Review 14 (1990): 25-38.

—Students of comparative literature are not easily discouraged from attempting yet another examination of “Blake and . . . .” The present checklist supplies more and ample evidence for this (see the introduction, above). Bagchee, however, in this essay is careful not to overstrain the case for which, as he admits in the very first sentence, the “bare facts . . .are not numerous, nor are they particularly compelling if we take a simply rational view of the matter.” Therefore, the author is “not proposing too fine a point for William Blake’s ‘influence’ on Eugene O’Neill. Rather, [he is] suggesting merely that some aspects of the playwright’s temperament may have found congenial elements in the life and works of Blake, as he knew them.” Therefore, the purpose of this article “is quite limited: to describe as clearly as possible the probable grounds of imaginative contact and similarity between O’Neill and Blake” (25). Starting from O’Neill’s inscription in the copy of the 1925 Writings of William Blake that he gave to his future wife, Bagchee examines the evidence for O’Neill’s interest in Blake’s poetry, for the “oriental preoccupations” (36) that are said to have been shared by both authors, as well as for the legend about Blake’s “Irish/O’Neill heritage” (29) as championed by Ellis and Yeats. Instead of merely overstressing the “similar interests or similar poetic goals” in Blake and O’Neill, the author presents a well-tempered account of the “crucial differences between their approaches” (36), too. He has here successfully added another chapter to the story of Blake’s reputation that was begun in Deborah Dorfman’s Blake in the Nineteenth Century of 1969.

44. *Balfour, Ian. “The Future of Citation: Blake, Wordsworth, and the Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy.” Writing the Future. Ed. David Wood. Warwick Studies in Philosophy and Literature. London: Routledge, 1990. 115-28.

—An essay that appears to be based on the author’s thesis; see Blake 21 (1987-88): 55 (#24), and, for related studies of Blake and Wordsworth, #88 as well as 153, below.

45. Behrendt, Stephen C. Reading William Blake. Basingstoke, Hants.: Macmillan, 1992. £40.00 boards.

—This is the first study to view the entire corpus of Blake’s writings in illuminated printing from the critical platform provided by reader-response criticism. The book thus contributes a new questionnaire as well as new insights to the ongoing attempt to understand that peculiar genre, Blake’s illuminated books. Behrendt here “explores the dynamics of the reading process involved in reading . . . Blake’s illuminated poems. . . . Because reading verbal texts and visual texts involves different aesth[e]tic assumptions and operations, the texts of Blake’s illuminated pages simultaneously make different demands on their readers, which further complicates the reading activity. I have not attempted here to offer a comprehensive reading of Blake’s poetry. Rather, I have explored some of the demands that Blake’s illuminated texts place upon us as part of the process of reading and comprehension. I have tried to outline some of the ways in which the intellectual and imaginative transaction proceeds between author and reader via the medium of the illuminated text as physical artifact” (viii). A sustained argument throughout the book is Behrendt’s concern with the openness of Blake’s visual and verbal texts (Eco’s The Open Work is cited early on in note 15 to chapter 1). In his readings of the reading processes offered by the pages of the Songs (36-72), Thel (74-84), Visions (84-93), the Marriage (93-100), the Continental prophecies (105-24), the Urizen trilogy (126-51), Milton (153-65) and Jerusalem (165-73), Behrendt continually retums to the cooperation of author and reader in the creation of “meaning” as his central leitmotif. In these works, he finds that readers “are everywhere forced to assess and to choose . . .as they struggle to ferret out something that they strive individually to determine to be Blake’s ‘meaning’. But ‘meaning’ in Blake’s works is ultimately a largely co-authored product, a fabric of signification whose pattern and weave reflects the readers’ views and activities perhaps as much as they do Blake’s” (1). With “meaning” so unstable and individualized, what can be said at all about “the program that propels Blake’s illuminated poetry”? In Behrendt’s view this common denominator will have to be seen as “an exercise in the shaping of a community of prophets, of cooperating artist/viewer/readers” (173). There are 16 illustrations, and Reading William Blake merits a reading. Unfortunately, the book’s price puts it outside the reach of the average student; therefore, before a paper-back edition becomes available, its circulation will probably be limited to members of the “inner circle” of Blake scholars. See also #54 and 78, below.

46. Bentley, E. B. “Blake’s Elusive Ladies.” Blake 26 (1992-93): 30-33.

47. Bentley, G. E., Jr. “Blake and Napoleon Redivivus.” Notes and Queries ns 38 (1991): 293-94.

—Taking his cue from Erdman’s biography of John Oswald (see Blake 22 [1988-89]: 55 [#161]), the author speculates that Blake had heard about William Thomson’s “exceedingly peculiar theory,” according to which it really was John Oswald who under the pseudonym of Napoleon Buonaparte left his mark on European history. This then would finally give meaning to a passage in Gilchrist’s Life of Blake (1863) that presumably would otherwise continue to be considered no more than a posthumous anecdote. Crediting an unnamed friend as his authority, Gilchrist reported that Blake “embraced . . . a ‘curious hypothesis’” (293) that does indeed share some similarities with Thomson’s.

48. Bentley, Gerald E. [i.e., G. E.], Jr. “Blake and Rome: The Conflicts of Art and Empire.” L’Esilio romantico: Forme di un conflitto. Ed. Joseph Cheyne and Lilla Maria Crisafulli Jones. Biblioteca di Studi Inglesi 52. Bari, It.: Adriatica, 1990. 33-48. Lit. 45000 paper.

—With only a few footnotes added, this essay seemingly presents a verbatim printing of a paper that was read on the occasion of the conference on “The Romantics as Expatriates,” organized by the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association and held at the British School at Rome, 15-17 Apr. 1988. Because Blake never crossed the Channel and thus “is an exile with a difference” (33), Bentley employs a biographical sketch for his framework in order to situate numerous quotations from Blake’s own writings, from those of some of his contemporaries, and from early accounts of Blake’s life. In effect, the article recapitulates the artist-poet’s criticisms of the Roman empire of antiquity and of the modern British empire. Bentley stresses the fact that in Blake’s writings both the positive and the negative connotations of “England,” “Italy,” and “Rome” cannot be understood without looking simultaneously at the social and political history of late eighteenth-century Europe and at the history of art.

49. Bentley, G. E., Jr. “Mainaduc, Magic, and Madness: George Cumberland and the Blake Connection.” Notes and Queries ns 38 (1991): 294-96.

—Starting out from the observation that “Blake has repeatedly been linked to the underground world of secret societies, mesmerism and magic, freemasonry and fraud,” Bentley supplies further evidence “that the artistic world of Blake’s time was rife with speculation about the limits of reason and the powers of the unknown.” In this brief source study of Blake and Cumberland the former is depicted as “one of the most vigorous and independent of these speculators” (294), and it is said to be “at least possible that Blake’s information about this subterranean world and his attitudes towards it” (295) were derived from the latter, even though Cumberland manifestly “was not one of the credulous.” The author stresses “the need to treat such hypothetical connections” between Blake and that “underworld” with “considerable scepticism until we have solid evidence for them” (296). For thematically related studies of Blake’s “underground” connections see #173-75, below; I am not sure though that Bentley will consider the “evidence” presented by Mee (and, in effect, any other than biographical and documentary evidence) as being “solid” enough.

50. Bentley, G. E., Jr. “Marie Vollstonecraft Godwin and William Blake in France: The First Foreign Engravings after Blake’s Designs.” Australian Journal of French Studies 26 (1989): 125-47.

—This is a descriptive account of the reengravings that were executed by following Blake’s plates for Original Stories and then published in a French translation of Wollstonecraft’s book, printed in Paris in 1799. Blake’s original engravings for the London edition and the anonymous French copy-engravings are reproduced together with a detail from “Nurse’s Song” in Experience (131-47). The existence of these copies after Blake had been recorded previously in John Windle’s Wollstonecraft bibliography of 1988, for which see Blake 23 (1989-90): 151 (#264).

51. Bentley, G. E., Jr. “‘They take great liberty’s’: Blake Reconfigured by Cromek and Modern Critics—The Arguments from Silence.” Studies in Romanticism 30 (1991): 657-84.

—In their articles of 1988-89, Aileen Ward and Dennis Read had attempted to demystify the so-called “Cromek affair”; see Blake 23 (1989-90): 139, 142 (#143, 167). Whereas these begin page 88 | ↑ back to top authors “conclude that Cromek and Stothard were the originators of the conception for a picture of the Procession of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims” (682), Bentley remains-unconvinced by their arguments. He insists “that both the old evidence and the new [as brought forward by Ward and Read] reveal R. H. Cromek as a man whose promises and words are not [i.e., never] to be trusted . . . Blake was clearly taken in and betrayed by Cromek.” If this holds true in the case of the designs and engravings for Blair’s Grave, Bentley reasons that it must “probably” be true “in much the same way with respect to the Canterbury Pilgrims design and engraving” (683)—an irrefutable conclusion or no more than an impassioned hypothesis?

52. Bialler, Nancy. “William Blake Discoveries.” Sotheby’s Preview Apr.-May 1991: 16-17.

—The author announces the discovery of previously unrecorded copies of “The Chaining of Orc” and of “The Man Sweeping the Interpreter’s Parlour,” which were found “tucked behind the flyleaf of a copy of Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake” (16). A third print from the same source, and attributed to Blake by the auctioneers (and by Robert Essick), is a “metal cut” (17) version (i.e., evidently a relief-etching) of Blake’s wood-engraved illustrations for Virgil’s first Eclogue (see also #104, below). Since at present there is only one other known impression of “The Chaining of Orc” (in the Rosenwald Collection at the National Gallery in Washington, DC), this print was bound to sell at a record price when auctioned by Sotheby’s in New York on 9-11 May 1991. Following this spectacular discovery and sale, owners of the first and second editions of Gilchrist’s Life will probably want to to reexamine their copies. See also #112 and 185, below.

53. Bidlake, Steven. “Blake, the Sacred, and the French Revolution: 18th-Century Ideology and the Problem of Violence.” European Romantic Review 3 (1992-93): 1-20.

—Bidlake attempts to lift the ideological veil that, by means of “an aesthetification or other screening,” hinders “a full recognition of violence,” and that produces “an evasion of its serious implications.” Because there is a tendency in Blake criticism that “persistently seeks to contain the violence in Blake’s texts so that it may be subordinated to an intrepretive category or strategy capable of rendering it inoffensive,” such criticism has in consequence “closed off access to an important affective and symbolic dimension of [Blake’s] prophetic texts” (1). The article examines the role and discourse of violence in Burke’s Reflections (2-4), then turns to “an approach to violence in culture” (4) as opened up by Freud and Girard, uses this approach to describe “the pattern in which the problem of violence manifests itself in the French Revolution” (6), and applies the findings to a reading of The French Revolution, America, and The Four Zoas (8-16). Bidlake’s aim in writing this essay must have been to inform his readers that “at the very least Blake’s inclusion of stark imagery of violence in what has so often been read as the unqualified triumph of apocalyptic imagination in Night 9 should remind us that the guillotine and allied forms of revolutionary violence are the obverse of the ideal doctrine of fraternity and rational equality, a fact that Paine and Wollstonecraft all too conveniently neglected and Burke too facilely explained away” (15-16). That is fine. And yet what troubled me while reading the article was the author’s reluctance to acknowledge in his methodology and in his readings of Blake that there is (or at the very least may be) a difference between violence as it was enacted in the historical event of the French Revolution and the Terreur, and the representation of such violence in a work of art, between corporeal and spiritual warfare. To Bidlake such a recognition that there is a difference between having a man or woman guillotined, and the depiction of that same act in poetry and art presumably would appear as synonymous with “an aesthetification or other screening” of the “problem of violence.” Yet without taking into account the aesthetic nature of Blake’s productions that was so important to him, how is one to understand the historical effectivity of the guillotine on one side, and the ineffectivity of Blake’s critique of the politics of his times on the other? See also #107 and 173, below.

54. Bigwood, Carol. “Seeing Blake’s Illuminated Texts.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49 (1991): 307-15.

—As a philosopher, and with a “concern [that] stems from Merleau-Ponty’s interrogation of cognition and perception,” Carol Bigwood returns to a number of questions that others have asked before. “Like the poet William Blake of the modern age and Heidegger and other postmodern thinkers, this essay views cognition as a restrictive rationality. By investigating the interrelationship of cognition and perception as played out in my reading of some of Blake’s original illuminated texts, I will show how these works frustrate the usual cognitive reading of texts and encourage a fuller perceptual experience. His books, thereby, not only slightly disengage us from the epochal perspective, but alert us to the restrictive character of our thinking, intimating a more flexible thinking that is at once more in-sight-ful [sic] and more open to the prelinguistic movements of perception” (308). There is nothing wrong with such a statement. Yet whereas the critical jargon as well as the citation of Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger as authorities on the problem of “cognition and perception” in Blake may belong to Bigwood, the essence of these assertions is not entirely new to Blake studies. If told that Blake “transforms our reading into an unexpectedly sensuous experience and encourages us to rediscover a creative, active pursuit which tries to get beneath ready-made concepts to the existential experience to which these signs originally gave form” (309), or that he encourages “us to sensuously experience the meanings of words” (311), some readers may feel that in 1991 this sounds all too familiar. Therefore, it is with some relief that in turning to the notes (which make no attempt to demonstrate any intimate knowledge of previous Blake criticism) one finds the publications of at least one Blake scholar duly credited. “Mitchell’s work on Blake’s ‘composite art’ in many ways anticipates my own phenomenological study of the intercoursing of textual and drawing lines in Blake’s illuminations” (314-15n5). Unfortunately, Bigwood’s own “phenomenological study” is further impaired by what I think is a mistaken and by now outdated idea about the artist’s working procedures (see 315n7), or her lack of familiarity with eighteenth-century conventions for the signing of a copperplate, practices that were common to Blake and many of his fellowengravers and therefore unlikely to carry a personal Blakean meaning (see 315n11). No doubt, in this essay one does encounter a couple of “in-sight-ful” observations on the minute particulars in the movements of Blake’s lines and the correspondences between them. Still, those who are looking for a more sustained examination of what it means to see and read Blake’s illuminated pages are advised to see #45, above.

55. Billigheimer, Rachel V. Wheels of Eternity: A Comparative Study of William Blake and William Butler Yeats. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan; New York, NY: St. Martin’s P, 1990. £27.50/$39.95 boards.

—This book presents a revised version of the author’s thesis, for which see Blake 16 (1982-83): 112 (#28). About its critical purpose one learns that in Wheels of Eternity “we shall compare and contrast symbolic circles in the poetic works of Blake and Yeats. Dealing specifically with circle images, the most significant and frequent of the symbols in both of the poets, we shall explore in detail their world views, aiming thereby to arrive at a deeper insight into their relationship, the relationship of Yeats’s ‘Chance’ and ‘Choice’ to Blake’s ‘wheels within wheels within wheels’” (10). Occasionally, such “symbolic circles” in Blake’s pictorial works are discussed as well (see 88-97 and passim).

56. Bindman, David. “William Blake, Songs of Innocence, [London]: W. Blake, 1789: Rosenwald Collection 1797; and William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, [London: W. Blake, 1794]: Rosenwald Collection 1801.” Vision of a Collector: The Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection in the Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1991. 291-92. $285.00 for the limited edition of 300 deluxe copies.

—One of 100 short essays (each describing an important item from the collection) in a volume designed to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Lessing J. Rosenwald’s birth. See also #70, 103, and 125, below.

57. Birenbaum, Harvey. Between Blake and Nietzsche: The Reality of Culture. London: Associated UP, for Bucknell UP, 1992. $26.20 boards.

—In this book, following a preface on “Myth and Symbol, Once Again” (xi-xvii), Blake’s “Albion Meets [Nietzsche’s] Overman” (1-7). Birenbaum then discusses “similar views of life” (25) in the works of the two authors as “The Sympathetic Perversion” (8-24), their idea of “a mythic text” (40) in “The Solitary Carnival” (25-40), “Blake: Seeing the Word” (41-59), and “Blake: The Word is a Song” (60-76). Chapters on “Unsaying the Word” in Nietzsche (77-95) and on “The Curse of the begin page 89 | ↑ back to top Sign” (96-118) prepare the ground for a concluding epilogue entitled “Toward Modernity” (119-27).

58. Black, Helen Hanna. “Some Versions of Early Romantic Pastoral: Aggression and Dominance in Rousseau, Wordsworth and Blake.” Dissertation Abstracts International 52 (1991-92): 925A. U of Colorado at Boulder, 1990.

—In “response to critics like Jerome McGann,” the author here argues “that the early Romantic pastorals and idyll of Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Blake incorporate history into their forms.” Black distinguishes “early Romantic pastoral by its structure of aggression and dominance, a structure derived from Rousseau,” and she finds that “Blake’s pastorals unmask the dominance at the basis of innocence and expose it as a mystifying form of ideological legitimation and control. Criticizing the tutorial idyll advocated by theorists of education like Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft, Blake’s polemic against innocence in Songs of Innocence and of Experience derives in part from his illustrations to Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories. . . . Blake’s pastoral is thus involved in an ongoing dialogue with late eighteenth-century radicalized and reformist pastoral.”

59. Blackstone, Bernard. “The Traveller Unknown.” The Lost Travellers: A Romantic Theme with Variations. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1983. 51-89. $52.50 boards.

—The reprint of a 1962 publication (see Bentley 1977, #1214); in addition to the Blake chapter, there are many additional (and well-indexed) references to Blake in other chapters of this book.

60. *Blondel, Jacques. “William Blake: Songs of Experience. ‘L’Arbre au poison’ (1793).” Repérages 9 (1987): 1-9.

61. Blumenfeld, Hugh Marshall. “Thunder of Thought: A Phenomenological Study of William Blake’s Poetics.” Dissertation Abstracts International 52 (1991-92): 2131A. New York U, 1991.

—The author of this dissertation aspires to be different, he wants to surprise his readers, and in order to do so offers some thunder and lightning. The study presents a critique of all rational criticism, even where it is of a post-structuralist brand, and of its proponents who “have rehabilitated ‘Mad Blake,’ elucidating his ‘system’ and identifying his sources. . . . With Blake’s madness now so methodical, this most rebellious, most intractable of poets is in more danger of being institutionalized than ever.” While saying nothing in this abstract about the possible contribution that is being made by yet another dissertation to this very phenomenon, Blumenfeld calls upon the “new science of chaos” (here said to champion “the essential irrationality of complex forms”) and “the method of Gaston Bachelard” in his brave attempt to save Blake’s “anger and irrationality” from the onslaught of rationalist academics. The “theoretical foundation” supplied by Bachelard’s philosophy “of science and imagination” allows for an understanding of “the fractal-like quality of Blake’s poetry.” However, I am not entirely convinced that this understanding is all that new. Being told that “Blake’s imaginative cosmos yields a poetics of space, time, and matter, whose phenomenological description develops out of the dynamism in Blake’s imagery,” that space “in Blake is always created through bodily exertion and pain,” that the “discontinuity and impulse-driven cadences characterizing Blakean time emerge through images of walking, hammering and singing,” and that “Blake’s antagonism to matter is full of ambivalence, since the resistances of metal and stone develop his mental strength and muscular art,” I still felt reminded of some of the findings of three generations of rationalist scholars. And I am afraid that while certainly “Blake, even sane, must . . . retain his anger and irrationality,” scholarship and criticism cannot but engage with it in the “fundamentally rational” manner that Blumenfeld pretends to scorn. He is right, of course, in stating that the “experience of poetry, especially Blake’s, is not wholly rational, and rational explanations of irrationality prove inadequate”—and yet, “inadequate” to what? Occasionally, some earlier critics must have thought about the aims as well as the limits of scholarly explication and interpretation of poetry? A reading of David Fuller’s book of 1988 might have demonstrated to Blumenfeld that at least he is not alone in raising such basic questions, not even in the narrow field of Blake studies, and that others already have supplied a program for coping with the issues he is interested in; see Blake 22 (1988-89): 45 (#65).

62. Boutang, Pierre. William Blake: manichéen et visionnaire. Mobile matière. Paris, Fr.: E. L. A. La Différence, 1990. Fr. 138.00.

—This may well be a fully revised and rewritten edition of Boutang’s 1970 publication under a new title; see Bentley 1977,#1264. For the author’s translations of Blake’s poetry see #3, above.

63. *Brenkman, John. Culture and Domination. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1987.

—The book is said to contain extensive discussions of the Songs, see also Blake 21 (1987-88): 56 (#37).

64. Brennan, Stephen C. “The Financier. Dreiser’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Studies in American Fiction 19 (1991): 55-69.

—Brennan thinks that the “analogy with Blake is worth briefly pursuing to explain the opposition between Butler and Cowperwood” (58) in Theodore Dreiser’s novel of 1912.

65. Brewster, Glen E. “Blake and the Metaphor of Marriage.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 16.1 (1992): 69-93.

—Brewster is convinced that “in the radical literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the proper individual roles in and social function of marriage were recurrent themes” (69), and that these themes were of great interest to Blake. Therefore, he begins with a historical sketch of the Marriage Act of 1753 and its results for gender relations (70-72) before briefly examining Godwin’s and Wollstonecraft’s arguments “for a new role for women in marriage” (74). The article then turns to the motif and metaphor of marriage in Blake’s writings, carefully and succinctly highlighting the critical potential of its use from a Notebook poem through Jerusalem (76-87). In summing up, the author points out that in his writings “Blake was more-progressive than Godwin, Byron, Shelley, Owen, and most of the other male writers who took up male-female relations as a major theme. He was also more radical than Wollstonecraft.” And while Blake “did not present satisfying conclusions for the questions he raised about gender relations,” he was still a “progressive thinker and artist in the way that all of the best progressive thinkers and artists are: he took up the materials that were available to him and molded them into works that imaged possibilities of social relations not yet seen on earth or in heaven” (88).

66. Brewster, Glen E. “‘Out of Nature’: Blake and the French Revolution Debate.” South Atlantic Review 56.4 (1991): 7-22.

—Like Jon Mee in his recent book (see #173,^[e] below), Brewster is here concerned with the role played by the British Revolution controversy of the 1790s in the shaping of Blake’s works. As an investigation in one of the discursive fields that have not been extensively treated in Dangerous Enthusiasm, the present article serves as a useful if minor addendum to Mee’s studies. The article argues that Blake like “the participants in the Revolution debate reexamined ideas of human nature as a philosophical ground for social and political economies, tried to redefine the English character in terms of the necessity for accommodation and change, and argued passionately about the implications of all these for the future.” Therefore, Brewster proposes to “look at the main tropes of the Revolution debate . . . [as] a means of establishing the contemporary ideas available to Blake for his own specific uses in his poetry of social critique” (8). The essay traces the connotations of “nature” and the rhetorics of religious and revolutionary discourse in Richard Price (8-12), Edmund Burke (11-14), and Thomas Paine (14-16), and only then turns to an examination of Blake’s radical reworking of “these metaphorical materials” in The French Revolution (17-20). In passing, Brewster also attempts to provide an answer to the question why the poem was left unfinished, an answer here based “on aesthetic rather than circumstantial grounds” (17).

67. *Brogan, Howard O. “William Blake and the Literary Canon.” CEA Forum 20.3/4 (1990): 10-12.

68. Brophy, James B. “Blake’s Reinterpretation of Comus: Charity Regained.” Milton Quarterly 25 (1991): 157.

—This is the abstract of a paper read at the Fourth International Milton Symposium, which was held at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 4-10 Aug. 1991.

69. Butlin, Martin. “The Dating and Composition of William Blake’s Larger Series of Illustrations to Paradise Lost.” British Art 1740-1820: Essays in Honor of Robert R. Wark. Ed. Guilland Sutherland. San Marino, CA: Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1992. 145-67. $60.00 boards.

—Butlin examines the specific form that Blake’s signature took in works of the period 1806-09 in an attempt to date the smaller and the larger set of the watercolors in illustration of Paradise Lost more precisely than has been begin page 90 | ↑ back to top possible before. At the same time he asks for the extent of the larger series of illustrations, asking “whether in fact the series does consist of just the twelve subjects or whether one should add two further works” (146). See also #91 and 156, below.

70. Butlin, Martin. “Milton, a Poem in 12 [i.e., 2] Books, [London: W. Blake], 1804 [i.e. 1815?]: Rosenwald Collection 1810.” Vision of a Collector: The Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection in the Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1991. 298-99. $285.00 for the limited edition of 300 deluxe copies.

—See the note to #56, above, as #103 and 125, below.

71. Butlin, Martin. “A New Color Print from the Small Book of Designs.” Blake 26 (1992-93): 19-21.

72. Butlin, Martin. “Two Newly Identified Sketches for Thomas Commins’s An Elegy and Further Rediscovered Drawings of the 1780s.” Blake 26 (1992-93): 21-26.

73. Butlin, Martin. William Blake. Tate Gallery Colour Book Series. Rev. ed. London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1990.

—Incorporating “further revisions,” this is a new printing of Butlin’s short introduction to Blake’s work as an artist that was first published in the Tate Gallery’s “Little Book” series in 1966. The booklet was then reprinted numerous times before being issued in a revised edition and the new, not-so-little “Tate Gallery Colour Book” format in 1983. See Bentley 1977, #412, as well as Blake 20 (1986-87): 80 (#55), and the additional information in 23 (1989-90): 165.

74. Carretta, Vincent. “‘Monarchy Is the Popery of Government.’” George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1990. 154-241. $40.00 boards.

—Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America and Europe are here discussed in terms of the satirical iconography of proand anti-monarchy prints such as “The Royal Hercules Destroying the Dragon Python” (fig.96).

75. Caspel, Paul P. J. van. “Blake and Joyce: Strange Syzygy.” Essays on English and American Literature and a Sheaf of Poems. Ed. J. Bakker, J. A. Verleun, and J. v. d. Vriesenaerde. Costerus ns 63. Amsterdam, Neth.: Rodopi, 1987. 101-17.

—Caspel’s study of Blake and Joyce forms part of a festschrift that was “offered to David Wilkinson on the occasion of his retirement from the chair of English literature in the University of Groningen.”

76. *Chang, Eun-Myoung. “William Blake eui si e natanan sigong eui segae wa young-won.” Diss. Yeungnam U [Kyungsan, Korea], 1988.

—The author discusses the categories of time, space, and eternity in Blake’s poetry. See also #192, 224, and 230, below.

77. Chayes, Irene H. “Picture and Page, Reader and Viewer in Blake’s Night Thoughts Illustrations.” Studies in Romanticism 30 (1991): 439-71.

—A brief sketch of the effects that some contemporary developments in literary criticism had on the study of Blake’s pictorial art (notably post-structuralism and reader-response criticism) is followed by Chayes’s own use of “the reader-response approach” in an attempt “to open up this relatively neglected area of Blake studies by exploring the responses that might be called out by a series of his pictures” (441). She argues that in the case of the Night Thoughts watercolors “the viewer is required to be a reader first, but his response to the drawing may take him far from the original text; moreover, after he has experienced the drawing his reader’s understanding of that same text may be drastically altered. . . . Because the literary texts at hand were not his own, Blake evidently felt free to explore the visual possiblities of even minor verbal passages, construct narrative or dramatic situations out of passing suggestions in the text, or contend wordlessly with the philosophical or theological positions taken by his author [i.e., Young]. His own readers [that is, in this case, his viewers] and critics have a similar freedom in dealing with the drawings he produced.” Since this “may provide clues to the more problematic relations of word and image in what has been called Blake’s ‘composite art’” (442), the present article is closely related to the one recorded in the subsequent entry and to a recent study by Michael Tolley (for which see #227, below).

78. Chayes, Irene H. “Words in Pictures. Testing the Boundary: Inscriptions by William Blake.” Word and Image 7 (1991): 85-97.

—Chayes sums up her argument in stating that, although “over the years much has been written about Milton and Jerusalem especially, almost always the visual and verbal relations both embody have been a concern only when they could be subordinated to his [Blake’s] privileged ‘prophetic’ texts.” Therefore, she has here “tried to show at least what Blake’s words of one particular kind can do when they are subordinated to his pictures” (96). In order to substantiate this argument, Irene Chayes has studied “selections from a special class of Blake’s inscriptions, those that are not merely on or about his pictures but are situated within them” (85). She has looked closely at “Pictures of Writing” in the series of watercolors illustrating Young and Gray, and at the “mock hieroglyphs” (86) in Urizen, then turned to “Labelling Images” in a second, and to “Mottoes and Mirror Writing” in a third section of her article. Here, most of “the inscriptions considered [are] from . . . Jerusalem,” and one learns how “both the verbal inscriptions and the visual images around them may be affected, drawn from one direction or the other to test the boundary that invisibly separates them as distinct modes of art” (85). With the inscriptions that Blake has introduced into some of the designs for Milton and Jerusalem, in their “Contrariety and Ambiguity” (90), Chayes finds the poet-artist starting out from somewhere far “on the verbal side,” and then gradually leading towards “the boundary between the visual and the verbal” and sometimes even beyond, where the written inscription is “attracted to the other side, the realm of purely visual images” (87). In a detail from the bottom of Jerusalem 72 the author recognizes “the culmination of the drive to cross the visual-verbal boundary” (96). Words in this instance are said to act “as pictures” in a process of “assimilation” which transcends both of the two distinct modes of art that Blake had started out from. For a related examination of Blake’s purpose in introducing reversed writing into his designs for Jerusalem see the respective note on 128-29 of Paley’s new edition of the illuminated poem (#9, above), and for an article on a closely related subject see Lussier’s contribution to the Inscriptions in Painting anthology (#165, below).

78A. Christensen, Inger. “Der Schatten der Wahrheit: William Blakes ‘Newton.’” Trans. Hanns Grössel. Neue Zücher Zeitung 18 Sept. 1992, intl. ed.: 43.

