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William Blake's Gothic Imagination: Bodies of Horror

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 William
Blake’s
Gothic
imagination
Bodies of horror

Edited by
Chris Bundock and Elizabeth Effinger

Manchester University Press

 Copyright © Manchester University Press 2018

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press,

copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter
may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of
both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 2194 3 hardback

First published 2018

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs

for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.

Typeset
by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
Printed in Great Britain
by TJ International Ltd, Padstow
 Contents
•

List of figures page vii

Notes on contributors ix
List of abbreviations xiii

Introduction Chris Bundock and Elizabeth Effinger 1

Part I: The bounding line of Blake’s Gothic: forms, genres,

and contexts 31
1 ‘Living Form’: William Blake’s Gothic relations
David Baulch 33
2 The horror of Rahab: towards an aesthetic context for
William Blake’s ‘Gothic’ form Kiel Shaub 64
3 The Gothic sublime Claire Colebrook 85

Part II: The misbegotten 107

4 Dark angels: Blake, Milton, and Lovecraft in Ridley Scott’s
Prometheus Jason Whittaker 109
5 William Blake’s monstrous progeny: anatomy and the birth
of horror in The [First] Book of Urizen Lucy Cogan 129
6 Blake’s Gothic humour: the spectacle of dissection
Stephanie Codsi 150

Part III: Female space and the image 163

7 The horrors of creation: globes, englobing powers, and
Blake’s archaeologies of the present Peter Otto 165

•v
Contents

8 Female spaces and the Gothic imagination in The Book

of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion
Ana Elena González-Treviño 189

Part IV: Sex, desire, perversion 211

9 The horrors of subjectivity/the jouissance of immanence
Mark Lussier 213
10 ‘Terrible Thunders’ and ‘Enormous Joys’: potency and
degeneracy in Blake’s Visions and James Graham’s
celestial bed Tristanne Connolly 235

Bibliography 265

vi •
 List of Figures
•

1 William Blake, Jerusalem, copy E, plate 74, detail

(1804 [1820]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon
Collection. page 4
2 William Blake, The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy (formerly
called ‘Hecate’) (c. 1795). Tate Images. 10
3 Francisco Goya, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos
[The sleep of reason produces monsters] (1799).
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 11
4 William Blake, ‘Albions Angel rose …’, Europe a Prophecy,
copy A, plate 12 (Bentley 14) (1794 [1795]). Yale Center
for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 12
5 William Blake, Nebuchadnezzar (c. 1795). Museum of Fine
Art, Boston. 13
6 William Blake, Death’s Door, For the Children: The Gates of
Paradise, plate 17 (1793). Yale Center for British Art, Paul
Mellon Collection. 44
7 William Blake, ‘So Cried He …’, America a Prophecy, copy
M, plate 14 (Bentley 12) (1793). Yale Center for British
Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 45
8 William Blake, Jerusalem, frontispiece, copy E, plate 1
(1804 [1820]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon
Collection. 47
9 William Blake, Jerusalem, title page, copy E, plate 2 (1804
[1820]). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 48
10 William Blake, Jerusalem, copy E, plate 32 (1804 [1820]).
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 50
11 William Blake, Jerusalem, copy E, plate 57 (1804 [1820]).
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 51

• vii
LIST OF Figures

12 William Blake, Jerusalem, copy E, plate 84 (1804 [1820]).

Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 54
13 William Blake, ‘London’, Songs of Innocence and of
Experience, copy F, plate 39 (Bentley 46) (1794). Yale
Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 55
14 William Blake, Ancient of Days, Europe A Prophecy,
frontispiece, copy A, plate 1 (1794). Yale Center for British
Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 133
15 William Hunter, ‘Fetus in utero’, table VI, Anatomia uteri
humani gravid. Tabulis Illustrata (1774). Engravings by
Jan van Rymsdyk (fl. 1750–88). US National Library of
Medicine Digital Collections. 138
16 William Blake, The [First] Book of Urizen, copy A, plate
10 (Bentley 7) (1794). Yale Center for British Art, Paul
Mellon Collection. 143
17 William Blake, The [First] Book of Urizen, copy A, plate
14 (Bentley 11) (1794). Yale Center for British Art, Paul
Mellon Collection. 145
18 William Blake, The [First] Book of Urizen, copy A, plate
11 (Bentley 17) (1794). Yale Center for British Art, Paul
Mellon Collection. 168
19 William Hunter, ‘Decem priores …’, table I, Anatomia uteri
humani gravid. Tabulis Illustrata (1774). Engravings by Jan
van Rymsdyk (fl. 1750–88). Special Collections, Baillieu
Library University of Melbourne. 175
20 William Blake, Song of Los, copy B, plate 8 (1795). The
Library of Congress, Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection. 178
21 William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, copy
I, frontispiece (1793). Yale Center for British Art, Paul
Mellon Collection. 203
22 William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, copy I,
title page (1793). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon
Collection. 227

