Romantic Circles Blog

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of electronic editions of America a Prophecy copies B and I. Ten of the fourteen extant copies of America were printed in 1793, the date on its title plate. Copy I, now in the Huntington Library and Art Gallery, is from this printing. The eighteen plates of copy I, like those of the other 1793 copies but unlike those of the later copies, were printed on two sides of the leaves, except for the frontispiece and title page (plates 1 and 2), and left uncolored. The plates were printed in greenish-black ink; five lines at the end of the text on plate 4 were masked and did not print, and plate 13 is in its first state. Copy B was printed in 1795 with copy A in the same brownish black ink on one side of the paper, with plate 13 in its second state. Unlike copy A, however, it is uncolored except for gray wash on the title plate. Now in the Morgan Library and Museum, copy B has a very curious history. Its plates 4 and 9, which were long assumed to be original, are in fact lithographic facsimiles from the mid 1870s produced to complete the copy. For a full technical description and history of this copy, see Joseph Viscomi, “Two Fake Blakes Revisited; One Dew-Smith Revealed.” Blake in Our Time: Essays in Honour of G. E. Bentley, Jr. Ed. Karen Mulhallen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. 35-78. Copies B and I join six other copies in the Archive, copies E and F (1793), A (1795), M (c. 1807), and O (1821), which altogether represent the full printing history of this illuminated book.

America a Prophecy was the first of Blake’s “Continental Prophecies,” followed by Europe a Prophecy in 1794, executed in the same style and size but usually colored, and, in 1795, “Africa” and “Asia,” two sections making up The Song of Los. Fine and important examples of all three books are in the Archive. Like all the illuminated books in the Archive, the text and images of America copies B and I are fully searchable and are supported by the Archive’s Compare feature. New protocols for transcription, which produce improved accuracy and fuller documentation in editors’ notes, have been applied to copies B and I and to all the America texts previously published.

With the publication of these two copies, the Archive now contains fully searchable and scalable electronic editions of 85 copies of Blake’s nineteen illuminated books in the context of full bibliographic information about each work, careful diplomatic transcriptions of all texts, detailed descriptions of all images, and extensive bibliographies. In addition to illuminated books, the Archive contains many important manuscripts and series of engravings, color printed drawings, tempera paintings, and water color drawings.

Due to recent security concerns related to Java browser plugins, the Archive has disabled its Java-based ImageSizer and Virtual Lightbox applications. Users can still view 100 and 300 dpi JPEG images as well as complete transcriptions for all works in the Archive including America copies B and I. Text searching is also still available for all works in the Archive, and image searching remains available for all works except those in preview mode. In the coming months the Archive will implement redesigned pages that restore the features of ImageSizer and the Virtual Lightbox without the use of Java.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the University of Rochester, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.


Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors

Ashley Reed, project manager, William Shaw, technical editor

The William Blake Archive

We here at Romantic Circles recently received an intriguing email we thought was worth passing on, from one Vicki Parslow Stafford:

I would like to bring to the attention of Romantic scholars, historians and biographers a collection of letters held by the Somerset Record Office which establishes the identity of the father of Mary Jane ‘Claire’ Clairmont, daughter of Mrs. Mary Jane Godwin (nee Vial) and stepsister of Mary Shelley.

The letters span the period from 1797, when Mary Jane Vial’s daughter was conceived, until early 1814.  They were formerly held by Dodson and Pulman, Solicitors of Taunton, Somerset, UK.  The collection comprises holograph letters from Mary Jane Vial to her former lover John Lethbridge, of Sandhill Park, Somerset; to his lawyer Robert Beadon; and to several others.  It also contains letters from Lethbridge to his lawyer, and sundry file notes and correspondence from Mary Jane Vial’s lawyer William Lambert White, of Yeovil.  The correspondence is concerned with securing financial support for Mary Jane, Vial’s daughter with John Lethbridge.  It includes a number of letters written by Vial between April and August 1799, when she was imprisoned for debt at Ilchester.

The documents are archived at Somerset Archive and Record Service http://www1.somerset.gov.uk/archives/, catalogue reference DD\DP 17/11, Papers of Dodson and Pulman, Solicitors of Taunton, Lethbridge estate papers (correspondence concerning Mary Jane Vial).