79. Cieszkowski, Krzysztof Z. “The Resistible Rise of the Exhibition Catalogue.” I Cataloghi delle esposizioni: Atti del terzo Convegno europeo delle Biblioteche d’Arte (IFLA), Firenze, 2-5 Novembre 1988. Ed. Giovanna Lazzi, et al. Fiesole, nr. Florence, It.: Casalini Libri, 1989. 1-9.

—With the present paper the author addressed an audience made up primarily of fine art librarians on the occasion of the third “Convegno europeo delle Biblioteche d’Arte.” Having referred to earlier definitions of the genre (1-2), Cieszkowski turns to the “history of the development of the exhibition catalogue,” and stresses the generic function of such publications as “a manifesto, a statement of intent or ideology, or a claim to consideration beyond the temporal and local parameters governing the exhibition” itself (2). As proof for this thesis, the author offers a brief historical analysis of the catalogues issued on the occasion of the one-man exhibitions that were held by Nathaniel Hone in 1775 (3-4), by William Blake in 1809 (4-6), and by Benjamin Robert Haydon in 1846 (6-7). Interestingly, all three were of course “contra-Reynolds-and-the-Academy” publications, and all three accompanied exhibitions that failed to realize the artists’ hopes for public recognition. While not claiming “that these three examples are either very typical or particularly indicative of the range of exhibitions and their related publications,” Cieszkowski urges his fellow librarians to remember “the hopes and aspirations of individuals” and “the human sensibilities that have engendered something new, original and eloquent, often at a cost we are never asked to pay” (7).

80. Clark, David L. “How to Do Things with Shakespeare: Illustrative Theory and Practice in Blake’s Pity.” The Mind in Creation: Essays on English Romantic Literature in Honour of Ross G. Woodman. Ed. J. Douglas Kneale. Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1992. 106-33, 167-73.

—This contribution to the Woodman festschrift offers a detailed analysis of Blake’s large colorprint “Pity” and the illustration to a Second Folio Edition of Shakespeare, “As if an Angel Dropped Down from the Clouds” (Butlin 1981, #310 and 547[6]).

81. Clark, Lorraine. Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Spectre of Dialectic. Cambridge, Cambs.: Cambridge UP, 1991. $49.95 boards.

—The present study of romantic irony in Blake and Kierkegaard is based on the author’s 1987 dissertation, previously listed in Blake 22 (1988-89): 44 (#52). This may explain why the aim of “the analogy with Kierkegaard” described by the book is “to suggest directions for situating Blake relative to the begin page 91 | ↑ back to top critical discourses he has thus far so successfully resisted” (22), i.e., the discourses of “deconstructive and poststructuralist criticism” (1). Whether or not such a statement still holds true in 1991, Clark here concentrates on the late prophecies and argues, in brief, “that in his new focus on the struggle of Los and the Spectre in The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem, Blake turns from a Hegelian ‘both-and’ dialectic of Orc and Urizen in his early works to something very like a Kierkegaardian ‘either/or’” (2). An overview of the contents of Clark’s five chapters and her conclusion will be found on pages 18-19.

82. Cohen, Michael. “Addison, Blake, Coram, and the London Foundling Hospital: Rhetoric as Philanthropy and Art.” Centennial Review 34 (1990): 540-66.

—Cohen starts out by drawing attention to “Addison’s nine paragraphs on the subject of charity children” in the Guardian, their putative impact on Blake and their transformation “into the ‘Holy Thursday’ poem for Songs of Innocence” (541). He then turns to Thomas Coram and the London Foundling Hospital which, soon after its institution in 1739, “became an illustration of a new alliance in English cultural life—a sisterhood of Art and Charity” (542) and then developed into “London’s first public gallery and its only public gallery for the first few decades of its existence” (546). The facts about Coram’s friendship with Hogarth and their “partnership . . . in philanthropy and art” (550) are summarized. Cohen also describes the peculiar function which the exhibition of paintings that had been presented to the Foundling Hospital had for the eighteenth- and nineteenth century artists who contributed to the rapidly growing collection. Several of the paintings are then treated in some detail, with special emphasis on the works by Emma Brownlow King (551-64). Thus, the article certainly makes a welcome illustrated introduction to an important collection of British paintings that has been described in detail by the late Benedict Nicolson as the “treasures” of the Foundling Hospital. It offers, however, precious little information that might justify the inclusion of Blake’s name in its title.

83. Colaiacomo, Paola. “Blake Agonistes.” L’Esilio romantico: Forme di un conflitto. Ed. Joseph Cheyne and Lilla Maria Crisafulli Jones. Biblioteca di Studi Inglesi 52. Bari, It.: Adriatica, 1990. 49-61. Lit. 45000 paper.

—Roland Barthes, Paul De Man, Ernst Gombrich, Mario Praz, and Aby Warburg supplied the theoretical backbone for this “discorso . . .divagante” (49). For her case study in Blakean iconology and symbolism Colaiacomo has chosen The Book of Thel. Instead of relying on the Sanesi edition of Blake’s Opere (see Blake 22 [1988-89]: 40 [#10]; 23 [1989-90]: 165),^[e] she is also offering some new translations of her own (see 53n3).

84. Colaiacomo, Paola, and Stefania D’Ottavi. “Il mito nella poesia di Blake: Produzione e distruzione.” Mitologie della ragione. Ed. Michele Cometa. Pordenone, It.: Studio Tesi, 1989. Lit. 40000.

—As is explained in the headnote to this joint article (201), Colaiacomo contributed the section on Blake’s ideology of the outline, entitled “Pensieri sull’Outline,” while D’Ottavi is responsible for the examination of the paradox of knowledge in the myth of Urizen, “Il paradosso della conoscenza nel mito di Urizen” (177-203). The latter concentrates as a matter of course on the theme of the collapse of rationalism and language in The Book of Urizen, and the former presents an account of Blake’s theory of outline in philosophical perspective.

85. *Cope, Kevin L. Compendious Conversation: The Method of Dialogue in the Early Enlightenment. Anglo-amerikanische Studien 4. Berne, Switz.: Lang, 1992. DM118.00 boards.

—Despite the book’s title, this volume is reported to contain some substantial discussion of Blakean dialogue.

86. Cox, Philip. “Blake, Marvell, and Milton: A Possible Source for a Proverb of Hell.” Notes and Queries ns 38 (1991): 292-93.

—“Bring out number weight & measure in a year of dearth.” Cox notes that this proverb “echoes the closing couplet of Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘On Mr Milton’s “Paradise Lost’”: ‘Thy verse created like thy theme sublime,/In number, weight, and measure, needs not rhyme.’” He then compares it with a verse in the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon and suggests that on account of the indirect allusion to Paradise Lost, “the proverb can be seen to possess a more positive, if still ambivalent, message” (293) than is usually attributed to it. This argument is to be buttressed in a sequel to the present article which will probably be published in the March 1993 issue of the same journal.

87. Cox, Stephen. Love and Logic: The Evolution of Blake’s Thought. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1992. $37.50 boards.

—This was the very last entry to be added to the present checklist, and I cannot supply more than a few hints about the impressive scope of this new monograph. “The subject of this book is William Blake’s simultaneous evolution of a theory of love and a practice of logic.” In an examination of all of the poet’s “prophetic” writings, Cox argues that Blake’s vision, “including his vision of love, is inseparable from his logic. Logic is vision’s brain and bone—and its heart, too” (1). Taking his cue from an article by Peter Thorslev published in 1971 (see vii), and effectively criticizing earlier “expositors of Blake” (1), the author demonstrates the close relationship between the concepts of love and logic in more than Blake’s philosophical and aesthetic ideas (see, e.g., 21-25 or 175-81). Rather, he offers extensive interpretations of the “Visionary Logic” that he finds at work in the Marriage (69-90) and Visions (113-25), in America and Europe (127-43), in Urizen (145-65) and in the three shorter of the Lambeth Books (158-64). Cox then turns to “The Ruins of The Zoas,” and to the theme of “Love among the[se] Ruins” (167-203), before examining Milton and Jerusalem in detail (205-73). Presenting the mirror-image of the introductory chapter, and by rehabilitating Henry Crabb Robinson as someone who “had precisely the qualifications one could wish for in a reporter of Blake’s words” (275), the book’s concluding chapter describes Blake as “The Logical Visionary” (275-80), one in whom “the love of God” was “a love that uses logic to explore the many and complicated ways of vision’s approach to Him” (280).

88. Crafton, Lisa Plummer. “The Strange Altering Eye: Patterns of Creative Perception in Wordsworth’s and Blake’s Lyrics.” Dissertation Abstracts International 52 (1991-92): 926A. U of Tennessee, 1990.

—“The general aims” of this study of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads and of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience “are to reveal the powerful similarities . . . in their heuristic intention, affective form, and rhetorical effect. Both Wordsworth and Blake structure their lyrics to effect an imaginative change in their readers.” And it is to this effect, according to Crafton, that “Blake evokes suspension between companion poems of Innocence/Experience, poems of dialogue within Experience, and rhetorically dialogic forces at work within the single lyric, typified by ‘London.’” There is nothing to be learned from this abstract concerning the relationship between this dissertation and earlier publications on the same subject such as the book by Heather Glen (see Blake 18 [1984-85]: 103 [#54]). Yet if there appears to be little gain, there also is no loss to be expected from such a new demonstration that Blake and Wordsworth, like other poets before and since, have “carefully shaped . . . the affective structures” inherent in their writings. See also #44, above, and #153, below.

89. Crisman, William C. [recte: Crisman, William]. “Blake’s ‘The Crystal Cabinet’ as a Reworking of Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence.” English Language Notes 29.1 (1991): 52-59.

—That the Spenserian stanzas of The Castle of Indolence and Blake’s “The Crystal Cabinet” (from the Pickering Manuscript) have “generally similar actions is clear.” And if Blake “were to give ‘a wry look’ at a Thomson poem, it might seem most naturally directed at the often moralistic, eighteenth-century Spenserian narrative” (52). The author first points out numerous similarities in the plot of both works, in their setting, in the “central symbol of the crystal device” (53), and in the characters depicted by both poets, concluding that “Thomson’s poem takes the form ‘happy-innocent-to-be-saved,’ whereas Blake’s closely parallel poem takes the form ‘happy-innocent-to-fallen.’” Crisman, however, remains well aware of the problems encountered “with such a comparison.” “Clichés are at hand: Blake has ironically reversed Thomson’s story, read it ‘demonically,’ ‘subverted’ it; the early Romantic has ‘re-read’ the earlier eighteenth-century allegory.” It is important then to stress that the author succeeds in demonstrating that what “has happened in fact is much more interesting” than that. “Blake has not so much ironically re-read Thomson as he has drawn out traits already latent in Thomson’s narrative” (55). From Crisman’s own re-reading of Thomson’s Indolence, it becomes clear that the “narrative form of the trapped innocent who becomes the grasper, the rape victim who allies with a rapist is already present in Thomson.” Therefore, all Blake had to do in his “reworking” was “to draw out Thomson’s self-ironic form from its moralistic tendencies and present it pure,” thus “perfecting an begin page 92 | ↑ back to top eighteenth-century anti-allegorical mode already well begun before ‘The Crystal Cabinet’” (58). Readers ought to note that the false middle initial in William Crisman’s name has been inserted by ELNs printer.

90. *Daniels, Molly A. The Prophetic Novel. American University Studies, 4th ser.: English Language and Literature 166. New York, NY: Lang, 1991. $34.95 boards.

—Not seen, but reported to contain substantial sections on Blake’s writings.

91. Davies, J. M. Q. “Blake’s Paradise Lost Designs Reconsidered.” Imagining Romanticism: Essays on English and Australian Romanticism. Ed. Deirdre Coleman and Peter Otto. Locust Hill Literary Studies 10. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill P, 1992. 143-81. $35.00 boards.

—This new collection of essays originated in a “conference on Romanticism and the Imagination, held at the University of Melbourne in 1989” (vii). Quite obviously, the organizers and editors assign to “Blake’s non-Coleridgean art” (xi) a major role where it comes to an understanding of the British romantic imagination. No less than three out of the 14 contributions are explicitly concerned with Blake’s works (see also #175 and 227, below). Davies’s well-illustrated article (see figs. 1-14) is in marked contrast with Tolley’s contribution to the same anthology. He attempts to demonstrate “that the interplay between figures, gestures and motifs in these designs [for Milton’s Paradise Lost] is more intricately orchestrated into a sequential narrative than has been recognized, and that this narrative presents not Milton’s but Blake’s own devil’s party version of the Fall.” Davies criticizes previous interpretations of the two series of watercolor designs which are here said to “have tended to encourage a ‘vertical’ movement of our imagination between poem and designs, while often missing iconographic continuities and contrasts which, when the designs are read ‘horizontally’ as internally coherent sequences, can reveal quite different emphases” (143). The author’s forthcoming book on Blake’s Milton Designs: The Dynamics of Meaning (to be published in Dec. 1992 as “Locust Hill Literary Studies 7”) is probably based on the same assumptions and is to contain a longer version of the present paper. For related studies of Blake’s series of Milton watercolors see #69, above, and 156, below. In Imagining Romanticism, Blake is also discussed by John Beer in a paper asking “Is the Romantic Imagination Our Imagination?” (25-48, see 27-29 and passim). Nelson Hilton contributes an essay on “Keats, Teats, and the Fane of Poesy” (49-72) to this collection, which figures as a welcome addition to the holdings of any major research library.

92. De Luca, Vincent Arthur. Words of Eternity: Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991. $32.50 boards.

—To an art historian such as Anthony Blunt there could be no question that “in order to understand Blake’s position something must be said about [the sublime and] its use in connection with the visual arts” (The Art of William Blake [New York, NY: Columbia UP, 1959] 13). This postulate, however, has with some exceptions, scarcely affected the literary criticism of Blake’s writings. Now, De Luca finally stresses that despite “the poet’s stated hostility to Edmund Burke . . . Blake’s involvement with sublimity is . . . something engaging his deeper aesthetic and intellectual concerns.” His book therefore “aims to demonstrate that Blake’s relation to the sublime is not superficial but profound; it argues that traditions of the sublime extant in his time play a major influential role in his aesthetics, the style and organization of his chief poetical works, and indeed, his outlook on the world” (3). But it is the treatment of those “larger questions” that the exploration of Blake’s response to the theory of the sublime leads to, which makes Words of Eternity a most important and hopefully influential study: “how, for example, does the concept of sublimity help to explain and justify the difficulties that Blake’s writings continue to pose? How might it prove an intelligibly unified frame of reference for certain features of the writings that are usually considered separately—for example, odd strategies of style and narrative construction, special patterns of imagery and symbolism, or insistent displays of arcane learning? What, finally, can Blake’s understanding and use of the sublime tell us of his place in the larger discourse of eighteenth-century and Romantic aesthetics?” (3-4). De Luca argues that “sublimity never manifests itself in Blake’s writings as an amorphous body of vague concepts and conventional terms, but rather resolves itself into two strongly delineated and differentiated sublimes.” It is the “interplay of these two modes of sublimity” that constitutes the “running motif of this book”; it links “the subjects of the work’s three main divisions,” and it supplies author and reader with “three related perspectives: theoretical, stylistic, and thematic. The first section of the book, ‘Theory’ [see chapter 1, 15-52], introduces some key terms of Blake’s diction, and then deals specifically with his explicit opinions on the sublime.” It locates the poet’s original contribution to the concept by “developing a sublime of determinate signifiers in which the text itself functions as the sublime object.” The following section, “Style: Sublime Effects” (see chapters 2-4, 55-142), “turns to Blake’s poetry itself and shows how the interplay of the two sublime modes reconstitutes itself on the stylistic level, giving rise to what I call a ‘bardic’ style and an ‘ironic’ style.” Here De Luca exemplifies how the latter of the two “tends . . . to arrest narrative and to collapse temporality into a hard-edged ‘now’ of intellectual intensity.” In the third part of the book, “Worldview: Imagery of Sublime Settings” (see chapters 5-7, 145-224), “the juncture of Blake’s specific stylistic gestures, such as his choice of imagery, with his larger thematic interests” (6) is examined, and it is suggested that, if “seen as displacements of thinking in the sublime mode,” “an imaginative unity” (7) can be perceived in “certain strands of thought that attracted Blake’s interest and are reflected in his poetic settings—such as eighteenth-century natural philosophy, the speculations of mythographers . . ., and various kinds of hermetic or quasi-Kabbalistic traditions promoting a hieroglyphic conception of reality” (6-7). Such an agenda may “suggest that this study is . . . an old-fashioned survey of sources and analogues or an intellectually neutral foray into the history of ideas.” And yet, in the writing of this book the author was well aware that he was employed on “a critical reconstruction,” “that the sublime ideology is a historically situated phenomenon like any other and that, as a rampantly idealizing mode, it has rendered itself a particularly inviting target of critique by various demystifying systems of present-day analysis. In what is, however, the first extensive study of Blake’s connections with the sublime tradition . . . a more conservative approach seems to me advisable—one in which the parties to be introduced to one another are presented in terms at least recognizable to themselves” (9). At the end of the book and the beginning of its epilogue (225-31), De Luca finds himself and his readers “on the verge of paradox . . . there is, first, a privileging of the constructed artifact over biological vitality in what is claimed to be the genuine human center of the poet’s vision, and second, more than a touch of solipsism in the claimed universality of that vision.” While he has no hope for resolving these paradoxes, “since Blake never resolved them himself,” they help the author to address two questions; the first of these asks for the place of “Blake’s sublime poetics, its premises and applications . . . in the larger framework of the eighteenth-century and Romantic sublime,” the second, “even less likely to admit a definitive answer, yet not to be avoided,” substitutes critical for historical interests and asks “what, after all, is such a sublime poetics good for?” (225)—not a bad question to mark the end of what seems to me to be a most rewarding book. Moreover, it proves to be a particularly fascinating experience to study De Luca’s reconstruction of the discursive field of the Poetics of the Sublime in the context of the Culture of Radicalism that is unearthed in Mee’s 1992 publication (see #173, below).

93. Den Otter, A. G. “The Question and The Book of Thel.” Studies in Romanticism 30 (1991): 633-55.

—Den Otter examines “Thel’s Motto” in detail, and the article begins with the observation that the four lines are “not really a motto” at all (633), and that the “very questioning nature of ‘Thel’s Motto’ undermines the motto structure” (634). Rather than “one aphorism of truth,” this motto is yielding “many variant possibilities.” Therefore, “this verse of questions” is here said to act as “an agent of liberating revolution, opening and threatening to expand the seemingly contained dimensions of future promise. Precisely because of its interrogation marks, the motto allows Thel her mark of exclamation (her shriek), breaking the ‘proper’ code of conduct with a rash supplement of new energy” (655). Den Otter repeatedly asks: “Are Thel’s questions . . . really so obnoxious that they deserve to be rebuffed?” (640). The answers in turn serve to question the earlier critical consensus concerning the “failure” of the heroine, so that a more positive view of Thel’s role emerges from the article. This revision is soon to be supplemented by Helen Bruder’s study of the same poem. For an earlier and related “Barthesian” begin page 93 | ↑ back to top reading of Thel by Den Otter see Blake 25 (1991-92): 18 (#78).

94. Dörrbecker, D. W. Konvention und Innovation: Eigenes und Entliehenes in der Bildform bei William Blake und in der britischen Knust seiner Zeit. Berlin, Ger.: Wasmuth, 1992. DM89.00 boards.

—Running to 400-odd pages, this may well be no more than a large book with a pretty small idea. If it is true, as was the conviction of Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, that “no one fails to recognize a Blake,” then it oughtto be possible to describe the functioning of those forms and visual formulas which determine the unity of the artist’s personal style. Therefore, the present study scarcely ever addresses for their own sake those questions that are concerned with the “meaning” or content of a given motif or a design. Rather, it asks for the iconography of style and forms, for Blake’s strategies in the choice of his materials and working processes, for the common denominator in his compositional treatment of the picture plane, his outline and shading techniques, his coloring, and so on. “Truth has bounds,” Blake once said. “Error none.” This book aspires to establish not “Truth,” but those “bounds” that frame the expressive use of visual language in Blake. In order to distinguish his personal style from period style, its “original,” innovative and characteristic components from the visual conventions and idioms that similarly permeate the works of his contemporaries, the elements of his pictorial vocabulary and syntax are gauged in near-tedious comparisons with the handling of compositional devices by artists such as Romney and West, Mortimer and Barry, Fuseli, Kauffmann and Flaxman, and many more. The book argues that these close comparisons are called for as a means to define the elements that constitute Blake’s personal and easily recognizable style. And it claims that only with such a demarcation between personal and period style firmly established, a critical examination of Blake’s visual vocabulary and grammar can hope to discover more about the individual meaning attached by the artist to the forms, motifs, and often traditional iconography he employed. It is for others, not for the present writer (who happens to be the author of the book), to decide whether such a consciously old-fashioned and/or neo-formalist attempt to supply some basic research for an improved understanding of Blake’s productions as a visual artist was worth the effort. There is no proper index, but a very detailed list of contents (vii-xii) and a catalogue of the works discussed (397-409). Konvention und Innovation is based on the author’s dissertation of 1985, for which see Blake 20 (1986-87): 80 (#64).

95. D’Ottavi, Stefania. “Frye e Blake.” Ritratto di Northrop Frye. Ed. Agostino Lombardo. Rome, It.: Bulzoni, 1989. 217-24.

—The present essay originated in a paper read to the audience of an international conference that was held in Rome in June 1989. It briefly describes Frye’s discovery of “un mondo di archetipi” in Blake (218), the consequences of that discovery for Frye’s own Anatomy of Criticism (221-23) and for subsequent developments in literary criticism (223-24) that are here represented by Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence and Agon (224). See also #84, above.

96. Downes, Margaret J. “Benediction of Metaphor at Colonus: William Blake and the Vision of the Ancients.” Colby Quarterly 27 (1991): 174-83.

—Blake admires the “capacity for inspiration” in the works “of the ancient Greeks,” though “he rebukes them for perverting that divine quality in the service of war or tyranny, whether political or mental.” In this context, Downes asks whether there is “any one work which he [Blake] grants, or would grant, more wholehearted praise” (174; my emphasis). And she sums up her answer to this question by reference to “the last play of Sophocles,” which is said to resemble strikingly “the thought and spirit of William Blake’s poetry, particularly his later prophecies. The Oedipus at Colonus is peculiar and difficult; . . . Studying it together with Blake’s . . . Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, illuminates both works and helps us understand Blake’s admiration of the Greeks’ vision. . . . The two works’ substantial similarities, particularly those concerning the metaphysics of love and blessing, help clarify the essence of each author’s intent and genius in light of the convictions and art of the other” (174-75).

97. *Draper, Michael. “Wells, Blake and the Prophetic Vision.” Wellsian: The Journal of the H. G. Wells Society 9 (1986): 12-17.

98. *Edwards, P. “An African Literary Source for Blake’s ‘Little Black Boy’?” Research in African Literatures 21 (1990): 179-81.

99. Engel, Manfred. “Neue Mythologie in der deutschen und englischen Frühromantik: William Blakes The Marriage of Heaven and Hell und Novalis’ Klingsohr-Märchen.” Arcadia 26 (1991): 225-45.

—This essay is as much concerned with problems of comparative method as it is with the works that are mentioned in its subtitle. Like Wellek or Mason among earlier critics, Engel is not only interested in possible similarities between English and German romanticism, but wants to preserve their contrasts as well. With the “Neue Mythologie” he employs a concept that has been of major importance to recent studies of German romanticism (226-27), and he proposes that such an interest in the creation of a new mythology might usefully operate as one of the criteria which allow for the historical definition of European romanticism in general. The comparison of Blake’s Marriage with Novalis’s “Klingsohr” tale (from Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 1802) tests the validity of such a working hypothesis (227). Rather than suggesting any “direct” influence of one of the two writers on the other, the article attempts to tap some of the ideological currents that proved to be fertile for both Novalis and Blake. Therefore, the first part of Engel’s study presents an introduction to eighteenth-century mythography and its impact on romantic poetry (228-31; see also #173, below); this is followed by two “interpretative sketches” (231) of Blake’s illuminated book (231-33) and Novalis’s tale (233-35). Next, Engel charts the epistemological concerns, the ideas pertaining to “ancient mythology,” and the critique of the mimetical function of art and poetry that were shared by both authors (235-40). The concluding section of the paper (240-45) describes the “Klingsohr” tale and the Marriage as crucial examples for the process of romantic mythmaking. Blake and Novalis have been variously yoked together in the past, most recently in books by Scholz and Hanke (see Blake 13 [1979-80]: 97; 17 [1983-84]: 66 [#79]). Engel makes no reference to these comparative studies and, with the “new mythology,” wisely addresses a tertium comparationis as a mediator between the works he discusses. The strengths of Engel’s treatment may well have to do with his awareness of the fact that any “direct comparison between William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell and the Klingsohr tale from Novalis’s Ofterdingen would yield more disparities^[e] than similarities; the divergencies in genre, poetics, and the system of ideological preconditions are more than evident” (231; my trans.).

100. Erdman, David V. Blake: Prophet Against Empire. New York, NY: Dover Publications, 1991. $14.95 paper.

—As stated on the verso of the book’s title page, and except for the shortened title, this is “an unabridged republication of the third [revised] edition (1977).” With this new printing by a new publisher a truly ground-breaking study and a truly standard work of the literature on Blake returns to the classroom. Since Erdman’s historical investigation definitely belongs with that handful of books on Blake that do not seem to age at all, and that remain a constant source of inspiration as much as of information on the poet’s life and work, the new printing is welcome indeed. Erdman’s “historical approach” and the “new” historicism in the interpretation of English romantic literature are not to be confused, but they are also anything but incompatible (see the introduction to #173, below). Therefore, this new printing may well become everybody’s Erdman for the 1990s. The book is still to be strongly recommended to any serious student of Blake. The price of the reprint may at first seem a little high if it is compared with the $3.95 that one was asked to pay for a paperback copy of the second edition from Anchor Books (1969), or the $5.95 one paid for the Princeton UP paper-back of the third edition (1977). And yet one only needs to look at some of the other prices cited in the present checklist to feel that the Dover republication of the classic account of Blake’s “Interpretation of the History of His Own Times” (the earlier subtitle of the book) is still the best value for money that one can hope for these days. Dover Publications has also reissued Erdman’s The Illuminated Blake, priced at $22.95.

101. Essick, Robert N. “Blake in the Marketplace, 1990.” Blake 24 (1990-91): 116-41.

—Added to the 1990 marketplace report is an “Appendix” with “New Information on Blake’s Engravings” (141) which updates the author’s catalogues of Blake’s separate plates and his commercial book illustrations. See #24, above, as well as the subsequent entry.

102. Essick, Robert N. “Blake in the Marketplace, 1991.” Blake 25 (1991-92): 144-67.

—Included here is an appendix with “New Information on Blake’s Engravings” (164-67), supplying “substantive additions or corrections” (164) to Essick’s standard catalogues of Blake’s separate plates and commercial book illustrations. See #24, above, and the preceding entry.

103. Essick, Robert N. “The Book of Urizen, Lambeth: Printed by Will Blake, 1794 [i.e., 1815]: Rosenwald Collection 1807.” Vision of a Collector: The Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection in the Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1991. 293-95. $285.00 for the limited edition of 300 deluxe copies.

—See the note to #56, above, as well as #70, above, and #125, below.

104. Essick, Robert N. “A Relief Etching of Blake’s Virgil Illustrations.” Blake 25 (1991-92): 117-27.

105. Essick, Robert N. William Blake, Adam’s Tongue, and the Uses of Specialization. Fortieth Annual Faculty Research Lecture. Riverside, CA: printed for the Academic Senate of the University of California at Riverside, 1991.

—This small pamphlet contains the text of (and notes for) the public lecture which on 4 Apr. 1991 was presented by the “1991 Faculty Research Lecturer” at the University of California, Riverside. Although Essick here returns “to some work on the English poet-artist William Blake and historical linguistics” that he did “a few years ago,” his “excursion into four of Blake’s paintings and what they tell us about language” is here brought to bear upon more general issues “of specialized research in the humanities.” Therefore, part of the paper is a revised summary of the introductory chapter to the author’s book on William Blake and the Language of Adam, while its final section is made up of “some reflections on how such [specialized] work relates to larger matters of current concern to us all” (1). In summing up the methodological implications of his own procedure in the interpretation of “Adam Naming the Beasts,” the portrait of Blake from his own collection, Blake’s frontispiece to Designs to a Series of Ballads (1802), “Eve Naming (or, Listening to) the Birds,” “The Virgin and Child in Egypt,” and “Christ Blessing,” Essick emphasizes his belief “that specialized research in the humanities can contribute, through publication and teaching, to the development of two valuable and inter-related ways of thinking that help the self realize, perhaps even escape from, some of its own limitations. Methodological consciousness gives us the ability to multiply the perspectival foundations of the self and become aware of our own mental operations. Such self-reflexivity is a form of self alienation . . . ., but such activities are in themselves part of what makes us human and lie at the heart of research in the humanities” (14).

106. Essick, Robert N. “William Blake and John Marsh.” Blake 25 (1991-92): 70-74.

107. Essick, Robert N. “William Blake, Thomas Paine, and Biblical Revolution.” Studies in Romanticism 30 (1991): 189-212.

