Includes bibliographical references (pages 265-283) and index.
Contents:
10. Tristanne Connolly. Part I: The bounding line of Blake's Gothic: forms, genres, and contexts. 1. 'Terrible Thunders' and 'Enormous Joys': potency and degeneracy in Blake's Vision and James Graham's celestial bed / David Baulch -- 2. The horror of Rahab: towards an aesthetic context for William Blake's 'Gothic' form / Kiel Shaub -- 3. The Gothic sublime / Claire Colebrook -- Part II: The misbegotten. 4. Dark angels: Blake, Milton, and Lovecraft in Ridley Scott's Prometheus / Jason Whittaker -- 5. William Blake's monstrous progeny: anatomy and the birth of horror in The [First] Book if Urizen / Lucy Cogan -- 6. Blake's Gothic humour: the spectacle of dissection / Stephanie Codsi -- Part III: Female space and the image. 7. The horrors of cration: globes, englobing powers, and Blake's archaeologies of the present / Peter Otto -- 8. Female spaces and the Gothic imagination in The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion / Ana Elena González-Treviño -- Part IV: Sex, desire, perversion. 9. The horrors of subjectivity / the jouissance of immanence / Mark Lussier -- 10. 'Terrible Thunders' and 'Enormous Joys': potency and degeneracy in Blake's Vision and James Graham's celestial bed / Tristanne Connolly.
Summary:
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'.-- Publisher's website.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.