viii •
 Notes on contributors
•

David Baulch is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the

University of West Florida. He has just finished a book-length manuscript
entitled Being at the Limit: William Blake, Difference, and Revolution. He is
author of a number of articles on William Blake, Thomas Lovell Beddoes,
and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Chris Bundock is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Regina.
He is author of Romantic Prophecy and the Resistance to Historicism (2016)
and has published articles on the Gothic and Romantic historiography.
His current book project, Romanticism’s Foreign Bodies, concerns how
the body becomes other to itself both culturally and medically in the
period. He has a chapter forthcoming in Blake: Modernity and Disaster
titled ‘Blake’s Nervous System: Hypochondria, Judaism, and Jerusalem’.
Stephanie Codsi currently teaches eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
literature at Bristol University. She has published in the Journal of Literature
and Science, BSLS, and an entry on teaching Blake to Erasmus students
in Romantic Textualities. Her poetry and music has appeared on Bristol
community radio, and her poetry will be published in the Landsdown
Poets’ Anthology this year. She is currently preparing a monograph titled
Creative Labour and Self-Annihilation in the Poetry of William Blake.
Lucy Cogan is Lecturer in the School of English, Drama and Film at
University College, Dublin. She edited Charlotte Dacre’s Confessions of
the Nun of St. Omer (2016) and has published articles on Blake and Sarah
Butler. Her research focuses on politics in the long eighteenth century as
well as related topics such as gender, radicalism, and religion.
Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Philosophy
and Women’s and Gender Studies at Penn State University. She has written

• ix
Notes on contributors

books and articles on contemporary European philosophy, literary history,

gender studies, queer theory, visual culture, and feminist philosophy. Her
most recent book is Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (co-authored with
Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller).

Tristanne Connolly is Associate Professor and Chair of English at St.

Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo. She is the author
of William Blake and the Body (2002) and has co-edited several essay
collections on Blake and on Romantic literature, most recently British
Romanticism in European Perspective: Into the Eurozone (2015) with Steve
Clark, and Sexy Blake (2013) with Helen P. Bruder. She is currently working
on another collection with Bruder, Beastly Blake (forthcoming 2018), and
a digital edition of Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants.

Elizabeth Effinger is Assistant Professor of English at the University of

New Brunswick and has published widely in British Romanticism. Some
of her work appears in ERR; Queer Blake; Blake, Gender and Culture; and
Romantic Circles. She is completing a book that explores the relationship
between Romanticism and critical posthumanism.

Ana Elena González-Treviño is Professor of English and Comparative

Literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and current
Deputy Director at the Centre for Mexican Studies in King’s College
London. She has published in the field of literary and cultural studies of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with emphasis on the works of
Thomas Traherne as well as the Arabian Nights. She currently directs a
digital humanities project, México imaginario, about the representation
of Mexican culture in early printed books in English and French.

Mark Lussier is a Professor in the Department of English and a Senior

Sustainability Scholar in the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona
State University. His major publications include Romantic Dynamics: The
Poetics of Physicality (1999), Romanticism and Buddhism (2006), Engaged
Romanticism: Romanticism as Praxis (2008), and Romantic Dharma: The
Emergence of Buddhism into Nineteenth-Century Europe (2011). His
chapters and essays have appeared in a wide range of collections and
journals, including Blake 2.0, Ecological Theory, Literature and Religion,
Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Studies in Romanticism, and Visible Language.

Peter Otto is Professor of Literature at the University of Melbourne.

His recent publications include Entertaining the Supernatural: Animal

x•
 Notes on contributors

Magnetism, Spiritualism, Secular Magic and Psychical Science (2007),

Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual
Reality (2011), and 21st Century Oxford Authors: William Blake (forthcom-
ing). He is currently completing a book on ‘William Blake, the history of
imagination, and the futures of Romanticism’, while also working on a
project entitled ‘Architectures of Imagination: Bodies, Buildings, Fictions,
and Worlds’.
Kiel Shaub is a Doctoral Candidate in English literature at the University
of California, Los Angeles. His current research focuses on the early history
of arts and sciences educational institutions in England.
Jason Whittaker is Head of the School of English and Journalism at the
University of Lincoln, and has written extensively on Blake and digital
technologies. His publications include William Blake and the Myths of
Britain (1999), Radical Blake (with Shirley Dent, 2002), Blake 2.0 (with
Tristanne Connolly and Steve Clark, 2012), and William Blake and the
Digital Humanities (with Roger Whitson, 2013). He is currently working
on two books, one on the hymn ‘Jerusalem’ and another on digital media
and fake news.

• xi

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