—This is a provocative contribution to the historically oriented criticism of Blake’s writings. Its “purpose . . . is to investigate how . . . four issues—politics, science, the Bible, and linguistics—collide and intermingle in Blake’s work during the revolutionary decade of the 1790s” (189). Essick reexamines these issues in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and The [First] Book of Urizen where, and this may alarm partisans of the new historicism, he finds “a critique of liberal ideology broader and deeper than Burke’s Reflections” (199). Essick re-contextualizes Blake’s portrayal of Urizen “back into the ideological debates of the 1790s in which the philosophy of mind and nature had been fully politicized” (200) and stresses the poet’s ironical and critical treatment of doctrines that were central to the writings of the liberal members of the Johnson circle such as Paine, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft. Contrary to received opinion, Blake here emerges not so much as an artist-member of that circle, but as its “prophetic” critic. A wealth of historical material—for example, an examination of “the contemporary political dimensions of applied mathematics” (204) as illustrated in the political career and writings of Condorcet—is here employed to lend weight to the author’s provocative revision of some of “the more resilient commonplaces of modern Blake scholarship” (200). Future scholarly interpretations of Urizen and the Marriage will necessarily have to take into account the arguments presented in this article and will have to come to grips with a revised view of Blake’s position that emerges here: “Blake tried to reclaim for his own time that combination of radical politics and apocalyptic Christianity which had motivated England’s revolutionaries of the previous century. But in the 1790s, this proved an inherently unstable compound. The Johnson circle was at once too secular in its liberalism and not radical enough in its revolutionism to satisfy Blake” (211-12). This article ought to be studied side by side with Mee’s Dangerous Enthusiasm (#173, below). See also #66, 150, 162, 174, especially 220, and 319, below.

108. Essick, Robert N. “William Blake’s ‘Female Will’ and Its Biographical Context.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 31 (1991): 615-30.

—“In this essay,” Essick’s focus is “on Blake’s relationships with women friends and rivals, including the engraver Caroline Watson.” He starts with “the critical history of gender-related themes in Blake’s art” before turning to an examination of “how Blake’s interactions with [such female friends and rivals] influenced his poetic representation of women” (615). The issue of patriarchal sexism is reviewed in readings of the Visions of the Daughters of Albion before the author considers “some of the women Blake knew” in order to “illuminate the complex interconnections between his life and art” (617). Catherine Blake is seen as associated with her husband’s idea of “pity” (618), and her “role within Blake’s professional activities as an artist and printmaker” as the “clean hand” for managing the paper and as a colorist is examined. Essick observes, most interestingly I think, that this “division of labor parallels, and may even have helped motivate, Blake’s general aesthetic theories on the superiority of line over color. . . . The language Blake deploys to express the subordination of color to line sometimes implies the same gender divisions determining artistic activities in the Blake household” (619). Next, the article briefly refers to some of the “intertextual relations” of the works of Blake and Wollstonecraft (620), and then follows this up with an examination of the poet-artist’s relationships with Elizabeth Butts (620-22) and with his female rival, the engraver Caroline Watson (622-25). In the competition with Watson for the favor of his patron, “Blake had to feminize his own graphic techniques. To be replaced by a woman in his role as Hayley’s principal engraver, and then to write a letter to Hayley submissively accepting this ‘exchange,’ could only have increased Blake’s anxieties about his own masculinity. Such a compound of feminization and rejection frequently expresses itself through an attack on women as a jealous or threatening enemy and an attempt to negate the feminine aspects of the self. This syndrome can account for the characterization of females and their sexuality in Milton and Jerusalem” (626). If any further proof is called for, then this article shows that at present no other scholar is better qualified than Essick to fuse his intimate knowledge of Blake’s writings, his art, the cultural (gender-related, social, political, philosophical, etc.) history of his times, and his grasp on every aspect of Blake’s biography in the writing of the “standard life” that, most recently, James King has sadly failed to produce (see #147, below).

109. Esterhammer, Angela. “Historicizing Blake’ at Strawberry Hill.” Wordsworth Circle 22 (1991): 135-36.

—Esterhammer reports on a conference organized by Steve Clark and David Worrall, “timed so as to take advantage of new developments in historical scholarship” (135), which took place at St. Mary’s College, Twickenham, Mddx. on 5-7 September 1990. See also Blake 25 (1991-92): 26 (#144).

110. Fabian, Bernhard. “William Blake (1757-1827).” Die englische Literatur. Vol. 2: “Autoren.” Ed. Bernhard Fabian. Munich, Ger.: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991. 35-39. DM22.80 paper.

—A brief introduction, dictionary style, which apparently is addressed to German undergraduates who are studying English literature.

111. Finch, G. J. “Blake and Civilization.” English 40 (1991): 193-203.

112. Fischer, Peter. “Die Mysterien des William Blake: Druckgraphik in New Yorker Versteigerungen.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 25 May 1991: 31.

—A note on Sotheby’s sale of some recently rediscovered pulls from Blake’s separate plates at New York on 9-11 May 1991; see also #52, above, and #185, below.

113. Freed, Eugenie R. “‘Sun-Clad Chastity’ and Blake’s ‘Maiden Queens’: Comus, Thel, and ‘The Angel.’” Blake 25 (1991-92): 104-16.

114. Freeman, Kathryn Sue. “The Four Zoas. Apocalypse According to Blake’s Sleeper.” begin page 95 | ↑ back to top Dissertation Abstracts International 51 (1990-91): 2752A. Yale U, 1990.

—“Blake’s The Four Zoas uses elements of quest romance and dream vision to represent the human mind as the dream of an undifferentiated Consciousness. The poem’s teleology mirrors its central paradox that vision, a state outside of time, is the goal toward which history moves.” Following an account of “the problem of causality” in Blake’s epic, a retrograde reading of Vala, or The Four Zoas furnishes Freeman’s study with, amongst others, these results: “Seen from the perspective of Night the Ninth whose revelations form a complex interplay with moments in the preceding Nights, the fallen state is regarded through gestures and patterns of behavior rather than [as?] an act in which a prior state of innocence is lost. The relation between the narrator, the story-tellers, and the authorial voice is explored retrospectively through the collective epiphany of Night the Ninth. Next, fictions of the Fall and prophecies of the apocalypse as told by various characters are contrasted to the series of revelations in Night the Ninth.” The author then examines “the interplay between the vortex that describes the fallen state as chaotic movement leading to a fearful empty center, and the redeemed version of centricity in which the chaos of the poem’s fallen state leads to the unbinding of the dualistic mind,” finding “the pivotal moment of the interplay” in the two versions of Night the Seventh. For other recently published critical examinations of Vala, or The Four Zoas see #39-41, above, as well as #191 and 211, below.

115. Furman, Wendy. “‘With Dreadful Faces Throng’d and Fiery Arms’: Apocalyptic ‘Synchronisme’ in Three Illustrations of Paradise Lost.” Coranto 25 (1990): 20-33.

—Furman investigates the apocalyptic imagery of three Miltonic illustrations. An introductory sketch of the history of puritan “apocalypticism of Milton’s time” (20) and of the symbolical “system of ‘synchronisms’” in Milton’s poetry (22) is followed by a brief explication of Michael’s Revelation in Paradise Lost (22-24). The author then examines the pictorial treatment of this “apocalyptic frame” (25) in three illustrations to Milton’s expulsion scene (25-31 and figs. 1-3): the Boston version of Blake’s watercolor designs for Paradise Lost, Carlotta Petrina’s illustration for the 1936 Limited Editions Club printing of the same poem, and Mary Groom’s white-line design for the Paradise Lost edition published in 1937 by the Golden Cockerel Press. Though iconographically it may be true that Petrina “takes a stance as prophetic as Blake’s” (29), it is difficult to discover any visual qualities that the three works have in common. The author has been engaged in “collaborative work on illustrations on Milton” with Virginia Tufte for several years (33n29); the present paper, therefore, may be said to offer a follow-up to those by Tufte that have been listed in Blake 23 (1989-90): 141 (#162), and 25 (1991-92): 32 (#190), and parts of it will probably be incorporated in Visualizing Paradise Lost: The Illustrations of 1688 and Those of William Blake, Gustave Doré, and Mary Groom, a book that Tufte and Furman are currently coauthoring.

116. Glausser, Wayne. “Atomistic Simulacra in the Enlightenment and in Blake’s Post-Enlightenment.” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 32 (1991): 73-88.

—Having become “interested in the strange history of reception which Blake inherits and to which he contributes,” Glausser proposes “to evaluate and make use of the simulacra as a resource for the interpretation of Blake, and at the same time examine relevant tangles in the Enlightenment reception of atomism” (74). To do so, he starts by introducing his readers to the meanings attached to the word simulacra by Lucretius, Baudrillard, Cook, and Serres (73-74), finding that the “atomistic simulacra . . . receive ambiguous treatment in postmodernism . . . . But this is nothing new” (74). Glausser next turns to questions prompted by Stevenson, Paley, and Hilton, asking how “strong are the connections between [Blake’s use of the word] ‘spectre’ and atomism, between ‘emanation’ and atomism” as familiar from Epicurean natural philosophy (75). In summing up the answers, he states that “it would appear that ‘spectres’ was a common enough translation for simulacra for Blake to have known of this connection” (79), and that simulacra “appears to have been a common enough translation” for Blake’s “emanations” which he may well “have encountered” (80). Glausser continues with an attempt to demonstrate that by “various means . . . —by metaphor and by rationalist theology, by metaphysics and by physics—atomism and Neoplatonism became comfortably compatible” in eighteenth-century enlightenment discourses. “This was not good news for Blake” (82). To counter the bad news, and as part of his “post-Enlightenment” (74), the poet is said to have developed a “kind of spectral ambiguity [that] leads to various effects of confusion in Blake’s long poems” (85). However, “Blake’s spectres, for all their overdetermined complexity, have at least one family resemblance: they collect around themes of separation from an original unity or presence, now lost but still imaginable. In this sense, both atomism and Neoplatonism participate in the spectral. . . . This approach might usefully be carried forward from Blake’s post-Enlightenment to the various postmoderns who have announced, both in denunciation and in celebration, new visions of the spectral” (86).

117. Gourlay, Alexander S. “Blake and Bonasone.” Blake 25 (1991-92): 138-39.

—Gourlay convincingly compares the motif of horse and riders in Bonasone’s engraving after Polidoro da Caravaggio, “Cloelia Crossing the Tiber,” and in Perry’s engraving after Blake’s frontispiece design for Stanley’s translation of Bürger’s Leonora, 1796.

118. Greco, Norma. “The Problematic Vision of Blake’s Innocence: A View from ‘Night.’” Dalhousie Review 70 (1990-91): 40-51.

—Unlike most (yet not all) earlier commentators, Greco believes that “there is much in the text and design of ‘Night’ that would have us question the speaker’s ‘innocent vision’” (41). In both text and the two designs (illus. on 46-47) she detects hints at “the speaker’s spiritual loss in the very process of his Christian ‘redemption’” (44). Blake’s “Night,” instead of being read “as a proclamation of the essential harmony, if not expressly Christian character, of Blake’s ‘state’ of Innocence” (40), is here described as voicing considerably “darker chords.” As Greco’s essay suggests, the narrator of the poem “has fallen into a deadly dream of the mother, sensual passivity, and religious abstraction.” If so, then indeed the “dangers of ‘Night’ would indicate not only ambiguity in Innocence but the incipient formation of Blake’s later theme . . . that emerged fully in Europe” (48).

119. Groves, David. “Blake and the Edinburgh Literary Gazette—with a Note on Thomas De Quincey.” Blake 25 (1991-92): 133-35.

—The article is mostly concerned with a review of the second volume of Cunningham’s Lives (1830) that is here reprinted and tentatively attributed to De Quincey. Groves has previously published a couple of similarly short articles on closely related subjects; see Blake 25 (1991-92): 21-22, 36 (#104-05, 226), as well as the subsequent entry. It is to be hoped that eventually he will organize the various findings he has made in some historical archives that are holding all those elusive Scottish periodicals into a more coherent and also an intellectually more interesting account.

120. Groves, David. “‘W—m B—e, a great original’: William Blake, the Grave, and James Hogg’s Confessions.” Scottish Literary Journal 18.2 (1991): 27-45.

—The author returns to a suggestion made by Karl Kiralis in 1959, “that a ‘very probable mention of William Blake’ might be found in the fictional character ‘W—m B—e, a great original,’ in the 1824 novel Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg.” Groves has discovered new evidence that “will now indicate that Hogg would have known of Blake from the year 1808, secondly that Hogg consulted an Edinburgh enthusiast for Blake for help in completing one important final detail of his Confessions, and thirdly that the novel does indeed refer indirectly to William Blake, and especially to Blake’s designs for Robert Blair’s poem The Grave, through the figure of W—m B—e,” a figure whose “association with the grave is the key to unlocking much of the novel’s irony” (27). Groves shows that Hogg knew of Cromek, and that he very likely saw Cromek’s 1808 edition of The Grave with Schiavonetti’s prints after Blake (28-29). Furthermore, Hogg was acquainted with Allan Cunningham through whom he “probably also learned of Blake” (29). More important for the author’s argument is Hogg’s meeting with Robert Scott (1771-1841), engraver, early Blake aficionado, and the father of William Bell Scott (29-32). It is, in any case, important enough to make Groves agree with the Scotts and with the normative aesthetics of the early nineteenth-century on “the superiority of [Blake’s] designs for The Grave over his earlier work for the Night Thoughts” (30). I am not sure that Blake, had he known of this, would have been all that proud of the esteem in which Schiavonetti’s etchings, rather than his own line engravings, were (and obviously still are) held north of the Scottish border. But just the same, Groves has a strong case in pointing out that in the Confessions “W—m B—e’s role begin page 96 | ↑ back to top in leading to the grave is suggestively reminiscent of William Blake’s role in illustrating The Grave. . . . Hogg . . .identifies the old shepherd in his novel as ‘W—m B—e, a great original,’ in order to underscore the connection with Blake and his well-known design for The Grave” (32), i.e., Schiavonetti’s version of “Death’s Door” (fig. 1). The remainder of the article (33-40) is devoted to an interpretation of the role played by “W—m B—e” in Hogg’s narrative.

121. *Hall, Jean. A Mind That Feeds upon Infinity: The Deep Self in English Romantic Poetry. Cranbury, NJ: Associated UP, for Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1991. $32.50 boards.

—Said to contain a chapter on “the deep self” in the writings of Blake.

122. Heffernan, James A. W. “Blake’s Oothoon: The Dilemmas of Marginality.” Studies in Romanticism 30 (1991): 3-18.

—The present study of “probably the most remarkable woman Blake ever conceived [who] is also one of the most complicated, disturbing, and least readily assimilable figures to appear in his poetry” (3), focuses on the discourse of Oothoon herself. The author demonstrates how “Oothoon’s language destabilizes sexual and semantic possession at the same time,” and thus puts into question “the possessiveness of fixed referentiality, in which words are bound to single meanings,” a possessiveness that is said to similarly characterize most other commentaries on the heroine’s role in Visions of the Daughters of Albion. The “open” language that Blake invented for Oothoon is contrasted with Bromion’s “rigidly univocal, exclusive, and divisive” (11) diction. To Heffeman “Oothoon remains a fascinating outsider because her attitude will not fit the structures of power and submission with which societies customarily organize themselves, and her language will not fit the categories of possession and opposition that we customarily use to define ourselves and our relation to others. She neither wins nor loses. She challenges the assumption that love means exclusive possession; she challenges the oppositions between fidelity and promiscuity, holiness and sensuality, the intellect and the senses, punishment and self-gratification, submission and transgression, defeat and victory. But she neither converts the men who oppress her nor liberates herself from them” (18). This then is another important contribution to the renewed debate over the meaning of The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion. For a related study of Oothoon see Wilkie’s recent book (listed here as #234), and the articles by Goslee and Linkin which have been recorded in Blake 25 (1991-92): 21 (#100), 24 (#132), and #223, below.

123. Heppner, Christopher. “The Chamber of Prophecy: Blake’s ‘A Vision’ (Butlin #756) Interpreted.” Blake 25 (1991-92): 127-31.

124. Heppner, Christopher. “The Good (In Spite of What You May Have Heard) Samaritan.” Blake 25 (1991-92): 64-69.

—Heppner is here addressing a critical fallacy that is characteristic of a great deal of earlier Blake scholarship, viz. the insistence that those of the artist’s series of watercolors and engravings that are illustrations of the literary works of others are also generally to be understood as modifications and ironic criticisms of the poets and poems illustrated. Though the author grants that “it is often clear” that such commentaries “are right,” he points out that “sometimes the expectation of finding such criticism can be a cause of error—the antithetical meaning is given a premature welcome before an adequate search has been made for a more fully articulated reading of the design” (64). In his iconographical study of one of the Night Thoughts engravings Heppner is thus implicitly concerned with much the same set of methodological questions that is discussed in Michael Tolley’s essay on Blake’s “Literalism” (see #227, below).

125. Hilton, Nelson. “The Complaint and the Consolation; or, Night Thoughts, London: R. Noble for R. Edwards, 1797: Rosenwald Collection 1819a.” Vision of a Collector: The Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection in the Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1991. 296-97. $285.00 for the limited edition of 300 deluxe copies.

—See the note to #56, as well as #70 and 103, above.

126. *Himy, Armand. “La Répétition dans les poèmes de William Blake.” La Répétition. Ed. Jean-Jacques Lecercle. Paris, Fr.: Centre de Recherches Anglo-Americaines, U de Paris X, 1989. 229-47.

127. Hoagwood, Terence Allan. “Literary Theory and the Christianity of William Blake.” Literature and Belief 9 (1989): 80-87.

—In this short article Hoagwood attempts to exemplify how “William Blake constructs a literary theory which is also more generally a Christian aesthetic. . . . Blake’s philosophy of literary form, which is always precisely a philosophy of biblical literature, involves two essentially semiotic or iconographical principles. These principles, these means of meaning, are drawn from the tradition of biblical literature and exegesis, and Blake uses them to reproduce the act of signifying that he associates specifically with the Bible. He goes farther, too, identifying Christian value within this act of signifying rather than in what is signified alone, so that the act of meaning and not just what is meant constitutes a major value. Blake’s two literary principles I shall be explaining as metalanguage [i.e., language about language] and visualization of vision” (80).

128. Hoeveler, Diane Long. Romantic Androgyny: The Women Within. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1990. $29.95 boards.

—In addition to a reprint (under new titles) of the author’s 1979 article on “Blake’s Erotic Apocalypse: The Androgynous Ideal in Jerusalem” (see Blake 15 [1981-82]: 86 [#71]), the book contains additional and extensive discussions of androgyny as theme and motif in Blake’s literary works. See Hoeveler’s chapters on “Blake: ‘Jerusalem in every Man / A Tent & Tabernacle’” (34-50), “Blake: ‘on the verge / Of Non-entity’” (125-39), and “Blake: ‘Thou Mother of my Mortal part’” (210-25).

129. Howard, Seymour. “Blake: Classicism, Gothicism, and Nationalism.” Antiquity Restored: Essays on the Afterlife of the Antique. Bibliotheca Artibus et Historiae. Vienna, Aus.: IRSA, 1990. 201-12, 287-88.

—The present chapter from the collection of Howard’s studies of various renaissance movements in the history of art was first published in 1985; see Blake 18 (1984-85): 103 (#64); 20 (1986-87): 82 (#112).

130. Ide, Nancy M. “Identifying Semantic Patterns: Time Series and Fourier Analyses.” Revue Informatique et Statistique dans les Sciences Humaines 24 (1988): 193-220.

—“The problems to which [the author has] applied the time series and Fourier methods involves The Four Zoas” (194). Having charted and studied computer-generated graphs of “image variety,” “image density,” or the “frequency” and “amplitude spectrum” of “images of labor” or of “pastoral images” in the epic (see figs. 1-22), Ide is in a position to tell her readers “that imagery is distributed across the text in patterns that are cyclical, periodic, and fundamentally symmetrical around the poem’s midpoint, thus verifying patterns that are perceivable by eye in plots of the original data reflecting the distribution of images across the text. . . . The existence of clearly pronounced patterning of the kind revealed by Fourier analysis for the image data is astounding” (218), especially, one feels tempted to add, to those who do not trust what is “perceivable by eye.” What are the conclusions that can be substantiated by such computer-assisted analyses? In summarizing her results, Ide points out this much: while “the analysis does not tell us what this patterning means in terms of the poem’s effects, there can be little doubt that the 3-cycle pattern apparent in the plots of the original image data are real. Whatever else we make of it, the Fourier analysis can be confidently said to show the pattern of image distribution in the Zoas is both rhythmic and simple. As a poet and a painter, Blake was overwhelmingly concerned with rhythm, harmony, and symmetry in his philosophy and art. . . . Anyone familiar with Blake’s art is aware of his attention to symmetry and form in his visual imagery as well. Given all of this, the patterns suggested by the Fourier analysis—whether they were consciously or unconsciously imposed on the poem—are especially deserving consideration in Blake’s work” (219). With the help of a powerful computer Ide has thus rediscovered for herself a problem of interpretation which others may have assumed is self-evident; there is probably nothing wrong with this, though it is not quite clear how Fourier analysis may help to solve that problem. If, however, the process of analysis turns Blake’s Four Zoas into “The Fourier Zoas” (218), such conservative reservations may indeed miss their mark entirely.

131. Ide, Nancy M. “Meaning and Method: Computer-Assisted Analysis of Blake.” Literary Computing and Literary Criticism: Theoretical and Practical Essays on Theme and Rhetoric. Ed. Rosanne G. Potter. Philadelphia, PA: U of Pennsylvania P, 1989. 123-41.

—For the author’s earlier work in the same field see Blake 17 (1983-84): 66 (#86); and 22 (1988-89): 46 (#77-78), as well as the preceding and subsequent entries. As in her previous computer-assisted studies of Blake’s poetry, begin page 97 | ↑ back to top Ide again concentrates on Vala, or The Four Zoas. Here she informs her readers that “despite . . . problems [of definitions and methodology] the computer has enabled [her] to look at the text of the Zoas and see Blake at work as no one has before” (123). Ide discusses “The Literary Problem” (123-27) and its “Computational Solution” (127-37), and finally presents a “Consideration of the Results” (137-39). Even though the latter are basically quantitative rather than qualitative, Ide claims that hers actually “constitutes the most comprehensive study of the imagery of Blake’s prophetic poetry, and one of the most comprehensive studies of The Four Zoas to date” (138). At the time of writing the author probably had not yet had a chance to study Donald Ault’s Narrative Unbound of 1987; however (and besides their fascination with charts), there is at least one thought that is common to Ide and Ault: like Ault in a recent article (see #42, above), Ide “wonders what the authors whom we dissect and analyze would think of the work we do.” Even without the help of Blake appearing to her in a dream (as he did to Ault), she, too, “cannot help but think that Blake, who forever urged new perspectives, would be somewhat pleased with my approach, and that the poet who adored the juxtaposition of opposites would find the application of Reason’s tool to the study of the fruits of the Imagination somehow appealing” (138-39). Is this irony?

132. Ide, Nancy M. “A Statistical Measure of Theme and Structure.” Computers and the Humanities 23 (1989): 277-83.

—Yet another paper by Ide which describes a “computer-assisted analysis of semantic patterning in William Blake’s The Four Zoas” (277). Though there is considerable overlap between the three articles by Ide recorded here and the same author’s earlier publications on The Four Zoas (all of which appear to be based on her 1982 Ph.D. thesis; see Blake 17[1983-84]: 66 [#86]), there are also some significant changes in focus, method, and even the numerical data that were employed for these excursions with Blake into the realms of electronic space. Whereas The Four Zoas is always introduced by Ide as “a narrative poem,” I felt a little puzzled when here I found that it contains “some 45’000 words” (277), while there were only “some 42’000 words” in the 1988 article (194 in #130, as cited above). Could it be that Ide’s computer has discovered yet another additional “Night” in Blake’s poem? Readers primarily interested in Blake, not in the techniques of computer-based analyses of literary texts, may want to turn to Ide’s earlier paper that was published in this journal (see Blake 22 [1988-89]: 46 [#77]) before delving any deeper into the computer specialist’s ideas of the patterning of semantic fields.

133. *Imaizumi, Yoko. “‘Yomukoto ga Dekinai Newton-Shugisha’: Blake to Yomukoto.” Eigo seinen 135 (1989): 284-86.

—A brief note on Blake and “Newtonian” reading; in Japanese.

134. Imamura, Yukiko. “Vision and Language of Prophecy in William Blake’s Poetry, 1783-1794.” Dissertation Abstracts International 52 (1991-92): 1339A. U of Manitoba, 1991.

—In an examination of Poetical Sketches, the Songs, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Urizen, Imamura wishes “to show that Blake is aligned with the biblical prophets not so much because of [his use of the larger structures and devices of the Bible, especially those identified in biblical exegeses] in his work as because of his stance, his purpose, his revisionary treatment of traditions, and, most importantly, his visionary perception that penetrates the barriers of time and space, subject and object, and divine, human, and natural. Such perception and the other characteristics are registered in his style and are also in similar forms found in classical prophets.” Particular attention is paid to The Book of Urizen “as a representative book of Blake’s ‘Bible of Hell,’” where Imamura reads Blake as demonstrating his peculiar “way of allusion which at once affirms the predecessors’ visions and corrects their contexts. Urizen also implicitly points to the failure of the biblical and Miltonic mode of prophecy as Blake sees it, in contrast to his own heuristic mode of prophecy that attempts to induce a mental apocalypse in the reader’s mind.” This dissertation then, while shifting the focus from narrative to style, nevertheless appears to be informed by a heavy dose of Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, and a couple of other previous examinations of Blake’s understanding of the “Language of Prophecy.” For another dissertation that is concerned with related problems see #237, below.

135. Immenhauser, Verena. “William Blakes biblische Frauengestalten: Christliche Bildschemata in der englischen Kunst um 1800.” Lic. phil. thesis. U of Berne, Switz., 1991.

—This unpublished typescript of what is the Swiss equivalent of a master’s thesis explores the numerous depictions of women in Blake’s Bible illustrations, their tradition, their form and content, and the gender-related questions raised by this imagery. Unlike Anne Mellor, Immenhauser grants to the women depicted by Blake more than “but two roles to play” (140). Her study is, to the best of my knowledge, the first attempt by an art historian to come to terms with the implications of the representation of women in Blake’s works. Though the typescript I have seen unquestionably calls for some thorough copy-editing, the range of Immenhauser’s text is certainly impressive, and some 850 notes demonstrate the thoroughness of her reading in both Blake and women’s studies. Following a brief but competent summary of previous feminist Blake criticism (9-11), part I (1-72) describes the Bible as Blake’s “Great Code of Art.” By necessity Immenhauser here recapitulates much that is already well-known from earlier publications. And yet one hopes that at least a revised and expanded version of part II on “Das biblische Frauenbild” (76-143) is to be published in the near future. This would usefully contain the descriptive analysis of “An Allegory of the Bible” (28-29) and the sections from part I that are concerned with Blake’s responses to the female in the imagery of Michelangelo (69-72), Raphael (29-31), and Fuseli (42-46), as well as those containing observations on the typology of female imagery in eighteenth-century British art and art theory.

136. Jackson, R. L. P. “The Interpretation of Tragic Experience.” Critical Review 30 (1990): 74-90.

—Blake’s “The Sick Rose” is among the works here studied for their expression of the tragic experience. With Hamlet and Middlemarch in the foreground, Jackson hopes that Blake’s song “might be allowed to sound in the background of [the] argument” (74). See also #216, below.

137. James, G. Ingli. “The Holy and the Heterodox: William Blake’s Transformational Use of Religious Language.” Studia Mystica 14 (1991): 31-44.

—“That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot,” Blake wrote to Trussler in 1799, “is not worth my care” (E702). He sure meant what he said, and many a reader of this journal would see no reason to renew her or his subscription if Blake’s works all of a sudden were to appear as “Explicit.” The present article participates in that everlasting endeavor of Blake critics to elucidate the poet’s meaning by addressing his “Use of Religious Language.” James surveys “the subversive implications of Blake’s works” (42) that he finds attached even to “common nouns which constitute the conventional currency of religious discourse, e.g., ‘the divine,’ ‘the eternal,’ ‘the miraculous,’ ‘the holy’” (31). The examination of Blake’s use of terms such as “the divine” (31-33) and “the holy” (33-34) leads James to reconsider Blake’s Swedenborgian connection (35-36), the identity of the creator in “The Lamb” (36-37), “Jerusalem” from Milton (38), the question of Blake’s particular brand of radicalism, here set off from that of the “New Left” (39-40), deconstructive theory and (a true first, I think) feminist theology (40-43).

138. Janowitz, Anne. “The Sublime of Ruin: Blake’s Jerusalem.” England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990. 145-76. £29.50/$39.95 boards.

—This is the fifth and final chapter of a book that has already been praised as well as condemned by its reviewers.

139. Johansen, Ib. “Blake, det sublime og revolutionen.” Romantik i europæisk litteratur: Politik, metafysik, retorik, poetik. Ed. Kirsten Sholm and Carl Finsen. Århus, Den.: Aarhus UP, 1989. 49-72.

—The essay includes a discussion of Blake’s entry for “The Ancient Britons” in the Descriptive Catalogue (55-58), an interpretation of “The Tyger” (59-62), and a reading of The Book of Ahania (64-67). Inevitably, it is the writings of Longinus, Burke and Kant that are mentioned alongside Blake’s (49-50), yet unfortunately, my utter ignorance of the Danish language does not allow for any further comments on the actual contents of this study. See also #92, above.

140. Johansen, Ib. “The Fires of Orc: William Blake and the Rhetoric of Revolutionary Discourse.” The Impact of the French Revolution on English Literature. Ed. Anders Iversen. Spec. issue of Dolphin 19 (1990): 43-75.

—Johansen joins Brewster, Essick, and Mee (see #66, 107, and 173-75) with this paper on begin page 98 | ↑ back to top Blake and the Revolution controversy which “was also a controversy over language, i.e. over the political and social function of linguistic and rhetorical codes, over the rights and obligations of language-users, etc.” (43). Making use of Reid’s Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in This Metropolis (1800) as well as modern historical studies referring to the writings of Burke and Hannah More or to Price’s Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789), Johansen contextualizes a reading of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (47-55) which is here considered as a deconstruction of “Christian orthodoxy (and even some more ‘heterodox’ versions of divinity such as, for example, Swedenborgian theosophy)” (50). Subsequent sections of the paper are devoted to interpretations of The French Revolution (55-61), America (61-65), and The Book of Ahania (66-68), stressing that despite some “post-revolutionary disillusionment . . . Blake remains faithful to his symbolic role as artist-rebel” (69). See also #6, above.

