William Blake's Gothic Imagination: Bodies of Horror

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Description

Scholars of the Gothic have long recognised Blake's affinity with the genre. Yet, to date, no major scholarly study focused on Blake's intersection with the Gothic exists. William Blake's Gothic imagination seeks to redress this disconnect.

The papers here do not simply identify Blake's Gothic conventions but, thanks to recent scholarship on affect, psychology, and embodiment in Gothic studies, reach deeper into the tissue of anxieties that take confused form through this notoriously nebulous historical, aesthetic, and narrative mode. The collection opens with papers touching on literary form, history, lineation, and narrative in Blake's work, establishing contact with major topics in Gothic studies. Then refines its focus to Blake's bloody, nervous bodies, through which he explores various kinds of Gothic horror related to reproduction, anatomy, sexuality, affect, and materiality. Rather than transcendent images, this collection attends to Blake's 'dark visions of torment'.

Reviews

These essays investigate how Blakes major textse.g., Jerusalem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The [First] Book of Urizen, and Visions of the Daughters of Albionarose in conjunction with the Gothic novel in English literature. Addressing a little-recognized facet of Blake studies, the collection examines Blakes 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 Blakes visual content: David Baulchs entry reads Gothic iconography in the illustrations of Blakes 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 Blakes monstrous present with horrified reactions to the alien bodies in The Book of Urizen. Other essays address philosophical readings of Blakes 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 Blakes verbal and visual media.
C. L. Bandish, Bluffton University

William Blakes Gothic Imagination is more than it promises to be a major scholarly study focused on Blakes intersections with the Gothic it is a landmark in Blake scholarship. While many of us may be familiar with Blakes popular reception, reading Blakes 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 Effingers collection and point to a fascinating, if sometimes unconscious, self-reflexivity that is not often found in many historicist analyses of Blakes work.
European Romantic Review

Author Bio

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