Abstracts
Abstract
William Blake's experimental artistic technologies produced a formidably complex artistic legacy. The Blake Archive (www.blakearchive.org) set out on a mission to restore that legacy by digital means—an ecological effort to reintegrate dispersed and disaggregated textual and pictorial fragments. But more than a decade of collective experience has revealed that the Archive is concerned at least as much with recapitulation and recycling as with restoration, and as much with disciplined fragmentation as with integration. The best explanation for the Archive's place in the posthumous history of Blake's work is in terms of editorial settlements that are crafted, negotiated, and imposed by editors acting as the agents of posterity. Those settlements are active participants in dynamic systems. Through three distinguishable historical phases—radical normalization in the decades following Blake's death; consolidation and institutionalization in the twentieth century; and, most recently, a digital superconsolidation that is simultaneously progressive and conservative—the editorial history of Blake's art elucidates several fundamental characteristics of editorial theory and practice. It also reveals suggestive symptoms of an unsettled and unsettling future of work, hope, challenge, and compromise on the brink of the known editorial universe.
Appendices
Works Cited
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- ———. William Blake’s Writings. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978.
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- ———. Assisted by Deirdre Toomey. The Complete Graphic Works of William Blake. [London]: Thames and Hudson, 1978.
- Bloom, Harold. “The Visionary Cinema of Romantic Poetry.” In William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon. Ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1969. 18-35.
- Butlin, Martin. The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake. 2 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.
- Cooper, Andrew, and Michael Simpson. "The High-Tech Luddite of Lambeth: Blake's Eternal Hacking." The Wordsworth Circle 30.3 (1999): 125-31.
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- ———. William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924.
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- ———. "Graphicality: Multimedia Fables for ‘Textual’ Critics." In Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print. Ed. Elizabeth B. Loizeaux and Neil Fraistat. Madison: U of Wisconsin Press, 2002. 99-122.
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- ———. "'Why Don't They Leave it Alone?' Speculations on the Authority of the Audience in Editorial Theory." In Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image, and the Body. Ed. Margaret Ezell and Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. 85-99.
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- Ellis, Edwin J., and William Butler Yeats, eds. The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical. 3 vols. London: Quaritch, 1893.
- Erdman, David V., ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1965. Quotations from Blake, followed by E and a page number, are cited from the final revision of Erdman’s edition, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1988.
- ———. The Illuminated Blake . . . All of William Blake’s Illuminated Works with a Plate-by-Plate Commentary. New York: Anchor, 1974.
- ———, ed. With the assistance of Donald K. Moore. The Notebook of William Blake: A Photographic and Typographic Facsimile. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973.
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- ———. “Poetry and Design in William Blake.” JAAC 10 (1951): 35-42.
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- Keynes, Geoffrey. A Bibliography of William Blake. New York: Grolier Club, 1921.
- ———. Engravings by William Blake: The Separate Plates. Dublin: Emery Walker, 1956.
- ———, ed. The Writings of William Blake. 3 vols. London: Nonesuch, 1925.
- ——— and Edwin Wolf II. William Blake’s Illuminated Books: A Census. New York: Grolier Club, 1953.
- Kroeber, Karl. "The Blake Archive and the Future of Literary Studies." The Wordsworth Circle 30.3 (1999): 123-25.
- ———. Rev. of Eaves, The Cambridge Companion to Blake. Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 38:4 (2005): 151-54.
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- Rossetti, William Michael. The Poetical Works of William Blake, Lyrical and Miscellaneous. Aldine Edition of the British Poets. London: G. Bell, 1874.
- ———. Rev. of facsimile of Blake, Jerusalem (Pearson, 1877). Academy 13 (1878): 14.
- Simpson, David. “Blake and Romanticism.” In Eaves, ed., The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. 169-87.
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- Unsworth, John. “Scholarly Primitives: What Methods Do Humanities Researchers Have in Common, and How Might Our Tools Reflect This?" Originally presented in a symposium on "Humanities Computing: Formal Methods, Experimental Practice," King's College, London, 13 May 2000 <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/Kings.5-00/primitives.html>.
- Viscomi, Joseph. Blake and the Idea of the Book. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993.
- The William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi <http://www.blakearchive.org>.
- “Plan of the Archive” (in “About the Archive” <http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/public/about/index.html>)
- Yeats, William Butler, ed.. The Poems of William Blake. London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1893.
The abbreviated list below omits many works that might have a significant role in a more comprehensive survey, including, as only one instance, even the most notable second and third editions of Blake’s writings. The Blake Archive’s bibliographies (http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/resources.html) are the most accessible supplement to what appears here.