141. Johansen, Ib. “The Politics of Eros: William Blake and the History of Sexuality at the End of the Eighteenth Century.” Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on English Studies, Cracow 1987 (April 8-11): English and American Literature: Continuity and Change. Ed. Marta Gibiska and Zygmunt Mazur. Zeszyty Naukowe Uniwersytetu Jagielloskiego 954: Prace Historycznoliterackie 73. Warsaw, Pol.: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe,^[e] 1990. 65-74.

—Finding that “Blake’s views concerning sexuality—or concerning sexual politics, implying both the political dimension of male-female relationships and the socialization of sexual ‘instincts’ in modern society—have been studied [up to 1987] from a rather narrow angle” (65), and following a short aside on “what might be called the ‘occult’ school” of Blake criticism (66), Johansen proposes “to relate some of Blake’s texts to the history of sexuality, concentrating on his early works and The Four Zoas . . . in the light of theses put forward in Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality” (67). The article examines the role of sexuality and its “implicitly or explicitly political status” (71) in some of the Songs (69-72), in the Visions, and in the Marriage (72-73), and optimistically “sum[s] up Blake’s sexual politics” by insisting that the poet “remains all his life a firm believer in the need for a sexual revolution, a revolution that implies a radical transformation of the prevalent (repressive) sex role pattern, which liberates male as well as female sexuality, but which at the same time does not isolate sexuality from other issues, from the total life-historical context” (74). In spite of the author’s agenda as quoted above, I failed to locate any extensive treatment of The Four Zoas in this published version of the conference paper.

142. Johansen, Ib. “William Blake eller revolutionen som utopi.” Hvad nu hvis: Årbog fra Det humanistiske Fakultet, Århus Universitet. Herning, Den.: Systime, for the Faculty of the Humanities, Århus U, 1984. 91-99.

—A general introduction to Blake’s revolutionary and utopian thought, providing Danish readers with an illustrated account of Blake’s treatment of the American and French revolutions (91-92), of “Sexuality, Politics, and Religion” (92-93), of Blake’s unalienated working procedures and his “Political Visions” (94-96), and of three of his “utopian” works, The French Revolution, America, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion (96-99).

143. Johansen, Ib. “William Blakes Himmel og Helvede.” Dante: Tidsskrift for Digtning, Kunst og Kritik 1.1 (1990): 75-93.

—Preceded by a Danish translation (presumably by Johansen) of “A Song of Liberty” (73-74), this article examines The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; in Danish.

144. *Kang, Sun-Koo. “William Blake eui Milton.” Journal of the English Language and Literature: Chungchong [Daejeon, Korea] 29 (1987): 5-31.

145. Kher, Inder Nath. “William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ and ‘The Doors of Perception.’” Literary Half-Yearly 32 (1991): 72-89.

—Any new attempt to come to terms with the “meaning” of Blake’s art and poetry is subject to the pressure being put on the present by the ever-growing burden of past scholarship. Since the mid-century, no such thing as a “fresh” reading of Blake’s works has been possible, at least not in professional and institutionalized art and literary criticism. Scholarly “innocence” has long since given way to a state of critical “experience.” Of course, there is nothing specifically Blakean about such a situation very similar to that in which, say, the students of Milton’s Paradise Lost or of Wordsworth’s Prelude find themselves entangled. Still, the scholar who embarks today on yet another study of “The Tyger,” after “Jerusalem” Blake’s most popular poem and, I believe, the lyric that has been scrutinized more often than any other of his poems, will (and should necessarily) feel the weight of earlier interpretative efforts as an almost suffocating presence. Inder Nath Kher proves to be aware of this in the latest attempt to come to grips with the fearful symmetry of Blake’s beast. Therefore, more than half of the present article is devoted to a discussion of a few selected earlier (and now somewhat dated) readings of “The Tyger” by Bloom (75-77), Hirsch (77-78), Adams (78-79), Gleckner (79-80), and Ostriker (85). Commencing with the assertion that “Blake must, of necessity, be approached through the principle of the archetype in poetry” (72), Kher states that for this new investigation “I am not presuming/claiming a better degree of perception than most critics have displayed. This paper only hopes to achieve one more level of appreciation, different in intensity of response, though not altogether exclusive” (74). Such rare scholarly modesty proves to be in line with Kher’s own interpretation of the poem (80-85), which is informed by “close reading” techniques and reserves the last words for the teachings not of criticism but of the mother of Blake’s “Little Black Boy.”

146. *Kim, Jin-ho. “A Study of the Creative Mind in William Blake’s Jerusalem.” Journal of the English Language and Literature 31 (1990): 21-42.

—For another study of the same poem and its illuminations see #9, above.

147. King, James. William Blake: His Life. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; New York, NY: St. Martin’s P, 1991. £25.00/$24.95 boards.

—The lack of a modern scholarly biography has been emphasized by Bentley in 1977 and, again, by Mary Lynn Johnson in 1985; neither Michael Davis’s or Jack Lindsay’s biographies (1977 and 1978), nor Stewart Crehan’s Blake in Context (1984) have been generally accepted as filling this gap. (King mentions only Lindsay’s book in his “Select Bibliography” [248-51], and makes no reference to either of these recent biographies in his preface.) Aileen Ward has been working on a new and deeply studied biography of the poet and artist for many years, and considerable as well as fruitful controversy is to be expected from that book if one may judge its contents from Ward’s reshuffling of traditional assumptions about Blake’s career in some of her recent articles. Peter Ackroyd, time-leap novelist of Hawksmoorian and Chattertonian fame, biographer of Eliot, Dickens, et al., is also reported to be engaged upon a Blake biography. (It seems more than likely that this will contain the first “interviews” with the deceased master since the time of Crabb Robinson.) However, James King, editor and biographer of Cowper, has been faster than them all and here presents a new version of His Life. One is curious to find out the merits of this short book (263 pages, the index and illustrations included): is this just another popular introduction to the “life and work” of Blake, or that long-expected scholarly work, destined to update and in part replace received opinion as represented by the earlier standard biographies by Alexander Gilchrist (1863) and Mona Wilson (1927)? Unfortunately, with the possible exception of the “new emphases” in its chapters on “Blake’s strained friendship with . . . William Hayley” (139), King’s book offers no major breakthrough. Rather, it is at best no more than an overview of the biographical information available in Bentley’s Blake Records (1969, supplemented in 1988) and current opinions on the interpretation of these sources. It is lacking a detailed critical apparatus, and adds nothing that is entirely new—except for the punctuation that King has “frequently inserted” [230] in Erdman’s text of The Complete Poetry and Prose and in sources that he cites from Blake Records. Whereas King does not seem to make use of any newly discovered documentary evidence in his biography, he is strongly inclined to see Blake’s poetry and pictures as “an expression of personality and thus . . . deeply autobiographical” (xvii). The author rightly feels that Gilchrist, who was drawing on “the recollections of disciples who knew [Blake] at the end of his life [when, accidentally or not, Blake had] altered the record,” produced an “extremely Victorian” book (xv). However, in characterizing Blake’s erotic imagination as “sometimes pomographic” (xvii), in viewing “random acts of brutal and perverted sexual activity” (125) in some of the Vala drawings—and nothing else, neither art, nor contextual meaning—and in stating that Blake’s “envy and jealousy in Vala . . . led merely to chaos” (xvii), King does not appear too far removed from the normative and ideological value systems he criticizes in his precursor. I found this a disappointing and sometimes infuriating begin page 99 | ↑ back to top book. It has recently (1992) been re-issued in paperback format at £7.95/$13.95.

148. *Ko, So-Woong. “Blake eui hyeondaesung.” Journal of the English Language and Literature [Seoul, Korea] 34 (1988): 635-55.

—The article addresses Blake’s “modernity.”

149. Kostova, Ludmila K. “William Blake and the Poetry of ‘Faithful Love’: A Reading of Two ‘Elizabethan’ ‘Songs’ from Poetical Sketches.” Publications du Centre Universitaire de Luxembourg: English Studies 3 (1991): 179-92.

—Kostova offers new readings for the two “Songs” beginning “Fresh from the dewy hill” and “When early morn walks forth in sober grey,” by examining their relationship with the Elizabethan poetic tradition. She finds that “an ironic commitment to,” and even “an ironic commentary” on this tradition characterizes some of the Poetical Sketches. The article originates in a paper read on the occasion of the “Third Conference on the Literature of Region and Nation” (Echternach, Lux., 10-14 Sept. 1991).

150. *Kucich, Greg. “Blake’s Eighteenth Century and the Shaping of Prophetic Consciousness in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Teaching Eighteenth-Century Poetry. Ed. Christopher Fox. New York, NY: AMS P, 1990. 331-48. $94.50 boards.

—See also #228, below, for another essay on Blake that was published in the same collection.

151. La Belle, Jenijoy. “A Reprinting of Blake’s Portrait of Thomas Alphonso Hayley.” Blake 25 (1991-92): 136-38.

—The author reports on what appears to be a restrike from the copperplate Blake had executed in 1800 for publication in Hayley’s Essay on Sculpture. Apparently, the plate was somehow acquired, subsequently (?) cut down, printed in brick red, and impressions were then published by Andrew W. Tuer in his Follies and Fashions of Our Grandfathers of 1886-87.

152. *Lai, Robert Sheng-yu. “Blake and Zen Buddhism: A Study in the Uses of Orthodox Religion.” Tamkang^[e] Review: A Quarterly of Comparative Studies between Chinese and Foreign Literatures 18 (1987-88): 351-69.

153. Lambo, John A. “William Blake and William Wordsworth: A Study of the Imagination in the Unitive Principle.” Aligarh Critical Miscellany 4 (1991): 139-56.

—Blake saw “in Wordsworth the Natural Man rising up against the Spiritual Man Continually & then he is No Poet but a Heathen Philosopher at Enmity against all true Poetry or Inspiration.” Since, however, he could also praise Wordsworth’s poetry as “in the highest degree Imaginative” (E 665), and since Crabb Robinson reported on the “intense” delight Blake received from reading Wordsworth’s Poems of 1815 (140), this does not unduly distract the author of the present paper. Lambo’s “central concern . . . is to prove that Blake and Wordsworth, in spite of some revealing differences between them, essentially share the same world view” (139). Moreover, his paper attempts to demonstrate that even “their attitude towards nature, or the world as a whole, is essentially similar” (141; see also 153). The tertium comparationis which allows Lambo to contradict what appears to be the overt meaning of most of Blake’s annotations to Wordsworth and of his respective remarks to Robinson is, of course, the concept of “the imagination.” As “the unitive principle working behind the visible frame of things” (141-42), and a generalization for that, this serves the desired purpose: to show that “there is sufficient similarity between [the two poets] to bolster up the juxtaposition. Referring closely to some of their works, this paper forcefully [!] argues that Blake and Wordsworth are convinced monists, that they are preoccupied with relations or correspondences and, above all, that the imagination plays an important role in their perception of the harmony that permeates the universe” (153-54). See also #44 and 88, above.

154. Lamont, Archie. William Blake and the Stone of Destiny. Corbie Essay in Literature 1. Montrose, Angus, Scotland: Corbie P, 1991. £0.70 paper.

—Readers of this pamphlet will learn that “William Blake was an opponent of war,” that he “manifests intense interest in Wales and Scotland” in Jerusalem, that he “may have been the descendant of a Welsh family which migrated to Ireland,” and that the “wrote about the Stone of Destiny, or Coronation Stone, conceived as a symbol of imperial domination.” The author (who died in 1985) saw clearly that Blake “was deeply aware of the suppression of women” [iii]. Lamont’s paper was first published in the July 1976 issue of the Scottish Journal of Science (227-43; not listed in Bentley 1977). Neil Mathers, the editor of the present re-publication, rightly draws attention to Lamont’s “writing style [that] is at once highly readable and eccentric.” At the same time, he points out—correctly, I feel—that “some may find certain interpretations . . . somewhat bizarre” [ii].

155. *Lamont, Claire. “Blake, Lamb, and the Chimney-Sweeper.” Charles Lamb Bulletin ns 76 (1991): 109-23.

156. Lawson, Bruce. “Blake’s Europe and His ‘Corrective’ Illustrations to Milton’s Nativity Ode.” Mosaic 25.1 (1992): 45-61.

—The author is convinced that there is something lacking in previous interpretative descriptions of Blake’s series of watercolors in illustration of Milton’s Nativity Ode. “What has not been adequately noted is the extent to which Blake’s designs . . . are not merely interpretive but also subversive, and that their vision of the Incamation is in fact quite close to the sardonic reading of Milton’s poem that informs Europe” (45). Lawson notes the “ironic relation” of “some characters and events of Europe” with the Nativity Ode (46); his reading, however, entails the “sensual fairy” of plate 3, a text that was added to only two out of the 12 complete copies of Blake’s prophecy that are known. (Note that the author does not employ the standard order for the sequence of plates in Europe that has been established in Bentley 1977.) The essay, on the majority of its pages, then expounds an interpretation of Blake’s iconography in his watercolor series illustrating Milton’s ode. Lawson here detects “a similar subversiveness” (48) to Blake’s reworking of the ode in Europe. His analysis of the Whitworth versions of the Nativity Ode designs (here reproduced in monochrome and referred to, rather irritatingly, as “Plates” throughout) starts out from the assumption that because of “their close conformity to the visual imagery of the ode” they reveal Blake’s “very close reading of the poem and at the same time [cloak] the extent of his reinterpretation of Milton’s vision” (50). As a means to “un-cloak” that reinterpretation, Lawson first draws attention to various (though isolated and fairly general) visual resemblances of motifs one encounters in the Milton water-colors and the pages of the illuminated book. For example, in an interpretation that I think is truly Urizenic in its perspective, he likens “the long scaled tail of the dragon” in the fifth of the Milton designs to “the coiled tail of the creature from the abyss” on the titlepage for Europe, that is of a figure which has traditionally been identified as an image of Orc who, to the eyes of Albion’s Angel, appears in serpent form, as the “rattlesnake” of revolution. Lawson’s key to unlock what he sees as the “subversive” meaning of the Milton series is, however, Blake’s compass symbolism. When Anthony Blunt and others examined the symbolism of the compasses in Blake’s works, they thought of verbal or pictorial representations of the instrument as it was used by creators, builders, and mathematicians alike. Lawson takes his readers one step further (or is it too far?) by assigning a negative symbolical meaning, “bondage, constraint and darkened vision,” to “compass angles” in general (52). The shape of a stable roof (“the Urizenic roof angle”), or the wings outstretched by an angel or by a demon, all such motifs are characterized by “compass angles” and, in consequence, they all share in the same evil and “constraining” (54) meaning. Whosoever is prepared to follow such reasoning may indeed discover a “veiled interpretation” (56) of Milton’s ode in Blake’s watercolors, and she or he will learn from Lawson and “from the vantage of hell” to discern in these designs just as in Europe “subversive images of constraining enclosures, sinister shapes and barely-controlled violence and energy” (60). For other studies of Blake’s series of Milton water-colors see #69 and 91, above, for another essay on Europe turn to #224, below.

157. *Lee, Chong-Ho. “Blake wa sinbijueui.” English Studies [Seoul, Korea] 12 (1988): 64-95.

—The author reexamines Blake’s mysticism.

158. *Lewis, Linda M. The Promethean Politics of Milton, Blake, and Shelley. Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1992. $34.95 boards.

—The present publication must have grown from the author’s dissertation; see the annotated entry in Blake 23 (1989-90): 135 (#108). For another study of Blake and Shelley see #179, below.

159. Lisberger, Joann Carrie. “Violence and the Lost Maternal: Problems of Sacrifice, Biblical Authority, and Feminine Desire in Narrative.” Dissertation Abstracts International 52 (1991-92): 1340A. Boston U, 1991.

—“This dissertation examines how narrative reinforces notions of the Maternal that work against the validation of feminine presence and desire in narrative. . . . Noting the similar tendency of biblical, narrative, and begin page 100 | ↑ back to top phallocentric traditions to revere but absent the actual mother, the thesis examines first how The Prairie (1827) by James Fenimore Cooper and The Book of Thel (1789) by William Blake control the mother and exalt Maternity in order to ensure the linear, procreative, symbolic imperatives of the Father. Both works reveal a sacrificial order in narrative whose metonymic^[e] and metaphoric registers absent the mother. Both works also reveal a related systematic violence against women, though Blake achieves critical distance from that violence.” Lisberger’s study thus participates in, and further contributes to, the critical debate that, over the past three or four years and mostly driven by feminist approaches, has led to a thorough reevaluation of the heroines in Blake’s Thel and Visions, see also #234, below (with references to some earlier studies that demonstrate the renewed interest in these poems).

160. Livingston, Ira Christopher. “Wheel within Wheel: A Cultural Physics of Irony.” Dissertation Abstracts International 51 (1990-91): 2754A. Stanford U, 1990.

—From this particularly short and remarkably abstract abstract one learns that irony “is the form of a dynamic relation that does not appear exclusively in the dimension of the text. The text participates in a network of ironic polarities that implicate psyches, families, genders, classes, institutions and disciplines. In ‘Wheel within Wheel’ the ironic spiral is elaborated between the poetry and letters of Wordsworth and Blake and their circles, the early journalism and later criticism of Paul de Man, several modern poems and the paradigms of postmodern physics and cultural theory.” The examination of Blake’s writings here contributes to “an alternative mapping of the complex cultural plane as ‘rrheality’: a heterogeneous field of interrelations at once real and rhetorical.” Surprisingly—or should I say ironically?—Nelson Hilton’s work on Blake is not mentioned by the author.

161. *Löchle, Dieter. “Form und Funktion urbaner Bildlichkeit in William Blakes Jerusalem.” M.A. thesis. U of Tübingen, W. Ger., 1983.

—This unpublished master’s thesis became known to me only through a quotation in Ludwig’s recent study of Blake’s use of biblical typology (see #163, below).

162. Lucas, John. “The Wanderer in the City: William Blake.” England and Englishness: Ideas of Nationhood in English Poetry 1688-1900. London: Hogarth P; Iowa City, IA: U of Iowa P, 1990. 71-88. £18.00/$22.50 boards.

—“Blake was the first writer of modern times to grasp the fact that if you cannot define nationhood in terms that include the city, and for that matter to give it real primacy, then you cannot define it at all. This is not to say that the definition has to be uncritical. The poet who wrote ‘London’ obviously didn’t think that” (88). In order to reach this conclusion, Lucas studies some of Blake’s Poetical Sketches, the image of the city in the Songs, in Milton and Jerusalem. “In order to get the measure of Blake’s radicalism” (81), the author compares Blake’s poetry with the writings of Thomas Paine and Erasmus Darwin (see 79-83, and #53 and 107, above, as well as #173, 220, and 319, below). For a list of references to other recent studies of the same subject as that here treated by Lucas see Blake 25 (1991-92): 29 (#172).

163. Ludwig, Hans-Werner. “‘In Eternity all is Vision’: Typologisches und apokalyptisches Denken bei William Blake.” Paradeigmata: Literarische Typologie des Alten Testaments. Ed. Franz Link. Vol. 1: “Von den Anfängen bis zum 19. Jahrhundert.” Schriften zur Literatur-wissenschaft 5/1. Berlin, Ger.: Duncker und Humblot, 1989. 351-74.

—The author presents a thorough (if not a radically new) description of Blake’s use and understanding of biblical typology in his writings and pictures.

164. Lundman, John Peter. “Suppressed Discourse: William Blake’s Use of the Language of Entropy.” Dissertation Abstracts International 51 (1990-91): 2385A. State U of New York at Stony Brook, 1990.

—This is a study “in semiotics and rhetoric centered in Blake’s poetry,” and it suggests what the author believes to be “useful changes in academic discourse and teaching methods.” Therefore, quite appropriately, Lundman wastes no time over abstracted arguments, and his text reads more like a candid program: “(1) Entropy and suppression are the most significant features of language. . . . The lexicon of Darwinist biology sensibly and usefully describes language. . . . (2) Blake suppresses some word-groups to create distinct ‘lexicons’ in Song[s] of Innocence and of Experience. MS Notebook and Jerusalem erasures and deletions subdue lexicons of self-expression and create ‘I’-less discourse. (3) Contexts modulate sense. Blake manipulates contexts to limit meaning when making a satiric attack. Reader and author conspire to limit meaning. . . . (4) ‘Species’ of discourses displace, parasitize, and consume . . . (5) Looking for ‘voice’ one can become ‘possessed’ by one or more discourses. Academic language is (self-) interested and strongly invasive. . . . Attending to a feminized/fecund moment or space may bring visionary access to the larger Human Discourse which can deliver individuals from the ‘I’-bonds of ‘single-vision’ which limit experience and fuller knowledge.” I reckon it safer not to invade here with what is likely to be none but my own self-interested academic language.

165. Lussier, Mark [Stephen]. “The Contra-Diction of Design: Blake’s Illustrations to Gray’s ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat.’” Inscriptions in Painting. Ed. Claude Gandelman. Spec. issue of Visible Language 23.2/3 (1989): 204-19.

—Lussier’s contribution to this special double issue of Visible Language commences with the question whether or not Blake’s watercolor designs for Gray’s ode “seek to elevate Gray’s poetry? If one reads the language of the designs, the answer is ‘no’” (205). With a little help from “Lacanian psychoanalytic theory” (212), and by means of a commentary on each of the six watercolors (all reproduced) for Gray’s “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat” (208-16), the author demonstrates how “Blake literally deconstructs Gray’s text” and achieves what is here seen as a “staggering imbalance of word and image” (206). In Lussier’s psychological interpretation of Blake’s images, the illustrations “to the opening stanzas present a drama. The subject, Selima [i.e., Walpole’s cat and the example of Gray’s moralizing ode], enacts a mirror stage encounter, and the resulting split, pinpointed by Lacan as one of the products of this encounter, can be read in the difference between the subject’s appearance and that of its reflected image. . . . Once plunged into the matrix of matter, subject and object undergo transformations, finally to be revealed as narcissistic projection onto the glass of nature. Blake offers, therefore, not a moral but a psychological message that is also manifest in history as systems of oppression that generate moral codes. Moreover, Blake equally reveals that poetry can reify those projective oppressions” (217-18). Because of “the deconstructive method of production . . . Blake’s contra-diction of the unconscious . . . operates on the margins [not just of the pages of the book produced for the Flaxmans but] of Gray’s conscious discourse and unveil[s] the phallic privileging of Gray’s association of the feline and feminine, which consciously attempts to control feminine sexuality through inner repression and outer oppression” (218). For more on the alleged compatibility of “Lacan and Blake’s language” (215) see the subsequent entry; for more on “Inscriptions by William Blake” see #78, above.

166. Lussier, Mark Stephen. “Vortex and Mirror: Blake and Lacan.” Dissertation Abstracts International 51 (1990-91): 2026A. Texas A & M U, 1989.

—Comparisons between Blake and Freud or Blake and Jung, as well as “Jungian” readings of Blake’s poetry and designs, have been fashionable for a long time, and the most recent Jungian interpretations of Blake were published only fairly recently (see, e.g., Blake 22 [1988-89]: 44 [#57]; or 25 [1991-92]: 16 [#63-64]). In the near future, however, such “Jungian” explorations may well be supplanted by “Lacanian” readings, and here is a start in that particular direction. Lussier shows himself convinced that the “thought of William Blake and Jacques Lacan offers interesting points of intersection,’ points that warrant a close examination. “Blake’s illuminated texts promote mirror-stage encounters with his readers, which require the formation of self-consciousness before a self-conscious text. Blake’s anticipation of Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts begins in this mirror-stage and is traced in relation to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In The Four Zoas, Blake attempts to radically redefine epic conventions . . ., a move against epic that speaks to Lacanian notions of the Symbolic order as the field of consciousness promoted by knowledge. Blake attempts to subvert this order through the play of word and design in his two prophecies, Milton and Jerusalem . . . [where] this attack leads to the exploration of feminine sexuality, since women are barred from discourse in language itself, where language is the privileged domain of phallocratic relations cast in the image of the masculine.”

167. *Martins, Floriano. “Visiones das filhas de Albion.” Minas Gerais: Suplemento literario 21 (1986): 8-9.

—I am unable to make out whether this is a critical note on or a translation into Portuguese of a few excerpts from the Visions of the Daughters of Albion.

168. *Matheson, C. S. [i.e., C. Suzanne?]. “The Respective Functions of Text and Design in the Art of William Blake.” Diss. U of Oxford, 1990.

—For some closely related studies see #45, 77-78 and 165, above, as well as #248, below.

169. *Matthews, Susan. “Blake’s Long Poems and the Contemporary Epic Revival.” Diss. U of Oxford, 1987.

170. McGann, Jerome [J.]. “William Blake Illuminates the Truth.” Critical Studies 1.1 (1989): 43-60.

—The previous checklist reported the 1989 publication of Towards a Literature of Knowledge and commented on its Blake chapter (see Blake 25 [1991-92]: 26 [#141]). Because the title of the present article and that of the first chapter in McGann’s book are the same, one is tempted to assume that the two texts are identical. In fact they relate to each other in much the same way that two pulls from the same relief-etched plate in two different copies of an illuminated book might (and quite appropriately so, since this sort of “variation” in Blake’s works is part of McGann’s subject here). For instance, part I of the journal essay (43-45) has been incorporated in the introduction to the book (26# 141: 5-8), the latter has much additional material (see 26#141: 14-15, 16-21, 24, 25, and 36-37), and there are numerous differences in the precise phrasing of the two versions. Both texts do, of course, agree in such memorable statements as the following: “because Blake came to grips with the problem of truth as a practicing artist, rather than as an academic, or a philosopher, his philosophical significance is to be sought, and defined, in his graphic and poetical work, and not in his ideas as such” (56). It is nevertheless the chapter from McGann’s book, and not the present journal publication, that is likely to be the one that will be used for quotation in the future.

171. McNeil, Maureen. “Newton as National Hero.” Let Newton Be! A New Perspective on His Life and Works. Ed. John Fauvel, et al. Oxford, Oxon.: Oxford UP, 1988. 223-39.

—Blake’s and Erasmus Darwin’s reactions toward Newton’s scientific method and discoveries are discussed at some length (223-29), and a few of Blake’s pictures are reproduced. Since 1989 the book has also been available in a paperback edition, priced at $14.95.

172. McQuail, Josephine Ann. “Persistence of Vision and The [First] Book of Urizen by William Blake.” Dissertation Abstracts International 51 (1990-91): 3084A. U of California at Berkeley, 1990.

—McQuail’s dissertation “examines the significance of the variations between the original printed versions of The [First] Book of Urizen.” It is based on the author’s “inspections of the different originals as well as recorded observations in the critical literature on the subject,” and it offers her “interpretations of significant variants” that draw on “semiological approaches derived from studies of the visual arts which combine word and image.” Therefore, “the tradition of the emblem book” and Blake’s own Notebook emblems as well as The Gates of Paradise are “invoked to help decipher Blake’s combination of poem and picture.” Next, the author turns to the “problem of textual discontinuity” in Urizen, here (following McGann, et al.) “explained by the fact that the work was a rewriting of the Bible . . . with reference to . . . Alexander Geddes’ new translation.” The Book of Ahania and The Book of Los are “also invoked in an interpretation of ‘The Bible of Hell,’” and McQuail ends with a descriptive evaluation of “typographic, photographic and facsimile reproductions” of Blake’s illuminated book. This concluding chapter is intended “to provide a guide for the edition of Urizen which will prove most useful, variously, to the student, scholar, and general reader of Blake.”

173. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford, Oxon.: Clarendon P, 1992. £30.00 boards.

