Radical Blake: Influence and Afterlife from 1827

Whittaker, Jason and Dent, Shirley (2002) Radical Blake: Influence and Afterlife from 1827. Palgrave Macmillan, UK. ISBN 0333986458

Abstract / Summary

This is the first full-length study to be published on Blake’s influence on subsequent writers and artists since R. Bertholf and A. Levitt’s William Blake and the Moderns in 1987, and the first text to consider that influence across a wider range of cultural formats and activities such as music, film, and political thinking. Its contribution has been noted in the field and stimulated an increased interest in the study of Blake’s reception, notably in texts such as The Reception of Blake in the Orient (eds. S. Clark and S. Masashi) and Blake and Modern Literature (E. Larrissy), with citations in a wide range of articles and books that have been published on Blake in the past five years. Radical Blake for Blake studies moved considerations of reception beyond the immediate audience for Blake’s original texts.

In terms of scholarship, Radical Blake draws particularly upon work undertaken in the last two decades in the fields of new historicism (Essick, Worrall, Mee, Makdisi) and what is referred to as the ‘new bibliography’ (Bentley, Viscomi, Essick), areas that changed our understanding of Blake’s ideas and methods. Whereas earlier reception studies tended to concentrate on formal characteristics that indicated the influence of Blake’s art and poetry, the methodology employed within Radical Blake emphasises the significance of cultural materialist contexts for new texts, supported in many cases by archival research to locate and identify the new areas where Blake’s art transformed and inspired artistic and literary production.

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