William Blake's Gothic Imagination

Chris Bundock is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Regina Elizabeth Effinger is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Brunswick

‘These essays investigate how Blake’s major texts—e.g., Jerusalem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The [First] Book of Urizen, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion—arose in conjunction with the Gothic novel in English literature. Addressing a little-recognized facet of Blake studies, the collection examines Blake’s works from aesthetic, architectural, and political Gothic perspectives. A lucid and accessible introduction precedes the essays, which will stretch nonspecialist readers. Several essays focus on Blake’s visual content: David Baulch’s entry reads Gothic iconography in the illustrations of Blake’s Jerusalem, and Jason Whittaker analyzes Blakean references in films by Ridley Scott, with an emphasis on Prometheus. Peter Otto finds the political and social upheavals of Gothic novels to be similarly contained in Blake’s monstrous present with horrified reactions to the alien bodies in The Book of Urizen. Other essays address philosophical readings of Blake’s Deleuzian multiplicity and his counter-Kantian sublime with sophisticated subtlety. This collection is not for the fainthearted, but neither is Blake. Psychological, mythological, and sociological, this collection will draw the reader into the many layers of Blake’s verbal and visual media.’C. L. Bandish, Bluffton University‘William Blake’s Gothic Imagination is more than it promises to be – a ‘major scholarly study focused on Blake’s intersections with the Gothic’ – it is a landmark in Blake scholarship. While many of us may be familiar with Blake’s popular reception, reading Blake’s art through the lens of the Gothic is a relatively new and rewarding critical undertaking.’ Sibylle Erle Bishop Grosseteste University, British Association of Romantic Studies‘An ambitious and expansive volume, Bundock and Effinger have opened a new field of enquiry relevant to Blake studies, gothic scholarship, and the broader field of aesthetic theory, particularly as it relates to political power and sexuality. It is to be hoped that their call for further scholarship into the intersection of Blakean verse and gothic horror will not go unanswered.’Eighteenth-Century Fiction'Such uncanny moments of uncomfortable intimacy occur throughout Bundock and Effinger’s collection and point to a fascinating, if sometimes unconscious, self-reflexivity that is not often found in many historicist analyses of Blake’s work.’European Romantic Review

• Introduction – Chris Bundock and Elizabeth Effinger Part I: The bounding line of Blake’s Gothic: forms, genres, and contexts1. ‘Living Form’: William Blake’s Gothic relations – David Baulch2. The horror of Rahab: towards an aesthetic context for William Blake’s ‘Gothic’ form – Kiel Shaub3. The Gothic sublime – Claire ColebrookPart II: The misbegotten 4. Dark angels: Blake, Milton, and Lovecraft in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus – Jason Whittaker5. William Blake’s monstrous progeny: anatomy and the birth of horror in The [First] Book of Urizen – Lucy Cogan6. Blake’s Gothic humour: the spectacle of dissection – Stephanie CodsiPart III: Female space and the image7. The horrors of creation: globes, englobing powers, and Blake’s archaeologies of the present – Peter Otto8. Female spaces and the Gothic imagination in The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion – Ana Elena González-TreviñoPart IV: Sex, desire, perversion 9. The horrors of subjectivity/the jouissance of immanence – Mark Lussier10. ‘Terrible Thunders’ and ‘Enormous Joys’: potency and degeneracy in Blake's Visions and James Graham's celestial bed – Tristanne ConnollyBibliography Index