—In this study of Blake’s writings of the 1790s the author draws on his far-ranging acquaintance with the publications of writers as diverse as Thomas Paine and Garnet Terry, Robert Lowth and Alexander Geddes, Thomas Spence and Joseph Priestley, Richard Brothers and Edmund Burke, Erasmus Darwin and William Warburton, and many more. In what “amounts to an archaeology of reading” (3) he frames the Marriage, the Urizen trilogy, and the Continental prophecies in the context of the political and revolutionary discourses prevalent during Blake’s Lambeth years. The author’s central concern is to move away from an iconographic identification of historical events that may or may not be represented in a given work or one of its lines or images. Dissatisfied with the tendency of previous “historicist Blake criticism [to underestimate] the radical significance of the formal dimension of the works,” Mee has examined the rhetorics of the revolutionary debate. He has singled out four discursive fields in order to situate Blake’s own enthusiastic and radical rhetoric of the revolutionary decade, to show that “Blake’s rhetorical practices operate across a consistent political typology” (2), and to “open up the texts.” While convincingly arguing that Blake, like his radical contemporaries, was a “bricoleur” who “unapologetically recombines elements from across discourse boundaries,” altering “the antecedent discourses . . . fundamentally . . . in the resultant structures” (3) of his works, Mee has chosen to organize the chapters of his own book in a more accessible and reader-friendly way. Following an explication of his subject, his approach and his research interests in an introduction on “Blake the Bricoleur” (1-19), Mee’s first chapter employs the framework of the rhetorics of “Popular Enthusiasm and Radical Millenarianism” (20-74) to locate the place of the Lambeth books in history. Here it is persuasively demonstrated that, for example, Blake’s tendency to rework and “reuse the same material in different contexts” is a “quality common to many of the radical texts produced in the [Revolution] controversy” (10). This is followed by a section entitled “‘Northern Antiquities’: Bards, Druids, and Ancient Liberties” (75-120) that offers an examination of the “parabolic style of Blake’s illuminated books” and of the characteristics they share with “eighteenth-century conceptions of what primitive literature was supposed to be like” (75). A third chapter discusses the poet’s thematic and rhetorical exploitation of the discourse of “speculative mythography” (121) and the cross-currents between “Mythography and Politics” (121-60), showing that it was part of “Blake’s poetic enterprise” (160) to subvert scriptural authority and its political application. Next, the book therefore describes “Blake’s use of the Bible in the 1790s” (161) and the peculiar role played by biblical criticism in the Revolution debate (161-213). In his conclusion Mee addresses what in the context (not just) of this book must indeed seem a “particularly pressing” subject (214). Starting out from an observation made by Paul Mann and a critique of Morris Eaves’s argument concerning “Romantic Expressive Theory,” Jon Mee here asks for the reasons responsible for Blake’s obvious failure to create an audience that would listen to the Dangerous Enthusiasm of his early prophecies (214-26). (For Mann’s article see Blake 20 [1986-87]: 83 [#127]; for Eaves’s see 15 [1981-82]: 85 [#48]; Mee’s account of Eaves’s stance is, I think, rather polemical and not entirely true to the latter.) This concluding chapter presents a fine analysis of Blake’s socially complicated relations with the book publishers of the 1790s in general, and the Johnson circle in particular (see especially 220-24), as well as of their consequences for Blake’s publication strategies. Though I thought much of this most interesting, I was surprised to find that, here as elsewhere in the book, the author still treats Blake’s illuminated printing primarily as “text” rather than as “picture gallery.” Therefore, some of the conclusions concerning an understanding of the peculiar properties of Blake’s medium—its “indeterminacy” (McGann), or its “radical variability” and “logic of difference” (Carr)—and hence of its “message” appear, at the very least, open to critical questioning (see 15-18 and passim; this matter will also be discussed at some length in Joseph Viscomi’s forthcoming book for which see the introduction, above). And yet these are very minor criticisms of a book that is packed with truly absorbing material, all enormously helpful in an attempt to understand more fully Blake’s participation in the discourses current in Britain’s “radical underworld” (McCalman) of the late eighteenth century. It is an entirely different question, and one that applies to all criticism, whether or not Mee’s optimistic hopes for his “historical approach which does not close down but opens up the texts it addresses” are indeed justified.

174. Mee, Jon. “The Radical Enthusiasm of Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 14 (1991): 51-60.

—The author’s central concern is with “the relationship between Blake’s poetic practice and the wider prophetic discourse that existed in the 1790s.” Therefore, in the present article he is “attempting to place Blake’s The Marriage begin page 102 | ↑ back to top of Heaven and Hell . . . in the context of the culture of enthusiasm via comparison with several vulgar millenarian texts . . . [and puts] forward some general suggestions as to the nature of Blake’s political rhetoric in the period” (51). To this end, Mee studies Blake’s Marriage alongside some of the “enthusiast” writings of Richard Brothers, Thomas Webster, and—at the core of his essay—John Wright and William Bryan. Mee thus adds new facets to the reconstruction of the historical climate that provided the impulse for Blake’s visionary satire; moreover, the historical investigation helps to throw into high relief the unique elements in Blake’s stance in the debate between radical religious enthusiasts and radical enlightenment philosophers. See also the proceding entry (this article reappears as part of chapter I in Mee’s book) and #107, above.

175. Mee, Jon. “William Blake and John Wright: Two Ex-Swedenborgians.” Imagining Romanticism: Essays on English and Australian Romanticism. Ed. Deirdre Coleman and Peter Otto. Locust Hill Literary Studies 10. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill P, 1992. 73-84. $35.00 boards.

—In a study that is closely connected to the subject of the author’s book and to his article on the Marriage (see the two preceding entries), Mee draws attention “to the relationship between Blake’s poetic practice and the wider prophetic discourse that existed in the 1790s” (73). For some general information on this new collection of essays, see #91, above.

176. Meller, Horst. “Romantisches Dichten unter dem Zeichen der ‘dark Satanic Mills.’” Die Industrielle Revolution in England: Literarische Texte und ihre Kontexte II. Ed. Bernd Schulte-Middelich and Peter O. Stummer. Anglistik und Englischunterricht 43. Heidelberg, Ger.: Winter, 1991. 65-87.

—Meller draws on passages from the writings of William Blake throughout this article which traces and analyzes some literary reactions toward the Industrial Revolution; see, especially, 71-72 and 77-79.

177. Meyer, Eric D. “Narratives of Development: Romanticism, Modernity, and Imperial History: A Study of the Romantic Epic in Goethe, Byron, Blake, and Wordsworth.” Dissertation Abstracts International 52 (1991-92): 1752A. U of Wisconsin at Madison, 1991.

—“This study situates Romantic literature in a historical narrative that runs from the Fall of the Bastille to Waterloo, and places Romantic texts against contemporary events like the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the rise of European imperialism in Africa and Asia . . . At the same time, this study considers the relation of the Romantic epic to narratives of universal history from Hegel to Marx.” Combined with such historical contextualizing is an analysis of the “concept” and the “contradictions of modernity.” Seeing the romantic period as an event that can be likened to “the postmodern break in which the narratives through which history is mediated to individuals are shattered by a traumatic shift in modes of cultural production,” Meyer characterizes Jerusalem (as well as the long romantic poems and dramas of Goethe, Byron, and Wordsworth) as responding “to this crisis of representation by reinserting historical experience into an overarching narrative of development that describes the evolution of the representative individual or collective subject, ‘Man,’ in his fall into alienation and self-division in social forms, and his rise toward utopian self-(re)unification as a figure of desire for restored human community.” Whereas this Blakean center, i.e. Meyer’s account of the fall and redemption of the Giant Albion, may not represent an entirely unfamiliar version, it is the circumference supplied by the author’s attempt to historicize “Narratives of Development” in “the period from 1789 to 1832” that lends interest to his investigations.

178. Meyer, Jerry. “The Woman Clothed with the Sun: Two illustrations to St. John’s Revelation by William Blake.” Studies in Iconography 12 (1988): 148-60.

179. Miner, Marlene Renee. “The Problem of Evil in the Works of Blake and Shelley.” Dissertation Abstracts International 51 (1990-91): 3756A. U of Cincinnati, 1990.

—More than 10 years ago, in 1981, Melanie Bandy’s book on Evil in the Poetry of Blake and Shelley was published, followed in 1985 by Terence Hoagwood’s Traditions of Blake and Shelley, and in 1986 by Daniela Tandecki’s study of Blake’s critique of the concepts of a moral law and of eighteenth-century morality (see Blake 16 [1982-83]: 112 [#22]; 20 [1986-87]: 82 [#109]; 22 [1988-89]: 50 [#121]). Now, the “Problem of Evil in the Works of Blake and Shelley” is being readdressed in Miner’s dissertation as the “most outstanding similarity” between the two poets. In order to demonstrate that both poets “ultimately advocate a nonrational understanding of man’s relationship to the cosmos and argue that evil results from a faulty vision of this relationship,” Miner starts out by examining similar as well as “different formulations of the problem of evil” in Blake’s and Shelley’s “juvenilia.” She then “explores their shared attack on orthodox religion in their early mature work.” Studying Thel, the Marriage, and “Blake’s minor prophe[c]ies” alongside Shelley’s Queen Mab, Alastor, and The Revolt of Islam, the author finds that both poets “deconstruct accepted thought systems and offer their own cosmologies that support a revolutionary ideology.” Next, “the political, historical, and ideological concerns” of the “revolutionary poems” and “the problems inherent in a strictly political revolution” are treated. Miner reads Blake’s Vala, or The Four Zoas and Shelley’s Hellas as depicting a “revolutionary future” and “demonstrates that their respective definitive works, Jerusalem and Prometheus Unbound evidence a refinement of themes and . . . a marked similarity between their respective solutions to the problem of evil: forging a new relationship among man, divinity, and the cosmos.” In her concluding chapter Marlene Miner “glances at Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job, which encapsulates his final vision, . . . and Shelley’s fragment, ‘The Triumph of Life.’” From the abstract one cannot tell what precisely the relationship is between this and previous examinations of “The Problem of Evil” in Blake’s works. For the most recent contribution to the comparative study of Blake and Shelley, see #157, above.

180. Minot, Walter S. “Blake’s ‘Infant Joy’: An Explanation of Age.” Blake 25 (1991-92): 78.

181. Minot, Walter S. “The ‘Marriage hearse’ in Blake’s ‘London.’” Papers on Language and Literature 28 (1992): 89-91.

—Minot argues that “to interpret ‘hearse’ as a candleholder in the closing line of . . . Blake’s ‘London’ is at least as justifiable as interpreting it to mean either ‘bier’ or ‘carriage.’” And he maintains that in favor of his “interpretation are the rich religious associations that the [‘candleholder’] reading calls up, especially if one accepts the more specific meaning connected with Good Friday. Then the irony becomes even deeper. Certainly such knowledge and such connotations were not beyond Blake” (91).

182. Möhring, Hans-Ulrich. “Die große Ernte der Völker: Der unbekannte Dichter William Blake.” Süddeutsche Zeitung 2-3 Nov. 1991: Wochenendbeilage.

—Blake an “unknown” poet? In the 1990s this may sound curious, if not downright false. And yet, addressing the readership of a German newspaper, Möhring’s subtitle is aptly chosen. Blake’s reputation in Germany generally remains what it was in Britain before the publication of Gilchrist’s biography in 1863. The article therefore presents an introduction to the major themes in Blake’s poetry, stressing their relevance for readers at the end of the twentieth century, and urging the need for a German translation of the complete writings. Möhring himself has previously translated a selection from the Songs (see #378, below); he is now engaged in preparing the first complete edition of Blake’s writings in German for a Munich publisher. There can be little doubt that the translator’s success with this project would have a major impact on the future reception of Blake in the German-speaking countries. Once such an edition has eventually been published, Blake can no longer be described as an “unbekannter Dichter,” not even in Germany.

183. Moskal, Jeanne. “Blake, Dante, and ‘Whatever Book is for Vengeance.’” Philological Quarterly 70 (1991): 317-37.

—Moskal argues that in the Dante water-colors “Blake attacks Dante’s denial of posthumous forgiveness with a fine sense of irony: Blake’s illustrations present Dante himself as a human being who has himself been forgiven posthumously by God, thus making Dante the perfect counter-example to his own theological claim” (318). Well aware of recent developments in the interpretation of this series of illustrations, Moskal takes “as a cue Fuller and Baine’s contrary emphasis [contrary to Roe or Klonsky’s allegorical readings] on recognizing the Dantean context.” She shows why and how in her view “Blake responds deliberately to Dante’s presentation of a posthumous Inferno rather than assuming that he treats the Inferno as another mythical presentation of the human condition during life.” However, she proposes that in his illustrations “Blake made a systematic critique of Dante by taking seriously the questions about forgiveness . . . that Dante’s poem raises” (319). Moskal thus combines some elements from the earlier “allegorical” begin page 103 | ↑ back to top with others from the new “illustrative” approach in her interpretation. She draws attention to “a contemporary British stereotype of all Italians as vengeful” and to an idea of Italy that was functioning “as a sign of otherness for the English” (319), current during the 1820s when Blake produced his Dante watercolors and engravings. Then, Moskal examines in detail Boyd’s translation of Dante and how it may have helped shape Blake’s own visual and verbal reactions to Dante (321-24). With the ground thus paved, she turns to a close reading of Blake’s annotations to Boyd, of his conversations with Crabb Robinson, and to an interpretation of selected motifs in some of the Inferno watercolors. It does not seriously distract from the interest of this paper that Moskal may be attributing too much weight to Blake’s use of “reversed (or mirror) writing” (330) in either Jerusalem (see Paley’s pertinent note on this phenomenon, 128-29 in #9, above) or in what after all is no more than a dry-point inscription in a still unfinished proof engraving for “The Circle of the Lustful” (330). Similarly, it does not really affect her argument (and can therefore easily be forgiven) if she writes of England’s foremost sculptor of the period as Blake’s “fellow engraver Flaxman” (331), or if she refers to the 1793 issue of The Gates of Paradise as “For the Sexes” (332). The author’s earlier studies of the ideas of friendship and forgiveness in Blake’s art and writings have been listed in Blake 23 (1989-90): 137-38 (#126-27); 25 (1991-92): 27 (#147). Taken together they set the tone for Moskal’s conclusions in the present article: “Forgiveness in Blake is identified with the process of reading and rewriting and appropriating one’s predecessors. Blake’s representation of vengeance and forgiveness in the character of Dante reflects Blake’s conviction that aesthetic considerations form the circumference of human experience” (333).

184. Mutis, Guido. “Visión sistémica de la poesía de William Blake.” Estudios Filologicos 25 (1990): 85-99.

—Mutis studies Blake’s “systematic” poetry in the light of “the emerging scientific paradigm proposed by [Gregory] Bateson (1980), Laszlo (1972), Capra (1982), Jantsch (1980), Prigogine (1980) et al. This may be clearly seen in [Blake’s] emphasis on processes over structures and in his postulation of open, dynamic and interrelated systems” (85).

185. Norman, Geraldine. “Blake Print Cleans Up at Sotheby’s New York Sale.” Independent 14 May 1991.

—A brief report on the record prices fetched at Sotheby’s (9-11 May 1991) by previously unrecorded impressions of “The Man Sweeping the Interpreter’s Parlour” and “The Chaining of Orc.” Known to me only from a clipping, hence no page reference available; see also #52 and 112, above.

186. O’Grady, Thomas B. “Little Chandler’s Song of Experience.” James Joyce Quarterly 28 (1990-91): 399-405.

—In a passage from Joyce’s short story “A Little Cloud,” according to O’Grady, “Joyce himself seems to allude, with both substantive and thematic significance, to the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience” (400). This allusion, the author claims, supplies new clues for an interpretation of the story.

187. O’Keefe, Richard Robert. “Mythic Archetypes in Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Blakean Reading.” Dissertation Abstracts International 52 (1991-92): 2926A. Pennsylvania State U, 1991.

—O’Keefe here “suggests a new method of reading Emerson, not as a self-contradictory philosopher, but as a mythic poet.” The methodological model for such a reading of Emerson’s essays “as prose-poems” is supplied by “the rhetorical modes of William Blake,” and by Blake scholarship. The result is that suddenly they “disclose consistent patterns of archetype and myth.” “A paradigm borrowed from Blake, the four archetypes of his myth, organizes the whole study: Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Apocalypse. . . . Emerson’s myth, like Blake’s, envisions a unified, humanized cosmos, in which ‘there’ is ‘here,’ the Not-Me is Me.”

188. *Ookuma, Akinobu. Blake no shirei. Tokyo, Jap.: Yashio shuppan, 1988.

—This book is reported to present a detailed study (on 296 pages) of Blake’s concept of the poetic spirit.

189. Ossar, Naomi. “Images of the Body in the Later Poetry of William Blake.” Dissertation Abstracts International 51 (1990-91): 2027-28A. Kansas State U, 1989.

—Ossar’s subject, “the anatomical and physiological sources of body imagery in the late poetry of William Blake and the uses to which Blake put those sources,” may seem surprising. However, if one thinks of the commercial engravings executed by Blake for books of medical interest such as Henry’s Memoirs of Albert de Haller (1783), Earle’s Practical Observations on the Operation for the Stone (1793), or Brown’s Elements of Medicine (1795), the artist-poet’s knowledge of (if not his interest in) contemporary medical debates seems less unlikely than at first glance one may be tempted to assume. Having studied Blake’s “images derived from the body” in his “Later Poetry” (i.e., everything from Urizen to Jerusalem), the author claims that “Blake assumed the role of a poet-healer who . . . depicted a salvation beyond both the body and language itself as we know them.” Ossar first presents “an overview of the changing state of physiology in Blake’s time,” and then “contrasts the nature of the polypus [a reference to Trembley’s polyp] as Blake understood it and his Zoa Tharmas, who represents the principle of physical, psychological, and social integration.” This leads toward a description of “the two complementary approaches to the problems of individual and universal disintegration, first, Romantic Physiology and second, the literal embodiment of language.” Apart from the original choice of subject, Ossar has yet another surprise in store: “That Blake virtually stopped publishing poetry during the last seven years of his life and kept to visual art suggests that he saw language as ultimately incapable of saying what is most important.” As an art historian I feel tempted to accept this as a fascinating idea; I am not entirely convinced though, that (or how) this suggestion can be harmonized with, say, Crabb Robinson’s account of his interviews with the aging poet.

190. Ostriker, Alicia. “The Road of Excess: My William Blake.” The Romantics and Us: Essays on Literature and Culture. Ed. Gene W. Ruoff. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1990. 67-88. $38.00 boards, $13.95 paper.

191. Otto, Peter. “The Multiple Births of Los in The Four Zoas.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 31 (1991): 631-53.

—That there are multiple voices, all uttering their own narratives, and seemingly in search of a narrator to “frame,” organize, or even systemize their mutually exclusive accounts of what is happening in The Four Zoas, has long been recognized. This, however, is the first post-Aultean attempt to “re-vision” Blake’s narrative, and its argument is to be developed in a companion volume to the author’s Constructive Vision and Visionary Deconstruction (see Blake 22 [1988-89]: 42 [#29]; 25 [1991-92]: 27 [#153]). Of the six occasions on which the epic makes “reference to the birth of Los”—here described as “perhaps the most remarkable instance of the poem’s multiplication of voices” (633)—three are examined by Otto in some detail and under the following headings: “The birth of Los from Tharmas” (634-36), “The Spectre’s account of the birth of Los” (636-37), “The Messengers’ account of the division of Urthona” (638-39), and “The Divisions of Urthona” (639-41). Otto also looks briefly at the speeches of “The Demons of the Deep and the Shadow of Enitharmon” (644-45), and then addresses the more general questions of “Narrative and Perspective” (641-44) and of “The shape of the present” (645-48). The article as a whole argues for a “narrative of embrace” (see, especially, 648-51) in order to demonstrate “that a reading of the poem need not produce results as disconcerting as Erdman and [even Ault’s process of a ‘linear re-visioning’] suggest. . . . The Four Zoas is an attempt to reverse the movement of the Fall by constructing what I shall call a narrative of embrace. It is only by embracing the conflicting voices and narratives of The Four Zoas that one glimpses the shape of the fallen world and so draws close to the apocalypse of Night the Ninth. . . . Rather than escaping from the ‘Cumbrous Wheels’ . . . of the fallen world, in a narrative of embrace one must move into proximity with others and embrace apparently incommensurable and contradictory accounts of events in that world” (632-33). The example of the “Multiple Births of Los” is employed by Otto to show how in “the fallen world, where perception is inevitably a function of perspective, the narrator’s attempt to gather together the fragments of the fallen world is necessarily paradoxical. In an embrace, the voices of those embraced must have as much weight as the narrative voice, for that which is embraced continually disrupts and makes fluid the form superimposed by the narrator. This means that a narrative of embrace cannot be completed in any traditional sense, for to do so would be to transform an embrace into an assimilation. Nevertheless, while continually frustrating our desire for the kind of unity that might be appropriate for a completed work, the poem does urge its readers to draw the poem together in a rather begin page 104 | ↑ back to top different sense. . . . In The Four Zoas we can see Blake moving towards a literary form which continually foregrounds the problems associated with re-membering^[e] the scattered and warring fragments of the fallen Albion” (650). If I understand the author correctly, he would agree, however, that because Blake is still moving towards such a form in The Four Zoas, “the conversation in ‘Visionary forms dramatic’” (651) as one encounters it here has a status which remains somehow different from that in “a completed work” (650) such as Jerusalem.

192. Otto, Peter. “Time, Eternity and the Fall in The Book of Urizen.” Philological Quarterly 69 (1990): 359-76.

—Unquestionably it is part of the critical consensus that Urizen is “Blake’s demonic or inverted reading of Genesis.” With the “assumption that the Fall is marked by the appearance of time and space,” Otto here questions one of the postulates that are both central and common, “despite the plurality of conceptual terms” (359), to almost all earlier interpretations of the Genesis chapter in Blake’s “Bible of Hell.” According to the author’s reading of plate 3, ll. 1-2, “Eternity is quite clearly able to incorporate error and, even more surprisingly, some kind of sequential and therefore temporal progression” (360). Moreover, “time and Eternity are used in The Book of Urizen in such a way that they make problematic the very model that critics have used to describe them. In particular, the oppositional dualism between time and Eternity which is implicit in much critical discourse about this poem breaks down . . . for Urizen, even as he divides and as his withdrawal is effected in time, is still in Eternity. . . . This simple inadequacy of the traditional dichotomy between time and Eternity to describe the multiplicity of time or the nature of Eternity in The Book of Urizen becomes a decisive objection when we investigate the nature of the Eternals” (361). Otto elaborates on this idea in sections on “Time and Eternity” (362-67), “A Double Withdrawal” (367-71), and “Time in the Fallen World” (371-75). Reading the sequence of events in Urizen in the light of Heidegger’s “distinction between the ontic and the ontological” (376n15), he finds that the “sequential time which we first observed in our description of the unfallen world has now [i.e., on plate 13, ll. 39-43] severed its links with ontological time and the times of others. Time and Eternity have been turned inside out, and sequential time no longer appears as the form of ontological time; it has become an alien, external force which determines our being. Sequential time has become ontic time” (374-75). Otto’s article, then, may be seen as a “Preludium” to the theme of his Constructive Vision and Visionary Deconstruction: Los, Eternity, and the Productions of Time in the Later Poetry of William Blake (see Blake 25 [1991-92]: 27-28 [#153]).

193. Paley, Morton D. “Blake and Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth.” Blake 25 (1991-92): 75-78.

—Though it is difficult to decide “precisely where Blake is indebted to Burnet and where [the ideas shared by both authors are] a matter of common tradition,” Paley convincingly argues that “the many similarities between their scenarios for the future of the earth, as well as the visual correspondences discussed [and illustrated], strongly suggest that Blake was familiar with The Sacred History of the Earth” (77). The author is certainly right in stating that if Blake actually looked into a copy of an early edition of Burnet’s late seventeenth-century publication, then its engraved plates “are likely to have interested Blake the engraver as well as Blake the cosmogonist” (75). Paley’s comparison between the uncanny globe that can be seen hovering over the priest-like figure in the frontispiece of copies of The Song of Los and the picture in the Sacred Theory that shows the earth in Chaos as a disk filled by “a mass of jumbled particles” (76) is a particularly striking one.

194. Paley, Morton D. “Blake’s Headgean The Seventh Head of the Beast in Night Thoughts 345.” Blake 24 (1990-91): 142-44.

195. Paley, Morton D. “Corrections for the Blake Trust Jerusalem.” Blake 26 (1992-93): 34. —See #9, above.

196. Parker, Jeffrey Davis. “Text and Iconography in the Commercial Designs of William Blake.” Dissertation Abstracts International 52 (1991-92): 170A. U of South Carolina, 1990.

—Rather than the results of his investigation, Parker’s abstract describes in some detail the approach he has chosen. Though its author is looking at some of those commercial engravings that were designed and executed by Blake, this study, with the publication of Robert Essick’s catalogue raisonné of Blake’s so-called reproductive engravings (see #24, above), may turn into a model for future research. “William Blake’s book illustrations to the texts of other non-canonical writers have been dismissed on the basis of arbitrary standards and values that have little if any relevance to Blake’s aesthetic, or, to the literary and historical context in which they appear. Therefore, it is the purpose of this study to provide a detailed examination of Blake’s designs to Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories From Real Life, William Hayley’s Ballads, and his Life of William Cowper, to demonstrate the ways in which Blake’s commercial book illustrations form an integral part of his creative achievement. My approach to Blake’s designs include borrowing, and in some instances revising strategies previously reserved for discussions of Blake’s illuminated books as ‘composite art.’ I include iconographic readings of these plates, as well as a stylistic analysis which takes into account the technique for producing a particular design, not as a stylistic limitation, or, as a stage in Blake’s development as an artist, but rather, as a mode of production having ideological as well as aesthetic values.” Therefore, Parker describes the “interactions and relationships between Blake’s own works and his commercial illustrations, between Blake and the content of the text, the personal as well as the ideological relationship to the author, and . . . the demands of the publishing industry.” One may feel somewhat puzzled by Parker’s assertion that Wollstonecraft still belongs with the group of “non-canonical writers,” and in his distinction between Blake’s “own imaginative works” and “his commercial illustrations” the language of art criticism and the traditional “standards and values” that Parker intends to attack and to deconstruct prove to be still alive and active. Nevertheless, in principle at least, Jeffrey Parker’s endeavor to rehabilitate that part of Blake’s productions which after all financed and thus made possible his more “original” and “imaginative” works seems long overdue. That the abstract does not refer to some of Essick’s exemplary studies which, after all, paved the way, is a blemish which, I hope, has to be attributed to the limited printing space that was allotted to its author by the editors of DAI.

197. Pedley, Colin. “Blake’s ‘Tyger’ and Contemporary Journalism.” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 14 (1991): 45-49.

—The author explores “the appearance and use in contemporary journalism” (45) of the symbol of the tiger and of its complex political meaning. “The examples cited here show the term ‘tiger’ being applied to persons or characteristics that are approached with disapproval. Blake, on the other hand, attributes the tiger’s creation . . . to the divine hand of the Creator. In so far as the tiger is a symbol of revolutionary activity, it is given the sanction of its divine origin. The nearest to this in the material discussed is in Robespierre’s ‘Address’ as printed in Politics for the People” (48). The possible meanings of a/the “Tyger” for a contemporary audience are studied by Pedley and, in addition, Blake’s version of the beast is reproduced on the front cover of this issue of the journal.

198. *Pennington, John. “Innocence and Experience and the Imagination in the World of Peter Beagle.” Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, General Fantasy and Mythic Studies 15.4 (1989): 10-16.

199. Phillips, Michael. “Printing Blake’s Songs, 1789-1794.” Library 6th ser. 13 (1991): 205-37.

—The craft of printing occasionally supplied metaphors and literary symbols for Blake’s writings (229), and the technical processes involved in Blake’s copperplate printing, just as those used in the creation of his engravings and etchings, are themselves invested with iconographic meaning. To a certain extent then, his media function as an integral part of Blake’s message in illuminated printing. That much has entered the critical consensus of Blake scholarship during the past decade, particularly through the efforts of Robert Essick, Morris Eaves, and Joseph Viscomi (see Phillips’s note 4). The subject that is being examined by Phillips in the present study is therefore not limited to its mere chalcographical interest. The author, having made Blake’s manuscripts and early poetry his special field of investigation, and having previously examined the evolution of the Songs “From Manuscript Draft to Illuminated Plate” (see Blake 14 [1980-81]: 89), here takes this work one step further. After briefly commenting on the 1793 prospectus, he supplies his readers with an “account of Blake’s invention of ‘Illuminated Printing’ together with a begin page 105 | ↑ back to top description of the genesis of the Songs as originally produced using his process. By discriminating these first issues it is possible to see how the Songs evolved from the original issue of Songs of Innocence in 1789 to that of the first combined issue of Songs of Innocence and of Experience in 1794. Blake’s process and what it signified for him is then discussed in relation to the conventions of illustrated book production and with regard to his aesthetic and his epistemology” (206). At the heart of the essay one finds an attempt to group the extant copies of Innocence (and of a few copies now bound as part one of the combined Songs) in a sequence of four separate printings or issues of the plates (see 211-14—and note that at least the first and second printing “may be contemporary” [212], i.e., may have been executed at the same time in what is simply a different shade of the same printing ink). Similarly, the “first printing of Songs of Experience [is] here established,” and Phillips shows that it “was for a separate issue” (214). He also offers what to my knowledge is an entirely new explanation of Blake’s colorprinting process, suggesting that each of the plates was passed through the press twice, first being printed in monochrome and only then being color-printed (see 214, 216, and n27). How it can be demonstrated that this actually was the case and why Blake should voluntarily have produced for himself the considerable problems in registration that would be a consequence of such a working method, as well as the duplication of the labor involved in the printing of each plate, remain to be explained. Blake’s technical innovations can generally be described as simplifications of earlier procedures, and Phillips himself stresses that Blake appears to have avoided “complicated and awkward” (209) techniques. Therefore, one is eager to see how much of Phillips’s hypotheses will hold up in the light of the reconstruction of Blake’s production techniques in Joseph Viscomi’s forthcoming Blake and the Idea of the Book (see the introduction, above). Following the reconstruction of what is described as the “second printing of Songs of Experience” (218), Phillips turns to an examination of the relationship of illuminated printing “to the conventions of book production as Blake knew them [see 219-22], to the theory of sculpture that may have influenced its inception [see 222-26] and to its relationship to his philosophy of mind [see 226-28].” The concluding section of the essay is devoted to “Blake’s adaption of the pastoral genre” (219; see 228-29). An important feature of the present publication, both in buttressing the author’s sequencing of the various printings and in their own right, are the eight color plates from pages in copies A, C-D and I of Innocence, and in copies G and H of Experience.

200. *Pieper, Eleonore. “Die Auseinandersetzung von Dante Gabriel Rossetti mit William Blake.” M.A. thesis. Westfälische Wilhelms-U, Münster, Ger., 1991/1992.

—This master’s thesis supplies an art historical supplement to the dissertation by Powers that is listed as #202, below.

201. Pietsch, Hans. “Im Dienst einer höheren Wahrheit.” Art: Das Kunstmagazin Aug. 1991: 108-09.

—This brief note was occasioned by the Tate Gallery’s Blake “display” of summer 1991 (which was accompanied by no more than a handlist), and it is illustrated with three glossy color reproductions. Among the clichés presented by Pietsch, there certainly is nothing new. See also #26, above.

202. Powers, Lucas Austin. “Human Formed Words: The Literary Legacy of William Blake’s Oral Poetic.” Dissertation Abstracts International 51 (1990-91): 2756A. Vanderbilt U, 1990.

