Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture

Whittaker, Jason, Clark, Steve and Connolly, Tristanne, eds. (2012) Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK. ISBN 978-0230280335

Abstract / Summary

Blake said of his designs, 'Tho' I call them Mine I know they are not Mine'. Then who owns Blake? Where does his work begin and end? There is something about reading and viewing Blake's multimedia which spurs creation in response. His reception goes far beyond academic criticism because he is more than just a literary figure: artist, printmaker, philosopher, revolutionary, visionary, Blake has always been more than words on a page. This volume follows some of his digital and analog regenerations in the fields of comics, cultural criticism, copyright; sculpture, surrealism, art history, art therapy; film, folk, rock, pop, and the afterlife of Blake's own music and lyrics. A variety of virtual selves has been created for Blake, his works, and his audience by the twentieth-century dissemination across a wide variety of media, and the more recent interactive possibilities raised by Web 2.0 as technology and as concept. The collection brought together scholars from Europe, North America and East Asia to provide new insights and research into the adoption of Blake by artists, musicians and cultural theorists, in many cases exploring their relations to Blake for the first time. As with the book on Blake and the Digital Humanities, it builds on over a decade of work into the reception of Blake, in this case concentrating on some aspects of visual and musical cultures that have been neglected by previous criticism. Along with my own contribution as an editor, Steve Clark is Professor of English at the University of Tokyo, who has moved from William Blake and Romantic poetry to the reception of Blake's work in the twentieth century and post-colonial studies, and Tristanne Connolly, Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo whose research concentrates on Blake and gender.

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