—Blake’s reactions toward Milton and other “precursors” have been studied in great detail whereas the question of his own impact on younger poets has not been confronted in the same measure by modern Blake criticism. And while Dorfman, in 1969, presented a detailed analysis of Blake’s “reputation as a poet from Gilchrist to Yeats” (see Bentley 1977, #1509), Powers understands his dissertation as “a work of literary history and literary mythology.” He therefore “explores how William Blake has been mythologized by his poetic heirs—beginning with his discoverer D. G. Rossetti. . . . Taking his cue from Blake’s term ‘emanation,’ Rossetti defined what I have termed the emanationist theory of poetry. . . . Thus for Rossetti, the literal artifact, or printed poem, was not an end in itself, a completed object to be studied, but a means to . . . mental union, a kind of ongoing dialogue between reader and writer. Subsequent chapters explore the evolution of Rossetti’s emanationist reading of Blake by later poets such as James Thomson [i.e., ‘B. V.,’ the author of ‘The City of Dreadful Night,’ not of The Seasons], Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Allen Ginsberg. Each chapter explores a different relationship with Blake.” Powers finds that “despite these differences . . . each of these poets ultimately repeated the gesture initiated by Rossetti: the assumption of ‘Blake’—not the historical figure, but the mythic figure, the Human Formed Word embodying the prophetic, live, or oral spirit of poetry.” See also #200, above, and #218, below.

203. Punter, David. The Romantic Unconscious: A Study in Narcissism and Patriarchy. New York, NY: New York UP; London: Routledge, 1990. $35.00 boards.

—The present book presents “an attempt to grapple with the unconscious of romanticism.” And Blake has been allotted an important place where it comes to solving this “complex task which involves both the perception of romanticism as a historical phenomenon and a continuous awareness of the survival of romanticism as a mode of apprehension which still conditions much of our culture and much of our critical working” (ix). During the late 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, Punter was among the first critics to engage with the “Problems of Gender” as encountered in Blake’s writings (see Blake 13 [1979-80]: 96; 15 [1981-82]: 87 [#92]; 16 [1982-83]: 115 [#103]; 17 [1983-84]: 67 [#115]; 18 [1984-85]: 104 [#93]; 20 [1986-87]: 84 [#157-58]). As part 3 of the present book, Punter now discusses “Romanticism and the Self” in “An Engagement with Blake.” There are sections dealing with “Problems of Gender” (68-73), “Shame and Trauma” (73-78), “Repetition and Change: Daughters of Albion” (78-83), “The Instituting of Blake” (83-86); Punter then addresses “Some Dialectics” (86-90), “The Wise Man and the Incorporation of the Feminine” (90-95), “Haunting” (95-98), “Reflexivity” (98-101), “Blake and Mysticism” (101-04), “Kenosis and the Vortex, Interpretation and Fantasy” (104-08), “Some Contexts: Blackwood, Lindsay, Swinburne, Beckett” (108-14), and finally “Mysticism and Psychosis: The Dark Dialogue” (114-17). Though these chapter do in part arise from the author’s 1982 monograph on Blake and dialectics and from some of his earlier articles on the poet’s works and their canonization, Punter’s reworkings have resulted in considerable shifts of focus and new emphases. He now feels convinced that “Blake’s writings . . . have a particular relevance for our purposes, because of the central hiatuses which occur around the terminology and syntax of the ‘Female Will’” (68). Besides a reading of some passages from the Visions, Punter concentrates on “Then she bore Pale desire” and on sections from The Four Zoas. He usefully supplements Hilton’s and Goslee’s recent studies of Blake’s poem “about empire, . . . mercantilism . . . property, possession, ownership” (78), and he comments on Blake as an “auteur who resists de-authorisation,” whose name is “transmitted largely without ‘difference,’ in either the heraldic or the Derridean sense” (83), and who does not call upon the critic “genuinely to deconstruct, rather to discover the principle and procedures of auto-deconstruction in the texts themselves” (84). The critical terminology employed by Punter in the writing of this book (a mixture that has been drawn together from a considerable number of disciplines and methodologies) is not always easily accessible and certainly not “too explicit.” However, Punter cannot be blamed for promising to his readers anything like “straight lines” through his reflections on literary narcissism and his own struggle with “the inevitable problem of how to speak about that which is not known” (ix).

204. Raine, Kathleen. Golgonooza, City of the Imagination: Last Studies in William Blake. Ipswich, Suff.: Golgonooza P; Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne P, 1991. £19.50 boards, £7.95/$14.95 paper.

—Kathleen Raine’s numerous contributions to the interpretation of Blake’s mythology and its dependence on an essentially Platonic “tradition,” the “hidden traces of the Perennial Philosophy” (3), no longer figure in the current critical debates surrounding the productions of the poet and artist in quite the same way they did during the 1960s and 1970s. The author’s life-long fascination with Blake has, however, never ceased, and even over the past decade it resulted in a series of articles that are here made available as a (the ultimate?) collection of her “last studies.” From the partly autobiographical introduction one learns that in “the academic world researchers talk of their ‘subject,’ and often in both senses of the word—‘subject’ not only as a field of study, but also as if the poet were himself ‘subject’ to their theories, often indeed ‘subjected’ to the Procrustean mutilation of some transient fashion.” True; yet how indeed it could possibly be otherwise I do not know. But then I begin page 106 | ↑ back to top suppose I would have to class myself as just another one of these researchers, not as a poet. Kathleen Raine, however, has distinguished herself as a poet in the very “tradition” that she claims was also Blake’s. And poets “read the same works [as researchers] but for other reasons, principally in search of meaning and wisdom.” Raine can therefore make a point of stressing that “Blake has not been [her] ‘subject’ but [her] Master, in the Indian sense of the word” (2). The eight essays that are “collected in this volume do not constitute a systematic study of Blake [such as Raine’s earlier books on the Master did]. . . . All . . . were written for some specific occasion; most are revised, to minimize repetition, and some extensively re-written” (6-7). Most of them have also been recorded in previous checklists; see Blake 20 (1986-87): 84 (#159-60); 21 (1987-88): 59 (#94); 22 (1988-89): 49 (#108); 23 (1989-90): 139 (#142); 25 (1991-92): 28 (#163-64).

205. *Raine, Kathleen. “The Sleep of Albion.” Merlin and Woman. Ed. R. J. Stewart. London, NY: Blandford P, 1988.

—Presumably this is the third published version of the same paper that was first read at the Celtic conference which was held at the University of Toronto in 1985, and then given again at the second Merlin conference in 1987; see Blake 21 (1987-88): 59 (#94); 25 (1991-92): 28 (#164); a fourth printing is part of the book that is recorded in the preceding entry.

206. Rajan, Tilottama. “En-Gendering the System: The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion.” The Mind in Creation: Essays on English Romantic Literature in Honour of Ross G. Woodman. Ed. J. Douglas Kneale. Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1992. 74-90, 155-57.

—Rajan enlarges on some of the themes of her recent book in this contribution to the Woodman festschrift and contributes to the lively discussion of gender issues that has, in the course of a few years, completely revised the understanding of the two illuminated books that are mentioned in Rajan’s title. See also #122 and 203, above, as well as #223 and 234, below.

207. Rajan, Tilottama. The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990. $42.50 boards, $14.95 paper.

—The principal theses of this book, addressing methodological problems in the hermeneutic tradition and in deconstruction, are known from an identically titled article in New Literary History 17 (1986): 573-94. Section B of the book’s part II is devoted to a discussion of “Canon and Heresy: Blake’s Intertextuality” (197-274). In its three chapters Rajan concentrates on a discussion of Blake’s Songs (221-34), Thel (234-46) and Visions (243-52), Europe (254-62) and Urizen (262-70). The Marriage (215-20), The Four Zoas, Milton (205-10), and Jerusalem (270-74) are also treated in some shorter sections.

208. Reed, Walter L. “Dimensions of Dialogue in the Book of Job: A Topology According to Bakhtin.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34 (1992): 177-96.

—The essay includes some fairly substantial commentary on Blake’s “London” (see 188-93 and fig. 2), as well as a chart with “Blake’s Answers to Job” (fig. 1).

209. *Rees, J. M. “Origin and Apocalypse: Prophetic Form in Blake’s Jerusalem.” Diss. U of London, 1987.

210. Richey, William. “‘The Covenant of Priam’: Blake’s Re-Visions of the Homeric Epic.” Dissertation Abstracts International 51 (1990-91): 3086A. U of California at Los Angeles, 1990.

—Examining “how Blake’s changing attitudes toward Homer and the classical tradition affected his poetic and philosophical development,” the author finds reason to take issue with “most” earlier critics who merely “downplayed the importance” of the shift leading from Blake’s involvement in British neoclassical thought to his later condemnation of “‘The Greek and Roman Classics’ as ‘the Antichrist.’” Richey is “convinced that [Blake’s] seemingly contradictory statements reflect a dramatic change in Blake’s thought which, to a large degree, determined the character of his later poetry.” Following a study of the neoclassical motifs in The Book of Thel and the “Bible of Hell,” the dissertation describes in detail the effect that the friendship with Hayley had on Blake’s use of elements from the classical tradition. “Blake began incorporating allusions to key episodes from the Iliad and Odyssey into Vala . . . . By 1804, however, the combined effect of Blake’s disenchantment with the French Revolution, his growing resentment of Hayley’s patronage, and his trial for sedition caused Blake to re-evaluate the classical tradition completely.” In Milton and Jerusalem he “waged a crusade against the classics to cure England of ‘the infection from the silly Greek & Latin slaves of the Sword.’” Though the latter is known well enough, Richey’s dissertation may contribute to the current promotion of a revised and more positive view of Blake’s friendship with Hayley (see also #147, above).

211. Rotenberg, Bettina. “Blake’s Contraries: A Poetics of Visionary Perception.” European Romantic Review 2 (1991-92): 81-98.

—Rotenberg starts out with the following questionnaire in mind: “Does poetry make possible a special kind of vision? Does it achieve a ‘privileged view’ of the ‘heights’ or does it supply another visionary code that writing itself undermines? In visionary poetry, which joins the dread of sight to an even deeper engagement with vision, contrary images of vision are yoked together. More than any other poet, William Blake constructs a mythology that embodies the dynamics of visionary perception within poetry, a visionary poetry by nature involved in an antagonism with itself” (81). Her examination of biblical prophecy and of Blake’s “Tiriel,” Urizen, and The Four Zoas in the light of “Heideggerian conception[s]” (93) leads to the recognition that it is “poetic language that intrinsically supplies the poet with the grounds for visionary perception. Nonetheless, what is coded as an ‘infinite’ vision in visionary^[e] poetry should be decoded both as fear of vision and a vision of fear. Underlying the sublime visions of poetry is a terror of vision and a vision of death. Visions of death necessarily involve the visionary writer with the limits of his own vision, and it is this double sense of finitude he must face when he begins to create. The visionary writer necessarily fears the vision that he drags out of darkness; and when he sits down to write, it is that fear he ultimately transcribes” (96). This article then addresses some of the issues that also figure quite prominently in book-length studies by Peter Otto and Vincent De Luca—for which see Blake 25 (1991-92): 27-28 (#153) and #92, above.

212. Rothenberg, Molly Anne. “Jerusalem’s ‘Forgotten Remembrances’: A Blakean Analysis of Narrativity and Ideology.” Genre 23 (1990): 205-26.

—According to Rothenberg, what has been “forgotten” in much “recent provocative scholarship devoted to . . . Blake’s Jerusalem . . . is an account of the historical conditions enabling both Blake’s discourse and that of postmodern literary theory, or an inquiry into the historical relationships of those discourses.” The article, therefore, commences with a critique of those “a historicist readings of Blake” which are here said to in effect “reproduce the narrative closures, interpretive exclusions, and metaphysical claims that are the focal points of Blake’s attack on the oppressive effects of a particular, historical world view” (205). As much concerned about the present as about history, Rothenberg then argues “that Jerusalem exposes—and condemns as oppressive—the hidden metaphysical assumptions and self-legitimating maneuvers of narrative in order to provide us with an analytics of the processes of exclusion, binarism, negation, hierarchizing, and transcendence that give rise to the production of the textual features we call narrative.” Rather than aligning Blake’s position with “cherished liberal assumptions about the origin and nature of liberty,” her reading attempts to clarify how and why “Jerusalem shows that the claims to liberty of the Enlightenment subject rest on unfounded metaphysical appeals that reproduce all the features and rationalizations of social tyranny. . . . As a result, the poem articulates a historical disjunction between liberalism and radicalism, unraveling the causes of liberalism’s apparently inevitable reproduction of and complicity in the conditions of oppression it attacks” (206). The same case, though in much more general terms, has been made before, for example in Woodring’s Politics in English Romantic Poetry of 1970. Nevertheless, I think it is important that—and like Essick in a recent article (see #107, above)—Rothenberg insists not so much on the poet’s wearing the Red Cap of Liberty in the streets of London, but (and a few years ago this might still have seemed heretical) on his “insight that the Enlightenment narratives of liberty and the self are dangerous because they provide precisely the conditions and legitimations for oppression on which tyranny historically has relied” (225). Because here as in two of her earlier publications Rothenberg concentrates on Jerusalem, her forthcoming book (see the introduction, above) is likely to center on an analysis of discursive structures in the same work.

213. *Sharpe, William Chapman. Unreal Cities: Urban Figuration in Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot, and Williams. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. $29.95/£21.50 boards.

—The introductory chapter to this book is said to offer yet another detailed reading of “London.” Sharpe’s study appears to be based on his dissertation, for which see Dissertation Abstracts International 44 (1983-84): 2776A.

214. Smith, Donald M. “Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience and Eighteenth-Century Religious and Moral Verse for Children.” Essays in Arts and Sciences 20 (1991): 1-16.

—When writing and etching the plates of the Songs, Blake followed “established models and in so doing radically changed their traditional intent and effect and in several ways transcended them” (15). These conclusions—and the author seems to be aware of this—will not sound altogether unfamiliar to the seasoned Blake scholar. Also, one may really have no need to be informed that “Blake’s radical politics, mysticism, and revolutionary artistry, his life and art are very much rooted in the era in which he lived.” However, Smith’s article is nevertheless quite useful in various ways. It offers a brief introduction to an “all but forgotten literary genre” (1), its major exponents such as Bunyan, Watts, Wright, Foxton, Doddridge, Cotton, Marchant, Wesley, Smart, Barbauld and their works (2-5), and to the “the aim of the genre” (5) as a whole. Smith then describes the general similarities in the format, the length of the verses, their simple language, their preferred meters, and the shared subject matter that characterize moralizing eighteenth-century children’s verse and the Songs (7-12). Finally, this is followed by a discussion of the divergence of Blake’s lyrics from the practice of earlier religious verse especially in the references to Christianity (12-15).

215. Sportelli, Annamaria. “Mito e tempo in ‘The French Revolution’ di William Blake.” La Rivoluzione francese in Inghilterra. Ed. Lilla Maria Crisafulli Jones. Romanticismo e dintorni 4. Naples, It.: Liguori, 1990. 273-92. Lit. 45000 paper.

216. Srigley, Michael. “The Sickness of Blake’s Rose.” Blake 26 (1992-93): 4-8.

—See also #136, above.

217. *Stalmaszczyk, Piotr. “Blake and Swedenborg.” Studies in English and American Literatures: 1. Ed. Krystyn Q. Poklewska and Janina Kwaśniak.^[e] Acta universitatis odziensis: Folia litteraria 24. Łódz, Pol.: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 1988. 103-13.

218. Stanton, Michael N. “Blake, ‘B. V.,’ and Billy Budd.” Melville Society Extracts 71 (1987): 12-16.

—There may be “little or no direct allusion to Blake in Billy Budd” (13), yet at the same time the Blakean quality of Melville’s novel “is evident in its treatment of themes such as innocence vs. experience, institutions vs. individuals, the natural and spontaneous vs. the artificial and repressive.” Stanton certainly has sufficient documentary evidence to offer to make his case a very plausible one. It is known that by “at least 1870” (12) Melville owned a copy of Gilchrist’s Life, and that while he was at work on his final revisions of Billy Budd in 1888 he read about Blake’s poetry in a scarce book by “B. V.” (1834-82). Melville’s friend James Billson had sent him one of only 160 copies of the British poet James Thomson’s Shelley, a Poem; . . . to Which Is Added an Essay on the Poems of William Blake that had been posthumously printed for private circulation. Stanton, of course, is primarily interested in demonstrating how Melville’s acquaintance with part of Blake’s writings and with Thomson’s essay helped to shape some of the episodes and the literary characters for Billy Budd(14-15); the student of Blake, however, is likely to be particularly struck by the quotations here offered from Thomson’s “Essay.” This text, by the way, started as no more than a review of Gilchrist’s Life, but it is full of promises that have been fulfilled (if they have or can be fulfilled at all) by Blake studies only a hundred years after its initial publication. It is most easily accessible today in a 1967 edition of Thomson’s Selected Prose (see Bentley 1977, #2837D).

219. Stemmler, Joan K. “‘Undisturbed above once in a Lustre’: Francis Douce, George Cumberland and William Blake at the Bodleian Library and Ashmolean Museum.” Blake 26 (1992-93): 9-18.

220. Stevenson, James A. “Reflections on William Blake and Thomas Paine.” San José Studies 15.3 (1989): 62-70.

—Starting out from the observation that both Blake and Paine “were part of an artisan milieu which bred independence, self-reliance, reformism, and creative activity,” the author attributes to these shared “backgrounds and outlooks . . . the basis for an iconoclastic affinity” (62). However, Stevenson is well aware of the problematic question “of what led Blake paradoxically to praise Paine’s deism while condemning deism in general.” While he finds a provisional answer in “an emotive commonality” between the two men, and in the “political sympathies” and “imaginative style” that Blake may have admired in Paine (63), Stevenson’s “Reflections” lead to a result that is in keeping with other recent reexaminations of Blake’s relationships with members of the Johnson circle: “Blake understood, as Paine did not, that the liberal, industrial state had the same potential to dehumanize as did the old regime which it was supplanting. Had Paine read any of Blake’s visionary poetry, the world’s most notorious deist might have realized some of the dangers that his ‘contrary’ free philosophy overlooked” (69-70). For Stevenson’s subject see also #53, 66, 107, 140, 162, 173, and 212, above, as well as #316, and 319, below.

221. Storch, Margaret. Sons and Adversaries: Women in William Blake and D. H. Lawrence. Knoxville, TN: U of Tennessee P, 1990. $28.95 boards.

—This book participates in the debate concerning gender-related issues in the poetry of William Blake which has come to “dominate” much recent Blake criticism (see also #108, 122, 234, etc.). In a sequence of parallel and neatly symmetrical moves, Storch examines “Patterns of Maternal Loss” in early Blake (25-44) and early Lawrence (45-64), the “Images of Women” in Blake (65-96) and Lawrence (97-130), the (temporary) “Triumph of Masculinity in Blake’s Milton” (131-56) and in Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent (157-78), before she arrives at her conclusion. The latter stresses the “Pastoral Reconciliation in Blake’s Illustrations to Virgil and Job, and in Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (179-90; for a contrary view of the pastoral see #58, above). On the book’s final page of text, one is told that the “images of women and men depicted in Blake and Lawrence make a powerful impression upon their readers because each was able to get very close to the elemental sources of love and hate” (190). This echoes a sentence from the “Preface,” stating that these two artists “stir powerful reactions in many people because they are in close touch with the sources of love and hate in all of us” (xi), and the author’s conclusions thus arrive at the desired quod erat demonstrandum. On the way, readers will have learned about Blake’s general affinity with Lawrence, about images of mothers, daughters (including all those little girls in Blake), emanations, the Shadowy Female and their male counter-images in a series of interpretations in which, besides Milton, Blake’s Songs, the Vala manuscript (and its illustrations), Jerusalem, and the Virgil and Job illustrations figure most prominently. Methodologically, Storch relies on “object-relations psychoanalysis, specifically, the ideas of Melanie Klein,” with the conviction that these views, because Klein “explores the foundations of human nature, . . . can be especially revealing when used to investigate works of art” (xi). Though Storch’s analyses of the functioning of, say, Blake’s images of the authoritarian father figures in Blake’s poetry are suggestive and often convincing, the understanding of the psychological relationships between the male and female protagonists in Blake’s writings are not the author’s central concern. Rather, Storch aims at a psychoanalytical knowledge of the deeper and hidden layer of the “unconscious material within Blake himself.” The literary critic thus assumes the role of the analyst and becomes engaged in what appears to me to be some sort of necromantic therapy, and the entire study is informed by the author’s creed that—to an unusual extent—“Blake has an urgent emotional involvement with his themes and dramatic enactments: his perceptions about human nature are ultimately perceptions about himself” (xii). Many, if not all, of the critical approaches that are currently in use in Blake scholarship would allow one to accept this statement as a truism. However, some would probably argue that these are perceptions “about himself” and “about human nature” as experienced by Blake in his social surroundings, and that they were shaped by Blake’s conscious involvement in the rhetorics of a complex field of aesthetical, linguistical, political, and institutional discourses. Storch would possibly agree, yet in her book has preferred what appears to me as a rather narrow psychoanalytical focus on the poet as an individual and on the “unconscious.” Still, I would like to stress that her readings of the poetry and, in particular, of its “treatment of women” and of the “accompanying images of begin page 108 | ↑ back to top masculinity and themes of male bonding,” of the “response to women and to male identity” (xi), of the “split images of menacing women; defensive fantasies of enclosing wombs; phallic female forms; and the notion of men as primary beings who give birth to women, their emanations, only to reabsorb them in the perfected state of redemption” (xii) in Blake’s writings have little to do with the crude identification of the life and the work in King’s new biography of Blake (see #147, above). That there is a biographical context for this imagery in Blake which had concrete and manifest reality outside as well as inside the realm of the merely “unconscious” has recently been demonstrated (see #108, above). See also 231 and 397, below.

222. *Suzuki, Masashi. “Senso to uzumaki: The Four Zoas ni okeru chikara.” Studies in English Literature/Eibungaku Kenkyu [Tokyo, Jap.] 64 (1987): 3-18.

—This article is said to study “War and Vortex: Power in The Four Zoas.”

223. Swearingen, James E. “The Enigma of Identity in Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 91 (1992): 203-15.

—Swearingen’s article on Visions had probably been submitted for publication before some closely related studies such as Wilkie’s book on Thel and Oothoon, or Goslee’s “Questioning the Master Trope” appeared in print (see Blake 25 [1991-92]: 21 [#100], as well as #122, #234 in the present compilation). Unlike Goslee he does not address the problem of race and gender here, but follows earlier feminist readings of Visions; Swearingen sees that the poem “raises the question of sexual difference in a dramatic, even inflammatory way” (203) and invites, at the same time, “reflection . . . on the subordinate question of property” (204). The author’s synopsis of the events that are related in the illuminated book considers “three distinct ways in which Oothoon might relate to her past” as models of “identity” (203), and it highlights the problematic relation of the private with the public domain. “Can liberation be a subjective affair or does individual illumination” such as Oothoon’s “remain essentially quixotic? Such an individual challenge remains a private event, unable to carry out the public translation of one code into another. Nor does Blake rest his hopes on the possibility that new vision will somehow expand from the individual to the world. In one respect, then, the poem ends without getting anywhere” (214). Though he finds “something different, something unspoken, something almost certainly unthought, in the ending of the Visions,” Swearingen (here coming close to Herbert Marcuse’s aesthetics) knows of a positive function in such an “open” ending. Blake “lets Oothoon’s exposition of the old patriarchal economy stand, lets it reveal how the principles of validation victimize everyone. Meanwhile, in love, she exemplifies an openness determined by no kind of exclusion, not even that of the powermongers” (215). The article, I think, is also very good where it comes to the purpose of the “chorus.” “In striking contrast with the male figures, the ‘chorus’ of women does not seek to speak for Oothoon; they let her speak, . . . . Without conceptualizing the rape and becoming locked in the same economy by opposition, they add public significance to Oothoon’s experience, deny that the story is private, and, in making it typical, make it political” (214). Much like Rothenberg (see #212, above)—or Blake himself—Swearingen, too, shows no signs of disillusionment. He seems convinced that there are still some lessons we may learn from the investigation of the art and poetry of the past, and in his concluding sentence thus turns to the present. Reading Visions of the Daughters of Albion makes him call quite vehemently for “a thinking that banishes the discriminatory alterity of gender, suffering, and death” (215). I like this a lot, and I hope many others will, too. Yet I still wonder (just as I did in the late 60s) how such messages may “expand from the individual to the world.” See also #122, 203, and 206-07, above.

224. Swearingen, James E. “Time and History in Blake’s Europe.” Clio 20 (1991): 109-21.

—Following two and a half pages that introduce Blake’s working methods, his social commitment and revolutionary inclinations during the 1790s, and some elementary account of Blake’s myth, Swearingen advises the reader to take Blake’s “symbols as indeterminate,” so that the act of reading “approaches the world in the mode of questioning.” He then suggests that instead of “using the concepts of time and history to interpret Europe, we will let the poem interrogate those concepts.” The announcement is put into practice by a summary of events in the “Preludium” (112-13), the “Prophecy” (113-17), and the “Fairy’s” additional plate (117-21). Swearingen pinpoints those passages where it can be shown that in Europe “the image of linear time becomes problematic as the time of natural cycles appears to subordinate and deploy linearity within the pattern of repetition” (111). There is some overlap here with, say, Otto’s study of “Time and Eternity” in Urizen (see #192, above); however, where the latter concentrated on the ontic and the ontological “versions” of sequential time, Swearingen is concerned with linear and cyclical time in history and distinguishes these by gendering the images of linear time as the “masculine,” of the cycle of natural recurrences in time as the “feminine” (120) with the “Fairy” as “essentially gender-neutral” (118). In Swearingen’s reading of Europe, this strategy allows for some surprising revisions. One example must be sufficient here: “Both Enitharmon and ‘Man’ must be more than natural entities contained in her dream. Instead of being embedded, like Orc, in time and looking ahead for some redemptive event, she has time, and that makes her historical. However restrictive in other respects, her experience restores history to nature” (116). See also #156, above.

225. Swearingen, James E. “William Blake’s Figural Politics.” ELH 59 (1992): 125-44.

—The third of Swearingen’s publications of the 1991-92 period is concerned with Jerusalem and devoted to “an inquiry into the political implications of three levels of vision: the efforts of Urizen to preserve things from time and change [127-29], the labor of Los to build three-fold Golgonooza [130-34], and the discourse of the Eternals as a perpetual beginning that redeems everyday life [134-42]” (127). Asking whether or not there is or can be “a polity of the Eternals” (125), and “what might the polity of Jerusalem be” (126), Swearingen first points out that “in situating eternity within time, Blake displaces the dialectic of worldly appetites in a kingdom of Satan and hope for otherworldly salvation in a kingdom of Christ” (127; see also #192, above). His conclusions with regard to Blake’s political vision in Jerusalem are these: “As a political virtue, love overreaches the exclusivity of humanism . . . no tie to a particular order of things weakens the bond of the Eternals to the polity. The perpetual figuring motion of that public life seeks to preserve no aim as it fulfills no scheme and is authorized by no principle. The polity of Jerusalem is ‘figural’ in that Blake declines to smash one idol by instituting another, but instead draws the reader into the dynamics of perpetual figuring and refiguring of social life” (142-43). See also #235, below.

226. Thorpe, Douglas. A New Earth: The Labor of Language in Pearl, Herbert’s Temple, and Blake’s Jerusalem. Washington, DC: Catholic U of America P, 1991. $39.95 boards.

—This publication presents “a study of the language of three of England’s greatest religious poets, seen from the perspective of both theological and linguistic concerns” in what is a considerably revised version of the author’s 1983 dissertation (see Blake 18[1984-85]: 105 [#107]). The chapters on the Pearl poet, Herbert, and Blake are framed by an “Introduction” (1-26), the “Conclusion: Toward the End of the Image” (177-200), and an “Epilogue” (201-02) which serve to carry the author’s argument “beyond poetry and into . . . other matters,” that is into theology as applied to the “larger concerns of our culture” (ix). Thorpe’s aim is to demonstrate that each of the three poets discussed “grounds his own poetics in an understanding of figurative language drawn from the New Testament parables: the language of Jesus,” and he wants “to use these writers as a means of exploring the relationship between language and the world, between body and spirit, and . . . the nature of what we call labor” (2). Chapter 4 is “Razing Jerusalem: Blake’s Word as World” (123-175). It asks for the function and functioning of the word (and the “Word”) as metaphor, as symbol, and—finally—as the “world” in Blake’s epic. The answers are made somewhat easier by Thorpe’s identification of the author with Los (see, e.g., 126 or 157). In the author’s Christian perspective “Blake’s mental warfare works with and within the world of images, revealing that what we see ‘around’ us is not simply out there but also in here. It is neither out nor in for Blake: it is simply here and now” (127). Such a statement may, in the light of much recent research, seem an oversimplification which by means of an equation evades more than one important critical crux inherent in Jerusalem. Moreover, and depending on one’s understanding of the term “poetic,” one may feel tempted to yield to some heretical distrust when being told that “‘To build the Universe’ for Blake is nothing but a poetic act, as Jerusalem sets out to begin page 109 | ↑ back to top demonstrate” (131). Fortunately though, Thorpe’s idea concerning the word as world in Blake is not entirely blind to “what we see ‘around’ us.” For example, his interpretation of Jerusalem does include references to such (outer-) worldly^[e] phenomena as money and economy, or alienated and unalienated labor, which he treats as part of Blake’s theme in the epic (158-62). To write about Jerusalem primarily as the work of a religious poet may all too easily have led to some crude distortions; this, I feel, is not the case in Thorpe’s cautiously argued book. Occasionally, I found some of the religious and/or theological overtones in New Earth rather distracting; on the whole, however, the author’s definition of the religious poet guarantees that even the heathen may at least argue with Thorpe’s brand of liberal theology and the perspective it supplies for a reading of Blake’s words and worlds. Religious poets here are not identified as those who seek “to express the inexpressible,” but as the poets who “reveal that whatever we know of the ‘ineffable’ is known precisely in our own labor, which is inevitably rooted in a concrete here and now” (5). Would Blake have enlisted?

227. Tolley, Michael J. “‘Words Standing in Chariots’: The Literalism of Blake’s Imagination.” Imagining Romanticism: Essays on English and Australian Romanticism. Ed. Deirdre Coleman and Peter Otto. Locust Hill Literary Studies 10. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill P, 1992. 125-42. $35.00 boards.

—The author reexamines the relation between word and image in Blake, and “the power of words to control passionate utterance” (125). Tolley draws his examples from Blake’s illustrations of the Bible, of Shakespeare, Milton, and Young, and he refers to Fuseli’s “Nightmare” composition and Darwin’s Botanic Garden in a comparison (139-41). His understanding of Blake’s “literalism” in the use of his sources often appears to be related to recent trends in the reinterpretation of the Dante watercolors (see Blake 23 [1989-90]: 131 [#73]; 25 (1991-92): 14 [#47], 31 [#186]). The methodology for interpreting Blake’s images that is here described, and the cautious yet explicit retreat from the position of the late Albert Roe (who suggested “that Blake was always and only illustrating himself” [134]), also supply what I believe to be a very promising approach for John E. Grant’s and Tolley’s commentary on the Night Thoughts designs that is still forthcoming. For some general information on this new collection of essays, see #91, above.

228. *Trawick, Leonard. “Teaching Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience.” Teaching Eighteenth-Century Poetry. Ed. Christopher Fox. New York, NY: AMS P, 1990. 319-29. $94.50 boards.

—See also #150, above, for another essay on Blake that was published in the same collection.

229. *Tuchiya, Shigeko. “Blake no Me mo Shinju ni?” Eigo Seinen 134 (1988): 377-79.

230. Van Lieshout, Julius Adrianus Theodorus. “Within and Without Eternity: The Dynamics of Interaction in William Blake’s Myth and Poetry.” Dissertation Abstracts International 53 (1992-93): 165A. U of Iowa, 1991.

—Because “Blake’s poetry and myth lack a centre or minimal element that can serve as the starting-point for linear analysis,” the author thought it necessary to “use notions developed by chaos theory, particularly self-similarity and fractals, to explain the dynamic nature and structure of Eternity and Blake’s poetry.” Doing so, what did he find? “In his visionary poetry, . . . Blake sets the parameters for a mythic field of infinite potential that is realized in the act of reading. If the reader enters this field,” she or he is said “to recreate Eternity out of a reductive, passive, and linear Generation.” It is the “Eternals’ conversations [in ‘Visionary forms dramatic’ that] constitute the dynamic interaction between Eternity and Generation, and Eternity is the continuous act of identifying the human forms in what the Fall reduces to physical objects. This identification is realized in the reader’s interaction with the text, and man’s interactions with the world.”

231. Welch, Dennis M. “Blake’s ‘Tyger’ and Comic Vision.” CEA Critic 53 (1990-91): 29-39.

—For other recent studies of Blake’s most popular poem see #145 and 197, above.

232. Widauer, Simone. “Blake und Dante: William Blakes Illustrationen zur Göttlichen Komödie.” Lic. phil. thesis. U of Basle, Switz., 1992.

—This unpublished typescript of a Swiss master’s thesis presents an account of the tradition that Blake was working in when creating his Dante illustrations, briefly comments on Fuseli’s and Flaxman’s Dante drawings, examines Blake’s verbal commentaries on Dante (and his translator Boyd), and then (72-128) interprets five of the watercolors in great detail (“Dante Running from the Three Beasts,” “The Mission of Virgil,” “Agnolo Brunelleschi Half Transformed by the Serpent,” “Dante at the Moment of Entering the Fire,” and “Dante Adoring Christ,” i.e., Butlin 1981, #812[1, 3, 52, 85, and 90]). Here special attention is being paid to the varying degree of textual referentiality that marks Blake’s visual “translations” of Dante’s epic. Widauer summarizes the results of her exemplary analyses by addressing Blake’s approach to pictorial space, gestures and physiognomical expression, outline, form and perception (128-44).

233. Wiener, Gary A. “Lawrence’s ‘Little Girl Lost.’” D. H. Lawrence Review 19 (1987): 243-53.

—Though primarily interested in Lawrence’s work, the author also treats the “artistic kinship of Lawrence and Blake” (245). For (much) more on Lawrence and Blake see #221, above.

234. Wilkie, Brian. Blake’s Thel and Oothoon. English Literary Studies Monograph Series 48. Victoria, BC: English Literary Studies (Department of English, U of Victoria), 1990. $8.50 paper.

—Though this is not evident from its title, this slim volume is as much an edition as it is a critical study, and it offers very good value for money indeed. Readers are here supplied with black-and-white reproductions of The Book of Thel, copy G, and of Visions of the Daughters of Albion, copy P, both from the Fitzwilliam Museum. They are also given the text of these poems interleaved with the plates (8-45). The remaining pages are devoted to a critical examination of the two books and form the monograph proper. Following an introduction in which he confronts his readers with some key “Issues” concerning the two texts and (to a limited extent) the illuminations that accompany them (47-51), Wilkie discusses “Relationships and Modes” (52-57), asks for “Correspondences” (58-62), examines the heroines’ “Role and Identity” (63-65), and observes “Metamorphoses” (66-72); he then treats the themes of “Sexuality” (73-84) and of “Mother, Child, Wife” (85-88) in both poems, studies their “Symbiosis” (89-96), and concludes with a set of “Interferences” (97-104) from the preceding chapters. The study of Blake’s heroines has recently gained new momentum, and Wilkie’s book participates in this reevaluation of The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion. As yet, no new consensus has been reached, readings that attribute a feminist or an anti-feminist stance to these texts compete with each other, and occasionally the interpretative antagonisms appear to be rooted in and to be addressing different positions in present-day gender politics rather than Blake’s words or pictures. Also, where James King (see #147, above) smells perversion, Wilkie may attribute to Blake an “almost unparalleled^[e] sensitivity to the beauty of the sexual act” (49). On the whole, this new monograph successfully questions many elements of various accepted “model readings” of Thel and Visions. Wilkie’s explication clearly shows how limited the interpretative value of the “threefold model of progress from Innocence through Experience to a higher Innocence” or “the assumption that a fall from Innocence to Experience is always a fortunate one” (97) really is, and he uses the “principle of simultaneity” to reinvest the two heroines with “a complexity of psychological dynamics that makes them more fully human” (98). He also forcefully argues that “to see [Blake’s variations over a given theme] as sequential corrections of himself” can sometimes result in what is “almost surely an error.” This much granted, such an insight surely cannot be treated as a general rule, applicable to Blake’s “total work.” In the poet’s manuscript drafts and in the artist’s prints and drawings one does encounter “variations” that clearly are such “sequential corrections” of earlier and experimental solutions to a given artistic problem. Wilkie’s idea of “Blake’s view of his total work . . . as a vast, ongoing, organic dialogue of Blake with himself, in which no piece of his spiritual history was ever simply discarded” (99), i.e., his own dynamic version of Frye’s more static model of “cycles,” therefore tends to be slightly simplistic and one-sided, too. It does not allow enough room for the history of both writing and reading, or for the questions posed by the response of contemporary readers of Blake (if there really were any). Much better then to end this note with the author’s appeal in which he states that the “greatest challenge in reading Thel and Visions . . . is to do justice to [Blake’s] openmindedness . . . without sentimentalizing him, without foolishly attempting to dilute the passion (including the anger) of his prophetic begin page 110 | ↑ back to top vocation” (51). For other studies of Blake’s Oothoon and Thel see #122, 159, 203, 206-07 and 223, above, as well as the recent articles by Goslee and by Linkin that have been listed in Blake 25 (1991-92): 21, 24 (#100, 132).

235. Williams, Nicholas Mark. “Blake’s Cunning Utopia: Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake.” Dissertation Abstracts International 52 (1991-92): 1346A. Emory U, 1990.

—“The present state of Blake criticism can be said to resemble, as it has for several decades past, a state of war.” Williams finds that “this war is between . . . those who would indicate [Blake’s] participation in a largely intellectual prophetic or philosophic tradition and those who would identify his poetry’s determination by its material and social conditions. The thesis of ideology and utopia . . . provides the framework for an attempt to articulate this battle between Blake’s interpreters.” Therefore, the author “considers several contemporary parallels for Blake’s ideas of both a theory of ideology and a theory of utopia: Mary Wollstonecraft, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and Robert Owen. In a chronological survey of the entire corpus [of his writings] . . . the evolution of Blake’s utopianism and its relation to a variously universalized or particularized concept of ideology is considered at length.” Williams thus examines “Blake’s desire for an extraideological ‘nowhere’” and “his despair in the face of an inescapable ideology . . . with an eye towards providing models of interpretation which are not merely negative, but which also acknowledge the positive, properly utopian energy at work in the literary text.” This dissertation, then, touches on some of the same issues that have recently been discussed in the work of James Swearingen (see #223-25, above).

236. Wright, Julia M. “‘Empire is no More’: Odin and Orc in America.” Blake 26 (1992-93): 26-29.

237. Yogev, Michael. “Covenant of the Word: The Bible in William Blake’s Late Prophetic Poems.” Dissertation Abstracts International 52 (1991-92): 2938A. U of Washington, 1991.

—“The Bible is unquestionably the one text Blake knew and studied most deeply. In this dissertation, I examine Blake’s unorthodox and inventive methods of incorporating Biblical allusions and tropes into his late prophetic poems, The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem.” In an attempt to continue the work begun by Leslie Tannenbaum, the author first “presents a historical overview of the hermeneutic tradition to which Blake was likely exposed,” and finds that “Blake develops what I call a ‘contrary hermeneutic,’ . . . that . . . avoids allegory’s abstractions, subverts the hermeneutic closure and historical determinism of typology, and rejects rabbinic legalism.” In Vala, or The Four Zoas Yogev sees “a critique of John’s apocalypse itself,” in Milton an “activist view of the individual’s task of reforming the world,” and as its “key metaphor . . . Jacob’s struggle with the angel.” He then addresses, in his concluding chapter, “the Minute Particulars of Jerusalem,” which “reveal” to him “how Scripture conditions Blake’s artistic and ethical vision on the most literal level.” For a related study of Blake’s use of biblical typology turn to #163, and for another dissertation, touching on some of the same questions, to #134; see also Thorpe’s book (#226), above.

238. *Zgorzelski, Andrzej. “Stategia wizji unoaczniacych w wierszu W. Blake’a ‘The Tyger.’” Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny 36 (1989): 115-32.

James Barry

257. Munro, Jane. “Italian Landscape Drawings by James Barry.” Master Drawings 29 (1991): 307-10.

—The author attributes to Barry three “landscape drawings and the fragment of a fourth . . ., all evidently belonging to a group of sketches made on a journey from Rome to Naples in 1769.” These sketchbook “‘memorials’ of the landscape through which he passed” (307) were tracked down in the collections of the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Yale Center for British Art; they are here reproduced for the first time (see figs. 2-5) and are considered “an important addition to the graphic oeuvre of one of Britain’s most fascinating eighteenth-century painters” (310). See also Blake 16 (1984-85): 106 (#119).

See also #94, 241, 245, 247, and 256, above, as well as #263 and 267-68, below.

James Basire

See #25 and 94, above.

Robert Blake

See #25-26, above.

Edward Calvert

See #26 and 245, above.

William Cowper

258. *Edgecombe, R. S. “Homilectic Conversation: William Cowper’s Table Talk.” University of Dayton Review 20 (1989): 39-49.

259. Faulkner, Peter. “William Cowper and the Poetry of Empire.” Durham University Journal ns 52 (1991): 165-73.

George Cumberland

See #27, 49, 94, and 219, above.

Erasmus Darwin

260. Bewell, Alan. “‘Jacobin Plants’: Botany as Social Theory in the 1790s.” Wordsworth Circle 20 (1989): 132-39.

—A fascinating account of botanical writing during the 1790s and its social applications; Bewell, after describing the “success of Linnaeus’ Sexual System of Plants” (133) and its consequences, turns to Darwin’s Loves of the Plants, the second part of The Botanic Garden. His analysis of the poem, its notes, and Fuseli’s frontispiece design leads to the recognition, first, that for Darwin “the patriarchal family was not a universal human institution, that other societies had developed alternate arrangements” (135), and that, second, “the horticultural discourse on luxuriants could easily be adapted to social critique” (138). Bewell also examines Wollstonecraft’s critical response to “the social [and gendered] use of botanical metaphor” begin page 113 | ↑ back to top (137) in detail, and he draws attention to “Blake’s use” (138) of such imagery.

261. *Wordsworth, Jonathan, ed. Erasmus Darwin: The Botanic Garden, Part II: Containing The Loves of the Plants, a Poem, with Philosophical Notes 1789. Revolution and Romanticism, 1789-1834: A Series of Facsimile Reprints. Oxford, Oxon.: Woodstock Books, 1991. £48.00/$85.00 boards.

See also #162, 171, 173, 227, and 244, above.

John Flaxman

262. Benge, Glenn F. “Barye, Flaxman and Phidias.” La scultura nel XIX secolo/La sculpture du XIXe siècle/Nineteenth Century Sculpture. Ed. Horst W. Janson. Atti del XXIV Congresso Internazionale di Storia dell’ Arte 6. Bologna, It.: Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice Bologna, 1984. 103-10.

—This is the published version of a paper read on the occasion of the 24th International Congress in the History of Art, organized by the C.I.H.A. at Bologna, 10-18 Sept. 1979. Glenn concentrates on the use of copies from Flaxman’s compositions in Barye’s drawings and plaster sketches. A little more on Flaxman can be found in Nicholas Penny’s contribution to the same volume of conference proceedings, concerned with “Symbol and Style in English Nineteenth Century Sepulchral Sculpture” (189-98).

263. Dörrbecker, D. W. “Vom ‘Schlechten Geschmack’: Die akademische Kritik des Bemini-Stiles bei John Flaxman und deren britische Exzentrizität.” Europäische Barock-Rezeption. Ed. Klaus Garber, in association with Ferdinand van Ingen, et al. Wolfenbütteler Arbeiten zur Barockforschung 20. Vol. 2. Wiesbaden, Ger.: Harrassowitz, for the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, 1991. 1265-94.

—The article examines the idea (and the ideology) of the historical “progress” of the arts that underlies Flaxman’s Lectures on Sculpture, as Delivered before the President and Members of the Royal Academy (first published in 1828). Drawing on related sources (such as the lectures and discourses delivered at the Royal Academy by Reynolds, Barry, Fuseli, and Opie), and on recent critical contributions to the study of British art theory of the late eighteenth century (particularly those of Barrell and Eaves), the author attempts to demonstrate that Flaxman’s account of Italian seventeenth- and British eighteenth-century sculpture, despite its seeming topicality, was guided by a rather peculiar model of the historical “development” of the arts. According to this sub-text of the sculptor’s lectures, the historical telos of British art around 1800 was a new “renaissance,” inaugurated at the Royal Academy, and in tune with the idea (and the ideology) of a “Britannia Triumphans.”

264. Groseclose, Barbara. “Imag(in)ing Indians.” Art History 13 (1990): 488-515.

—This is an illustrated examination of the ancillary figures of Indians that were employed in the commissions for monuments executed by Flaxman and some of his contemporaries for patrons in India. See, especially, 500 and 503.

265. *Hall, Michael. “In the Right Setting.” Country Life 21 Nov. 1991: 98-99.

—The article reports on the plans to reinstall the Flaxman Gallery at University College London.

266. *McAvera, Brian. “Richard Hamilton, Ulysses, and the Flaxman Factor.” Art Monthly Mar. 1989: 19-21.

—McAvera draws attention to the relation between the visual and the verbal in those of Hamilton’s prints that have been inspired by Joyce’s Ulysses, and then compares it to that in Flaxman’s series of illustrations to classical literature.

267. *Panofsky, Dora, and Erwin Panofsky. “Romanticism, Classicist and Victorian.” Pandora’s Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol. Bollingen Series 52. [3rd ed.] Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991.

—This is probably no more than a reprint of the second edition (1962) of the Panofskys’ study of Barry’s “Creation of Pandora” and Flaxman’s Hesiod illustrations that were engraved by Blake for the 1817 publication. See also the subsequent entry.

268. Panofsky, Dora, and Erwin Panofsky. “Romantik, klassizistische und viktorianische.” Die Büchse der Pandora: Bedeutungswandel eines mythischen Symbols. Trans. Peter D. Krumme. Edition Pandora [spec. ed.]. Frankfort on the Main, Ger.: Campus, 1992. 97-124.

—This is the German translation of a classic first published in 1956; some of Blake’s Hesiod engravings after Flaxman are here reproduced as figs. 44-47.

269. *Ramage, Nancy H. “Owed to a Grecian Urn: The Debt of Flaxman and Wedgwood to Hamilton.” Ars ceramica 6 (1989): 8-12.

270. *Reichner, Robert J. “Wedgwood Chessmen.” Ars ceramica 7 (1990): 24-28.

—This chess set was designed by Flaxman in 1783, and the first chessmen to be produced in Jasper ware were sold by the firm of Wedgwood by 1785.

See also #94, 241, 244-45, 250, and 253, above.

Henry Fuseli

271. *Andersen, Jørgen. “De haengte mand.” Cras 54 (1989): 34-47.

—This essay is said to be concerned with the iconography of violence and lust in the drawings of Henry Fuseli.

272. Bate, Jonathan. Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730-1830. Oxford, Oxon.: Clarendon P, 1989.

—The book includes discussions of Fuseli’s Shakespearean designs and their impact (46-47, 52-57, and 93-94). Bate also devotes a section to Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (45-58 and passim).

272A. Berwanger, Bettina. “Johann Heinrich Füsslis Nibelungenillustrationen.” M.A. thesis. U of Trier, Ger., 1991.

273. Bircher, Martin, and Gisold Lammel, eds. Helvetien in Deutschland: Schweizer Kunst aus Residenzen deutscher Klassik 1770-1830. Strauhof Zürich 5. Exh. cat. Zurich, Switz.: OZV Offizin Zürich Verlags-AG, 1990 (distributed outside Switzerland by the VCH Verlagsgesellschaft, Weinheim, Ger.). DM58.00 boards.

—The present publication commemorates an exhibition that was organized in cooperation with the Kunstsammlungen Weimar and was shown at the Zurich Strauhof (25 Oct. 1990-6 Jan. 1991) and then at the Hällisch-Fränkisches Museum in Schwäbisch Hall, Ger. (19 Jan.-3 Mar. 1991). The introductory essays include discussions of Lavater’s Essays in Physiognomy and Lips’s engravings for the first edition (44-54), and a chapter on “‘Freudequellen im Elysium der Phantasie’: Johann Heinrich Füssli” (74-89). Angelica Kauffmann was represented in the exhibition by three works (100-05), and another short chapter deals, again, with the “‘Beförderung der Menschenkenntniß’: Johann Caspar Lavater” (108-11).

274. Butlin, Martin. Drawings by Henry Fuseli, R.A.: From a Private Collection. Sale [cat.] 4739. London: Christie’s, 1992.

—This year’s most important Fuseli publication catalogues “an album containing well over fifty hitherto unknown drawings” by the artist (many of them on the recto and verso of the sheet). It covers “nearly every aspect of Fuseli’s career and subject matter” [7]. Butlin’s “Introduction” [7-9] briefly chronicles Fuseli’s biography, describes the album, tells of its compilation, and comments on its provenance: it “was assembled by a member of [a] family with which Fuseli was closely associated, the Moores. Inscribed inside the cover of the album in which these drawings were mounted is the name ‘Harriet Jane Moore’” [8]. Harriet Moore was also the recipient of copy E of Blake’s For Children (presented to her by Fuseli in 1806) and the owner of various other works by Fuseli, including the so-called Roman Album. Unlike this album, which is preserved in the British Museum Print Room, the newly rediscovered series of drawings was broken up into 57 lots for the sale. Most of the items that are here expertly described by Butlin fetched prices near or well above the higher estimates during the sale on 14 Apr. 1992; the success of the sale exemplified, again, the high esteem in which Fuseli’s sketches and studies, rather than his finished paintings, are held by twentieth-century curators and collectors. (Some of the consequences of this preference are addressed in the annotation to #281, below.) At least until the publication of the English-language edition of Gert Schiff’s catalogue raisonné of Fuseli’s works, to be translated and fully revised by David Weinglass, the present beautifully illustrated catalogue will remain indispensable for the student of Fuseli’s style and iconography. However, on account of the tight production schedule, and much to the distress of the author, the auctioneers decided to entrust their own staff rather than Butlin himself with the proofreading of the text. This resulted in a couple of typographical errors: for “Kaufmann” [7] read “Kauffmann”; it was James rather than “John Moore” [8] who had died in 1809, who “was of considerable help” to Knowles when the latter assembled information for his life of Fuseli; for “James Weathercock,” an invention of Christie’s copyeditor, read “Janus Weathercock” throughout; moreover, the author now agrees with David Weinglass and the present writer that many of begin page 114 | ↑ back to top the “Henry Fusili” signatures on these drawings (and especially those on the numbered designs where such an inscription appears three or four times on the same sheet of paper [see lots 52-57]) are not in the artist’s hand. See also #277 and 279, below.

275. Jegge, Alexander. “Erzählweisen des Phantastischen bei Füssli und Wieland.” Unsere Kunstdenkmäler/Nos monuments d’art et d’histoire/I nostri monumenti storici 42 (1991): 514.

—This abstract of a master’s thesis (U of Basle, Switz., 1990) reports about the first detailed examination of the 12 designs that in 1804-05 were executed by Fuseli in illustration of Wieland’s Oberon.

276. La Cassagnère, Christian. “Image picturale et image littéraire dans le nocturne romantique: Essai de poétique inter-textuelle.” Romantisme 15.49 (1985): 47-65.

—La Cassagnère writes about the parallels in the imagery of Fuseli’s painting of the “Nightmare” and of Shelley’s poem of 1819, “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery.”

277. *Norman, Geraldine. “A Fuseli Treasure-Trove.” Independent on Sunday 29 Mar. 1992: rev. suppl. 54-55.

—See Butlin’s catalogue of the rediscovered Fuseli album (#274, above) and #279, below.

278. *Strinati, Claudio, ed. Johann Heinrich Füssli: Aforismi sull’arte. Rome, It.: Theoria, 1989.

—An Italian translation of Fuseli’s Aphorisms on Art.

279. Thomas, Gina. “Harriets Album: Ein spektakulärer Füssli-Fund.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 11 Apr. 1992: 33.

—Thomas comments on the rediscovery of the album of Fuseli drawings that was compiled by Harriet Jane Moore and has now been auctioned at Christie’s. The sale catalogue is here recorded as #274; see also #277, above.

280. Tomory, Peter. The Drawings of Henry Fuseli from the Auckland City Art Gallery. Exh. cat. New York, NY: American Federation of Arts, n.d. [1990].

—This exhibition flyer was issued on the occasion of a traveling exhibition organized by the American Federation of Arts in association with the Auckland City Art Gallery. The Auckland Fuselis were consecutively shown (during Nov. 1990-Nov. 1991) at the Frick Art Museum, Pittsburgh, at the National Academy of Design, New York, at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. The fold-out prospectus for the exhibition contains an introduction by Tomory and a checklist of the 37 exhibits; four of the drawings are reproduced. In the first paragraph the author recapitulates his hypothesis concerning the Blakean provenance of the large group of Fuseli’s drawings that was acquired by the Auckland museum in 1965. Since 1979 (when Tomory had first suggested “that the recipient” of these drawings, chosen by Fuseli “as gifts for another artist . . . could have been William Blake”) this hypothesis has not precisely gained in credibility, and in the present brochure no new “internal and external evidence” that might buttress Tomory’s claim is brought forward.

281. Weinglass, H. D. [i.e., David H.]. “‘Kann uns zum Vaterland die Fremde werden?’: In der Emigration: Johann Heinrich Füssli.” Neue Zürcher Zeitung 23-24 Nov. 1991: 67-68.

—This study confronts Henry Fuseli, the British Royal Academician, with Johann Heinrich Füssli, his Swiss alter-ego. David Weinglass describes the painter’s ambivalent relationship with the country he had left behind in order to embark on a career, first as a man of letters, and then as one of the most influential figures of the London art world during Blake’s times. The drawings after Swiss mannerist book illustrations that Fuseli executed in his youth at Zurich and his treatment of subjects from Swiss history are here set off against his Italian and British drawings and the paintings executed for the “Milton Gallery.” The essay very usefully raises a couple of questions of primary importance for the direction Fuseli studies will take in the future. Weinglass clearly ranks Fuseli’s drawings much higher than the paintings, and he stresses this point just as other commentators and collectors, ever since the “rediscovery” of the artist in the 1920s, have done before him. While there is much that could be said in favor of such an evaluation by the modern connoisseur, it is hard to believe that Fuseli himself would have subscribed without some hesitation to such a reversal in the hierarchy of the means, genres, and economics of artistic expression. Similarly, if Haydon’s frenzied and thoroughly biased account of Fuseli’s painting technique continues to be uncritically paraphrased time and again (see 67, third column), there is little chance to even think about the possible suitability of the artist’s peculiar handling of color for his choice of subject matter. Also, as long as the study of Fuseli (and David Weinglass is unquestionably one of its leading authorities) accepts the superiority of the artist’s drawings over his paintings as a presupposition that is not to be questioned, it is bound to stress the personal rather than the public dimensions of his works. In addition, Fuseli’s oils are technically not much worse than those of, say, Reynolds (or Blake’s early temperas for that matter), a point that is lacking from Weinglass’s account. Whateverthe quality of Fuseli’s technical training and its deficiencies, he put them to good use. It is a simple fact, I think, that the awesome void one is staring at in a painting such as “Sin Pursued by Death” (Zurich, Kunsthaus)—and that stares back from it—is as much the material result of Fuseli’s dry brushstrokes, of his “dead” coloring, as of the shapes he gives to his figures, or the acts he shows them involved in. And it is this void which first creates that peculiar feeling of mystery in front of a Fuseli painting, which then distinguishes the viewer’s emotional response to Fuseli’s idea of “Milton” from a response to any other painter’s. The “deadened” pigments and the color black in his paintings thus heighten, not diminish, an effect that can also be observed in Fuseli’s drawings. Both function as a painterly device that increases the impact that is created when figures inside a composition see (and know) more than the viewer is allowed to see (and know) while looking at them. Therefore, I should like to argue that in Fuseli, as in Blake, color and its compositional treatment manifestly contribute to the specific meaning of a painting, and that such meaning and its compelling power to evoke responses from the viewers cannot sufficiently be described in terms of iconographic identifications alone. These are general problems of interpretation which, however, qualify as issues for further debate in coming years. Finally, I would like to point out that in the anonymous German translation the present text is not always easy to comprehend; furthermore, the translation represents a considerably shortened version of the original text (kindly made available to me by the author), and it does not always do justice to its ideas. Weinglass’s catalogue raisonné of Fuseli’s Engraved Illustrations is expected from Scolar Press in 1993.

See also #26, 94, 227, 241, 244-45, 247, 251, 256, 260-61, and #263, above, as well as #312 and 375, below.

William Godwin

282. Crisafulli Jones, Lilla Maria. “William Godwin o l’etica del dovere.” La Rivoluzione francese in Inghilterra. Ed. Lilla Maria Crisafulli Jones. Romanticismo e dintomi 4. Naples, It.: Liguori, 1990. 99-133. Lit. 45000 paper.

283. *Crowder, George. Classical Anarchism: The Political Thought of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin. Oxford, Oxon.: Clarendon P, 1991. £27.50 boards.

284. *Graham, Kenneth W. “Narrative and Ideology in Godwin’s Caleb Williams.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2 (1990): 215-28.

285. *Graham, Kenneth W. The Politics of Narrative: Ideology and Social Change in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams. AMS Studies in the Eighteenth Century 16. New York, NY: AMS P, 1991. $37.50/£29.95 boards.

286. Hale, Dorothy J. “Profits of Altruism: Caleb Williams and Arthur Mervyn.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 22 (1988-89): 47-69.

287. Hindle, Maurice. “William Godwin’s Caleb Williams: A Critical Edition (Volumes I and II).” Dissertation Abstracts International 52 (1991-92): 308C. U of Essex, 1989.

—It is the purpose of this critical and fully annotated edition of Caleb Williams to establish Godwin “as a fascinating ‘transitional’ writer in the shift from ‘Enlightenment’ to ‘Romanticism’ thinking.” Hindle sees the “key importance” of this “transitional text . . . in the way it registers the problems occurring at that moment in European history and thought, . . . [that] Foucault has termed the ‘threshold of modernity.’ The material presented with the novel text offers evidence of how Godwin comes to be situated at this threshold and discusses the various determinations which bring this about. Thus the Chronology and Chapters One to Five of the Critical Introduction treat the historical, political, religious and psychological factors materially bearing Godwin towards the production of the novel. . . . The Bibliography of Caleb Williams illustrates a widespread consumption of the novel over time and space, suggesting that the ‘divided mind’ which the book makes available to its psychologically-minded audience has been begin page 115 | ↑ back to top and still is an important ideologically defining feature of modern life, its politics and desires.”

288. Mace, Nancy A. “Hercules and Alexander: Classical Allusion in Caleb Williams.” English Language Notes 25.3 (1988): 39-44.

289. Morrow, John. “Republicanism and Public Virtue: William Godwin’s History of the Commonwealth of England.” Historical Journal 34 (1991): 645-64.

290. *Philp, Mark, et al., eds. The Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin. 8 vols. Pickering Masters. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992. £395.00 boards.

291. Trott, Nicola. “The Coleridge Circle and the ‘Answer to Godwin.’” Review of English Studies ns 41 (1990): 212-29.

292. Wehrs, Donald R. “Rhetoric, History, Rebellion: Caleb Williams and the Subversion of Eighteenth-Century Fiction.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 28 (1988): 497-511.

293. *Wordsworth, Jonathan, ed. William Godwin: Memoirs of the Author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ 1798. Revolution and Romanticism, 1789-1834: A Series of Facsimile Reprints. Oxford, Oxon.: Woodstock Books, 1990. £22.50/$43.00 boards.

294. *Wordsworth, Jonathan, ed. William Godwin: Political Justice 1793. 2 vols. Revolution and Romanticism, 1789-1834: A Series of Facsimile Reprints. Oxford, Oxon.: Woodstock Books, 1992. £150.00/$275.00 (pre-publication price until July 1992 was £125.00/$225.00) boards.

—Godwin’s Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft are contained in the first of these reprint volumes.

See also #66, 107, and 173, above.

William Hayley

See #108, 147, 196, and 210, above.

Joseph Johnson

See #107 and 173, above.

Angelica Kauffmann

295. Adam, Malise Forbes, and Mary Mauchline. “Ut pictura poesis: Angelica Kauffmann’s Literary Sources.” Apollo 135 (1992): 345-49.

—In spite of the expectations for some general explication raised by the article’s title, the essay is mostly concerned with the description of an English secretaire-bookcase of c. 1786. The latter is ornamented with a series of scenes that derive from paintings by and engravings after Kauffmann, and it is only the iconography of these roundels that the authors examine in any detail.

296. Berger, Renate, ed. “Angelika Kauffmann (1741-1807).” “Und ich sehe nichts, nichts als die Malerei”: Autobiographische Texte von Künstlerinnen des 18.-20. Jahrhunderts. Die Frau in der Gesellschaft: Fischer Taschenbuch 3722. Frankfort on the Main, W. Ger.: Fischer, 1987. 35-39. DM19.80 paper.

—Preceded by the editor’s short introduction (35), this anthology reprints a long letter of 10 Oct. 1766, written by Kauffmann to her father (36-38), and explaining to him the social pressures on a female portrait painter that she found herself faced with in London.

297. Bock, Henning. “Zwei mythologische Gemälde von Angelika Kauffmann für die Gemäldegalerie.” Jahrbuch Preußischer Kulturbesitz 23 (1986): 301-10.

—Bock studies two mythological paintings that were executed by Kauffmann and sold in 1782 to the collector George Bowles, and that have more recently been acquired for the small collection of British paintings at the Gemäldegalerie Berlin. The author examines their iconography (Montesquieu’s story of Cephisa and her lover clipping the wings of Cupid) in the context of the “cult of learned eroticism (Walch)” (304-05). Both ovals are reproduced in color. The same article (or an excerpt?) obviously has been published almost simultaneously as “Neuerwerbungen der Gemäldegalerie: Angelika Kauffmann, zwei Szenen aus der Geschichte von Cupido und Cephisa, 1782” (Berliner Museen 4 [1986]: n. pag.).

298. *Dorgerloh, Annette. “‘Vielleicht die cultivirteste Frau in Europa.’” Bildende Kunst May 1989: 20-22.

—A general account of the outlines of Kauffmann’s career as an artist that is said to be nicely illustrated in color.

299. “Exkursion 13: Angelika Kauffmann—‘die kultivierteste Frau Europas.’” Unsere Kunstdenkmäler/Nos monuments d’art et d’histoire/I nostri monumenti storici 43 (1992): 328.

—This is no more than the program for a study trip to exhibitions of Kauffmann’s works in Vaduz and Bregenz that was organized by the Society for Swiss Art History on the occasion of its 112th annual meeting, held in Vaduz.

300. Gleichenstein, Elisabeth von, and Karin Stober, eds. ‘. . . und hat als Weib unglaubliches Talent’ (Goethe): Angelika Kauffmann (1741-1807), Marie Ellenrieder (1791-1863): Malerei und Graphik. Exh. cat. Konstanz, Ger.: Städtische Museen Konstanz-Rosgartenmuseum, 1992.

—This is the catalogue of an exhibition that was shown at Konstanz, 30 May-23 Aug. 1992. It presents essays on Kauffmann’s “life and work” by Dagmar Zimdars (13-25 and 77-86), Bettina Baumgärtel (45-61), Christoph Michel (62-76), and Michaela Burek (123-34). There are 17 color plates with reproductions of some of Kauffmann’s paintings that were on show.

301. Hagen, Rose-Marie. “‘Eine seltene Person, eine deutsche Malerin.’” Art: Das Kunstmagazin Nov. 1991: 113-21.

—See the annotation to #298, above.

302. Michel, Christoph. “Goethe redivivus? Zu einem unbezeichneten Porträt Angelika Kauffmanns.” Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts ns [30] (1991): 57-67.

—Michel describes an unsigned portrait (of Goethe) from a private collection, he analyses its iconography, and attributes it to Kauffmann. The painting is illustrated in color.

303. Rice, Louise, and Ruth Eisenberg. “Angelica Kauffmann’s Uffizi Self-Portrait.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 6th ser. 117 (1991): 123-26.

304. Rosenthal, Angela. “Angelika Kauffman Ma(s)king Claims.” Art History 15 (1992): 38-59.

—Rosenthal studies the iconography of a group of Kauffmann’s paintings and drawings. “The article sets out to disclose in the work of Angelica Kauffman commentaries upon the dominant ideologies of sexual difference active in the eighteenth century,” and it demonstrates how the artist “specifically thematizes and criticizes prevailing social constructions of women and femininity.” The hidden meaning that the author finds is here read as a commentary on the handicapped situation of the female artist in late eighteenth-century London (as elsewhere), and as Kauffmann’s “claims” for full professional recognition of female artists. Of course, such “claims could not avoid marginalization, unless couched in a manner palatable to dominant taste. Consequently, statements such as Kauffman’s cannot be decoded unless tied to the male centred eighteenth-century discourse which defined the role of women in society,” and which was linked “to the rapidly evolving economies of trade and class” (38). After sketching the outlines of these historical changes (39-41), Rosenthal turns to a detailed examination of two of Kauffmann’s works that address central issues in art theory and, “hidden in the recesses of [such] traditional iconographies,” are simultaneously concerned with the “claims to intellectual and professional rights” for women (41). Kauffmann is here seen as joining “other female intellectuals in criticizing the confining aspects of sensibility. . . . she reconstructs a scene of female intellect, while still retaining qualities of emotionality. In this respect she is thus less radical in her thinking than Wollstonecraft, for example, who actively sought to erase the category of the sensible. The compromise made by Kauffman fairly sums up her [more] pragmatic approach: combining an ideological fidelity to a differentiated and positive notion of female sexual identity, and an unwillingness to sacrifice professional success. The disclosure of the masking dynamic . . . helps to define these imperatives” (54). Though Rosenthal’s reading of the visual evidence variously contradicts and/or tellingly supplements that of Baumgärtel (see, e.g., 48, 51, and n46, 60), the latter’s book nevertheless supplies some general context for the article of the former; see Blake 25 (1991-92): 40 (#269).

305. Sello, Gottfried. “Angelika Kauffmann.” Malerinnen aus fünf Jahrhunderten. Hamburg, W. Ger.: Ellert, 1988. 46-47.

—A short note on Kauffmann’s “Miranda and Ferdinand,” one of her Shakespearean^[e] subject paintings, here reproduced in color.

306. *Züchner, Ursula. “Angelika Kauffmann: Ihr Selbstbildnis in Chur.” M.A. thesis. Albert-Ludwigs-U, Freiburg i. Brsg., Ger., 1992.

See also #94, 241, 245, 247, 255, and 273, above.

Johann Caspar Lavater

307. Gray, Richard. “Sign and Sein: The Physiognomikstreit and the Dispute over the Semiotic Constitution of Bourgeois Individuality.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 66 (1992): 300-32.

—Gray discusses the controversy of the 1770s concerning the claims and uses of begin page 116 | ↑ back to top physiognomy; the central opponents, of course, were Lavater and Lichtenberg.

308. Handschuch[-Hammann], Monika,^[e] ed. Johann Kaspar Lavater: Predigten über die Existenz des Teufels und andere Schriften: Belehrungen. Bibliothek Ullstein: Teuflische Bücher 5/Ullstein-Buch 26211. Berlin, Ger.: Ullstein, 1991. DM14.80 paper.

309. *Herberhold, Elke. “Kunstwerke und Kunsttheorie in Johann Caspar Lavaters Physiognomischen Fragmenten (1775-1778).” M.A. thesis. Philipps-U, Marburg a. d. L., Ger., 1992.

—In this unpublished master’s thesis the author explores Lavater’s use of works of art and earlier theories of art when writing his Essays in Physiognomy.

310. Riha, Karl, and Carsten Zelle, eds. Johann Caspar Lavater: Von der Physiognomik und Hundert physiognomische Regeln. Insel Taschenbuch 1366. Frankfort on the Main, Ger.: Insel, 1991. DM12.00 paper.

—Lavater’s “Ur-Physiognomy” was first published in 1772, and it has never been reprinted before. The text of the present booklet (which was issued on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Lavater’s birth) follows that of the first edition in book format verbatim. However, it is to be regretted that the second part of About Physiognomy “which contains a draft, very incomplete in every regard, for a work of this kind,” has not been included. Riha and Zelle have decided (reluctantly, it seems [see 141], and possibly urged to do so by their publishers) to replace it with the One Hundred Physiognomical Rules of 1786-93. They also have contributed a well-informed “Nachwort” and an editorial report (111-45).

311. *Sauer, Klaus M. Die Predigttätigkeit Johann Kaspar Lavaters (1741-1801): Darstellung und Quellengrundlage. Zurich, Switz.: Theologischer Verlag und Buchhandlungen Zürich (TVZ), 1987. SFr. 180.00.

312. Schnetzler, Ursula. Johann Caspar Lavaters Tagebuch aus dem Jahre 1761. Pfäffikon, Switz.: Schellenberg Druck, 1989.

—This published version of a U of Zurich dissertation presents an annotated edition of Lavater’s “Diarium: Mensis Januarius 1761” and of a collection of the future physiognomist’s letters from the same period. Among this material readers will find a couple of hitherto unpublished references by Lavater to his friend Fuseli and the latter’s poetry (see the index on 304, s.v. “Füssli”).

313. Siegrist, Christoph, ed. Johann Caspar Lavater: Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe: Eine Auswahl. Reclams Universal-Bibliothek 350. Stuttgart, W. Ger.: Reclam, 1984. DM16.00 paper.

314. Zelle, Carsten. “Physiognomie des Schreckens im achtzehnten Jahrhundert: Zu Johann Caspar Lavater und Charles Lebrun.” Lessing Yearbook 21 (1989): 89-102.

—This is an illustrated account of Lavater’s use—in the Essays on Physiognomy—of Le Brun’s Method to Learn to Design the Passions. See also August Ohage’s study of Lessing and eighteenth-century physiognomy in the same volume (55-87) and #308, above.

See also #273, above.

John Linnell

315. *Street, Paul. “Painting Deepest England: The Late Landscapes of John Linnell and the Uses of Nostalgia.” Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia. Ed. Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase. Manchester: Manchester UP; New York, NY: St. Martin’s P, 1989. 68-80.

See also #26, 245, and 250, above, as well as #325, below.

George Morland

See #26, above.

John Hamilton Mortimer

See #94, 241, 245, and 247, above.

Thomas Paine

316. *Beale, D.A. “Language, Poetry and the Rights of Man.” Theoria 75 (1990): 37-51.

—Beale comments on Paine, Burke, and Blake; see also #107, 173, and 220, above.

317. Leiman, Mel. “Tom Paine: Citizen of the World.” The Impact of the French Revolution on English Literature. Ed. Anders Iversen. Spec. issue of Dolphin 19 (1990): 24-32.

—Leiman supplies a synopsis of Paine’s biography and of his egalitarian stance in eighteenth-century politics. He then concentrates on economical issues and on the practical problems inherent in Paine’s blueprint for a society governed by the principle of “equality.”

318. Simons, John. “Tom Paine in England.” BARS Bulletin and Review 3 (1992): 7-8.

—This brief note has been occasioned by the discovery of an entry in “the record books of the Hambledon Cricket Club” which reveals “that Tom Paine was present at the meeting of 28 August 1796.” The possibility “that the entry in the minute book may be ‘a prank’” (7) is mentioned by Simons. He seems convinced, however, “that the minute book records something more” (8) than a mere joke—more about Paine’s itinerary on his journey from France to the States, or more about revolutionary affinities in a cricket club?

319. Thomas, Gordon K. “‘And When America Was Free’: Thomas Paine and the English Romantics.” Charles Lamb Bulletin ns 69 (1990): 164-77.

—Thomas briefly comments on Blake and Paine (169-70, 172), and he reports (without questioning the evidence) that it was Blake who “warned Paine of his impending arrest and helped him flee the country just one step ahead of government agents” (169). Biographically as well as intellectually he is subscribing to a view that is diametrically opposed to the one which has recently been suggested in an essay by Robert Essick (see #107, above).

320. Thomson, Ann. “Thomas Paine and the United Irishmen.” Études Irlandaises ns 16.1 (1991): 109-19.

321. *Wordsworth, Jonathan, ed. Thomas Paine: The Rights of Man (Part I) 1791. Revolution and Romanticism, 1789-1834: A Series of Facsimile Reprints. Oxford, Oxon.: Woodstock Books, 1992. £25.00/$48.00 boards.

See also #66, 107, 162, 173, 220, and 249, above.

Samuel Palmer

322. Goldman, Paul. Samuel Palmer: Visionary Printmaker. Exh. cat. n.p. [London]: Trustees of the British Museum, 1991. £2.50 paper.

—This is the catalogue for a traveling loan exhibition from the British Museum Print Room, consecutively shown at the Holburne Museum in Bath (14 Feb.-30 Apr.), the Newport Museum and Art Gallery (4 May-29 June), the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery (3 Oct.-14 Nov. 1991), and the Hatton Gallery at the University of Newcastle (24 Jan.-14 Mar. 1992). It contains brief notes on “The Life of Samuel Palmer” (1-2; with the two obligatory paragraphs on Blake, Palmer and the Ancients) and “Palmer the Etcher” (5), plus catalogue entries for the 29 items on show (6-15), an illustrated “Glossary of Technical Terms” (16), and a “Bibliographical Note” (19). Nine prints are reproduced at the actual size of the original plates. The exhibits included the disputed monotype of a “Landscape with Ploughman” (#16) and the four canceled, but recently restored copperplates for An English Version of the Eclogues of Virgil (1883) with impressions pulled at the British Museum in 1990 (#18a/b-21a/b).

323. Gould, David, and John Commander. “A Samuel Palmer Edition.” Letters. Times Literary Supplement 7-13 Sept. 1990: 945; 5-11 Oct. 1990: 1067.

—This exchange of letters was triggered by the advertisement that the William Blake Trust had published in TLS for The Complete Etchings of Samuel Palmer and His Illustrations for Virgil and Milton (see the TLS issue for 16-22 Mar. 1990: 288 and Blake 25 [1991-92]: 41-42 [#284]). As the owner of the original (canceled, yet restored) copperplate Gould complains about the “questionable behaviour of the Blake Trust” in what he claims to be the “unauthorized” (945) use of 36 restrikes from Palmer’s “Lonely Tower” etching by the Trust in copies of the deluxe edition of this series of Palmer reproductions. Commander, on behalf of the Trust, “rejects [Gould’s] accusations” (1067) and discreetly points to the commercial, profit-orientated motives he sees at work in the collector’s criticisms.

324. [Libson, Lowell, and Raymond Lister]. Samuel Palmer: An Exhibition of Palmer’s Works with a Leger Provenance to Celebrate a Century of Art Dealing. Exh. cat. London: Leger Galleries, 1992.

—This visually highly attractive catalogue of an exhibition held at Leger’s (24 June-24 July 1992) is a tribute to Harold Leger’s personal interest in Palmer’s work, an enthusiasm that, according to David Posnett’s preface, “brought this gallery a little too near to the Palmeresque in the 1970s” [v]. Lister contributes an essay on “Samuel Palmer in the Twentieth Century” [vi-ix] that is followed by a “Palmer Chronology” and the catalogue of the 30 works on show; with only four exceptions, these are described as watercolors. For each work, the provenance and exhibition history are detailed, brief descriptions and comments are supplied, and all the exhibits are illustrated in color one to a page of this spaciously printed oblong quarto volume.

325. Postle, Martin. “Samuel Palmer and the Slade: Artists and Amateurs in Association.” Apollo 133 (1991): 252-57.

—In an appendix (257), Postle publishes two previously unknown letters of Palmer, both addressed to Edwin Wilkins Field in Sept. 1868, and preserved with a group of others by Victorian artists (including Linnell) in the Records Office of University College, London.

See also #7, 26, 245, and 250, above, as well as #361, below.

Richard Price

326. *Spadafora, David. The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1990. $40.00/£22.50 boards.

—The book is reported to contain discussions of the scientific work of both Price and Priestley.

327. *Stephens, John, ed. Richard Price: Four Dissertations (1768). Bristol, Glos.: Thoemmes Antiquarian Books, 1990. £38.00 boards (distributed by Routledge).

328. *Thomas, D. O., ed. The Correspondence of Richard Price. Vol. 2: “March 1778-February 1786.” Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1992. $49.95 boards.

—For a listing of the first volume see Blake 25 (1991-92): 42 (#287).

329. *Wordsworth, Jonathan, ed. Richard Price: A Discourse on the Love of Our Country 1789. Revolution and Romanticism, 1789-1834: A Series of Facsimile Reprints. Oxford, Oxon.: Woodstock Books, 1992. £21.00/$40.00 boards.

See also #66 and 173, above.

Joseph Priestley

330. *Anderson, R. G. W., and Christopher Lawrence, eds. Science, Medicine, and Dissent: Joseph Priestley (1733-1804). London: Wellcome Trust and Science Museum, 1987. £9.95 paper.

—This appears to be an attractively illustrated and oversized publication; it contains the papers that in 1983 were read at the Wellcome Institute in celebration of the 250th anniversary of Priestley’s birth, as well as the catalogue for an exhibition held at the Royal Society and the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine on the same occasion.

331. Turnbull, Paul. “Gibbon’s Exchange with Joseph Priestley.” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 14 (1991): 139-58.

See also #173 and 326, above.

George Richmond

See #26, 245, and 250, above.

George Romney

332. *Grandal, Hortensia. “George Romney: el classicismo en la escuela inglesa.” Goya July-Dec. 1986: 154-61.

333. Watson, Jennifer C. “Romney’s Theatrical Portraiture: Mrs Siddons and Tryphosa Jane Willis.” Apollo 136 (1992): 147-51.

See also #26, 241, 245, and 247, above, and #375, below.

William Bell Scott

See #26, 120, and 255, above.

Thomas Stothard

334. Gourlay, Alexander S. “Six Illustrations by Stothard.” Blake 25 (1991-92): 135.

—A note that identifies the engravings after Stothard’s designs which illustrate a 1786 edition of The Tatler, as a truly “minute particular” it serves as an addendum to Bentley’s “addenda to Bennett’s list of Stothard illustrations.” The reference to the descriptions of these plates in Coxhead’s monograph of 1906, here circumstantially cited from a letter by Robert Essick to the author, is part of the very entry in Bennett’s checklist that Gourlay himself mentions; moreover, it seems likely that it was the source from which Bennett’s initial information for this entry was taken.

See also #26, 94, 245, 247, and 250, above.

Emanuel Swedenborg

335. *Hallengren, Anders. “Naturtingens hermeneutik: Whitman och Swedenborg.” Tidskrift for Litteraturvetenskap 19 (1990): 50-58.

336. Kaltenbrunner, Gerd-Klaus. “Emanuel Swedenborg: Ein Naturforscher und Polyhistor, der mit den EngeIn diskutierte.” Neue deutsche Hefte 35 (1988): 788-97.

337. *Lineham, Peter J. “The Origins of the New Jerusalem Church in the 1780s.” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 70.3 (1988): 109-22.

—This article appears to be a reworking of one of the chapters in the author’s unpublished thesis on “The English Swedenborgians 1770-1840: A Study in the Social Dimensions of Religious Sectarianism” (U of Sussex, 1978).

338. Niewöhner, Friedrich. “Emanuel Swedenborg in Wolfenbüttel: ein deutschschwedisches Arbeitsgespräch in der Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel vom 15. bis 18. Mai 1988.” Das Achtzehnte Jahrhundert 12 (1988): 118-19; also in Wolfenbütteler Bibliotheks-Informationen 14.1-4 (1989): 18.

—This is a short report from a conference that had first been announced in the Wolfenbütteler Bibliotheks-Informationen 13.1/2 (1988): 7.

339. *Swedenborg, Emanuel. Le Livre des rëves: Journal des années 1743-1744. Trans. Régis Boyer. Paris, Fr.: Berg International, 1985.

See also #204 and 217, above.

Thomas Taylor

340. Taylor, Thomas, trans. Porphyry. On the Cave of the Nymphs. [Ed.] with an Introduction by Kathleen Raine. Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes P, 1991. $20.00 boards, $7.00 paper.

—Kathleen Raine, in her introduction (7-19) to this new edition of Taylor’s translation of Porphyry’s De antro nympharum, draws attention (once again) to the considerable influence of Porphyry, his “special concern . . . with the soul” (11), and of the Neoplatonic tradition in general on the Italian Renaissance, Yeats, and Blake (15-16). It must be for this reason that the latter’s Arlington Court tempera is reproduced as a frontispiece to the booklet and sets the the tone for Taylor’s 1789-92 translation of “this most beautiful and profound treatise” (12) of the third century. The life, acquaintances, and reputation of the translator are outlined on 16-19. Unfortunately, there is no identification in this volume of the edition of Taylor’s History of the Restoration of the Platonic Theology, or of his Commentaries of Proclus (1789), from which the translation of Porphyry’s text is here cited (25-56). Also, upon comparing the present version of Taylor’s “Concerning the Cave of the Nymphs” with the text of his translation of Porphyry as printed in Thomas Taylor the Platonist: Selected Writings, ed. Kathleen Raine and George Mills Harper (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1969) 296-342, I was surprised to find major discrepancies between the two editions in the phrasing of both the text and (especially) Taylor’s notes (57-70). The Phanes Press edition may have been taken from a heavily edited later version of the original translation, or it may by itself represent the result of some recent, but silent ‘modernization.’ The edition of this booklet is limited to 1000 paperbound copies, and an additional 200 copies are offered in a cloth binding.

John Varley

See #7, 245, and 250, above.

Caroline Watson

See #108 and 247, above.

Josiah Wedgwood

See #250 and 270, above.

Benjamin West

341. Cohen, Ronald. “A Benjamin West Discovery: A Missing Portrait of the Painter’s Wife and Son Identified.” Apollo 133 (1991): 171-73.

—The article reports on the rediscovery of “Mrs. Benjamin West and Her Son Raphael” in a private collection. The painting of c. 1767 is modeled quite closely on Raphael’s “Madonna della sedia” in the Pitti Palace; it is here reproduced in color (173).

342. *Maser, Edward A. “An American modello for England.” Imagination und Imago: Festschrift Kurt Rossacher—Zum 65. Geburtstag von Kurt Rossacher und zum zehnjährigen Bestandsjubiläum des Salzburger Barockmuseums. Ed. Leopold Netopil and Franz Wagner. Salzburg, Aus.: Salzburger Barockmuseum, 1983. 167-71.

—Maser studies West’s modello for “The Graces Unveiling Nature,” one of the ceiling paintings he was to execute for the Royal Academy.

343. Prown, Jules D. “The Expedition Against the Ohio Indians in 1764 under Colonel Bouquet: Two Early Drawings by Benjamin West.” British Art 1740-1820: Essays in Honor of Robert R. Wark. Ed. Guilland Sutherland. San Marino, CA: Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1992. 205-33. $60.00 boards.

344. *Staley, Allen. “Benjamin West in Italy.” The Italian Presence in American Art, 1760-1860. Ed. Irma B. Jaffe. New York, NY: Fordham UP; Rome, It.: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1989. 1-8.

345. *Staley, Allen. Benjamin West in Pennsylvania Collections. Exh. cat. Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1986.

—This exhibition of 36 of West’s works was on view from 1 Mar. to 13 Apr. 1986.

See also #94, 241, 244-45, 247, 251, 253, and 256, above.

Mary Wollstonecraft

346. *Blodgett, Harriet. “Emily Vindicated: Ann Radcliffe and Mary Wollstonecraft.” Weber Studies: An Interdisciplinary Humanities Journal 7.2 (1990): 48-61.

347. Borghi, Liana. “Mary Wollstonecraft: una rivoluzione mancata.” La Rivoluzione francese in Inghilterra. Ed. Lilla Maria Crisafulli Jones. Romanticismo e dintorni 4. Naples, It.: Liguori, 1990. 135-53. Lit. 45000 paper.

348. Cole, Lucinda. “(Anti)feminist Sympathies: The Politics of Relationship in Smith, Wollstonecraft, and More.” ELH 58 (1991): 107-40.

—For the discussion of Wollstonecraft’s “sympathies” see 125-31.

349. *Ellison, Julie. “Redoubled Feeling: Politics, Sentiment, and the Sublime in Williams and Wollstonecraft.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 20 (1990): 197-215.

350. Fortunati, Vita. “Liberty and the Utopian Tradition in Mary Wollstonecraft.” L’Esilio romantico: Forme di un conflitto. Ed. Joseph Cheyne and Lilla Maria Crisafulli Jones. Biblioteca di Studi Inglesi 52. Bari, It.: Adriatica, 1990. 101-16.

—Fortunati is concerned with “the profound influence that the French Revolution had upon the political ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft,” and she attempts to demonstrate (for example in her comparison of the author’s first and last novel on 114) that “political theory in Wollstonecraft is always inextricably linked with her personal experiences” (101).

351. Langbauer, Laurie. “An Early Romance: Motherhood and Women’s Writing in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Novels.” Romanticism and Feminism. Ed. Anne K. Mellor. Midland Book 462. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1988. 208-19. $37.50 boards, $12.95 paper.

—In the same collection of essays, Alan Richardson’s “Romanticism and the Colonization of the Feminine” (13-25) briefly discusses Blake’s “conception of ‘emanation’ as feminine” (20).

352. *Lorch, Jennifer. Mary Wollstonecraft: The Making of a Radical Feminist. Berg Women’s Series. Providence, RI: Berg Publishers, 1990. $29.95/£14.95 boards.

353. Maurer, Shawn Lisa. “The Female (As) Reader: Sex, Sensibility, and the Maternal in Wollstonecraft’s Fictions.” Essays in Literature 19 (1992): 36-54.

354. Myers, Mitzi. “Pedagogy as Self-Expression in Mary Wollstonecraft: Exorcising the Past, Finding a Voice.” The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Shari Benstock. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P; London: Routledge, 1988. 192-210.

—See also the note for the subsequent entry.

355. *Parke, Catherine N. “What Kind of Heroine Is Mary Wollstonecraft?” Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics: Essays in Honor of Jean H. Hagstrum. Ed. Syndy McMillen Conger. Cranbury, NJ: Associated UP, for Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1990. 103-19. $36.50 boards.

—In two other contributions to this new Hagstrum festschrift, by Leland E. Warren and Mitzi Myers, one meets with Wollstonecraft and Austen as “The Conscious Speakers: Sensibility and the Art of Conversation Considered” (25-42) and reads about “Sensibility and the ‘Walk of Reason’: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Literary Reviews as Cultural Critique” (120-44).

356. *Todd, Janet, ed. Mary and Maria by Mary Wollstonecraft, Matilda by Mary Shelley. Pickering Women’s Classics. London: Pickering, 1992. £24.95 boards.

357. *Todd, Janet, ed. A Wollstonecraft Anthology. New York, NY: Columbia UP; Oxford, Oxon.: Polity P, 1990. $36.00 boards, $16.00/£8.95 paper.

—This is a (revised?) re-issue of the handy selection from the writings of Wollstonecraft, edited by one of the editors of the complete edition.

358. Trouille, Mary. “A Bold New Vision of Woman: Staël and Wollstonecraft Respond to Rousseau.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 292 (1991): 293-336.

—The material presented in this extensive essay probably stems from the author’s 1988 dissertation; see Dissertation Abstracts International 49 (1988-89): 2212A, and Blake 25 (1991-92): 43 (#310).

359. Ty, Eleanor Rose. “Romantic Revolutionaries: Women Novelists of the 1790s.” Dissertation Abstracts International 49 (1988-89): 2235A. McMaster U, 1987.

—Just as one should have guessed from the title of this thesis, in “selecting to work on the novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Helen Maria Williams, Elizabeth Inchbald and Charlotte Smith,” the author has “deliberately” chosen “five women writers who were radicals of the 1790s in their own ways. . . . All five saw the need for change in society; they became the advocates for reform, stressing, in particular, the requirement for amelioration of the women’s condition. My thesis points out exactly to which aspects of the patriarchal establishment these authors objected.” Furthermore, it “shows that while their fictional works seem to be couched in the language of love and sensibility, the women nevertheless revise and deconstruct the essentially male-structured traditional novel.” “Most significantly,” though this may not come as too much of a surprise, Ty argues “that these works articulated the female consciousness, perhaps for the first time in novel form. . . . By allowing the female voice to enter into male discourse, these fictions undermine the phallocentric monopoly of power and control of language. Consequently, the transparency of the meaning of words such as virtue, chastity, happiness, love is questioned. These crucial words acquire new signification, embodying specifically female vision and desire.”

360. *Wilson, Anna. “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Search for the Radical Woman.” Genders 6 (1989): 88-101.

See also #26, 58, 65, 107, 196, 249, 260, and 290, above, as well as #377 and 380, below.