The Somerset County Archives and the depositors have kindly granted me permission to transcribe the letters and make the transcriptions available to scholars and interested persons, through publication on a web site.  The transcriptions can be viewed on my website Claire Clairmont, Mary Jane’s Daughter, at https://sites.google.com/site/maryjanesdaughter/home

Please be aware that I am not a Romantic scholar or historian (I am an alumnus of the the University of Queensland but my professional experience is in disability policy and program development).  I have a keen amateur interest in genealogy, and came across this collection while researching an ancestor also named Mary Vial.  As a consequence, my website may well not meet the Romatic Circle’s rigorous standards for electronic resources.

Nevertheless, I would be pleased if you would take whatever steps you consider appropriate to advise your members and readers of the existence of this previously unpublished material. I am sure it will be of interest to many.  I would also be very glad to receive any criticisms of the content of the website and suggestions for its improvement.

With regards,

Vicki Parslow Stafford

vpstafford ~[at]~ optusnet.com.au

via Elizabeth Denlinger, curator of  The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at the NYPL:

The New York Public Library is delighted to announce the availability of up to ten fellowships to support visiting scholars pursuing research in the Library’s Dorot Jewish Division; Manuscripts and Archives Division; Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs; or Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle.  Fellowships will range from $2,500 to $3,000.

Scholars from outside the New York metropolitan area engaged in graduate-level, post-doctoral, or independent research are invited to apply.

Applications must demonstrate how The New York Public Library’s collections are essential to the research proposed, and successful applicants are expected to contribute a report on their findings, suitable for posting to the Library’s website, at the conclusion of their research.

Applicants who are neither United States citizens nor entitled to work in the U.S. will be responsible for arranging their own visas. Fellowships will be handled as reimbursements when this is required due to the awardee’s visa status.

Applications must be received by April 1, 2010, and should include:
Cover letter
Curriculum vitae
Outline of proposed research and indication of Library holdings to be used
(not more than 1,000 words)
Outline budget for travel and per diem expenses
Proposed dates to be spent in residence
One letter of recommendation

Application materials, including letters of recommendation, may be submitted by e-mail in PDF format (the preferred submission method) to jbaumann [at] nypl.org.

Awards will be announced April 30.

The official site (with all the above info and more) is here:

http://www.nypl.org/short-term-research-fellowships

Also, look here for more info on the Pforzheimer.

James Heffernan alerted us to New Books on Literature 19, a new book review site he’s editing:

Launching on September 1, 2009,  nbol-19.org is an Online Review of Books on English and American Literature of the Nineteenth Century.  Sponsored by Dartmouth College and edited by James Heffernan with technical help from Thomas Luxon  and editorial advice from thirty-three specialists in nineteenth-century literature,  this site aims to revolutionize academic reviewing by assessing new books within ninety days of their publication, by inviting authors to respond to each review within thirty days of its submission,  and by inviting comments from visitors to the site.  Taking advantage of web resources, its reviews will include pictures from the books it reviews and links to relevant material on other sites.  With reviewers ranging from graduate students to chaired professors and emeriti,  this site has commissioned  just over one hundred reviews of books published in 2009, is already posting more than twenty of them, and aims to have the rest up by next April.  Meanwhile, its Books Announced list for 2009 briefly describes all the  books it will review.

It seems worth noting, in the vein of our recent Coraline post, some of the Romantic ties to Watchmen, the superhero movie that has been quite visible since its debut earlier this month. The film is based on the 1986 comic book series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Its trailer is below:

Though familiar with the work in its comic book form, this blogger has not yet seen the film. Reviews are mixed. Roger Ebert spoke well of it, while The New York Times’ A.O. Scott is somewhat more nonplussed. Alan Moore, the writer of the source comic book, has disowned the film sight unseen.

One of the story’s central characters in both media is Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias. In his superhero incarnation, Ozymandias is a superior physical and mental specimen, having traced the path of Alexander the Great’s conquest and learned the spiritual and physical disciplines native to those areas. After a law passed banning superheroes in the 1970s, Veidt publicly revealed his secret identity, and turned his alter ego into a successful line of products and services. As the murder mystery that launches the film unfolds (from here there are spoilers, for those so concerned), Veidt is exposed by the film’s other heroes as the mastermind behind a vast conspiracy to simultaneously undermine the former superhero community and to unite a world on the brink of nuclear war around a common — though manufactured — enemy for the good of mankind.

In the comic book, Moore makes little reference to Shelley’s eponymous poem until the end of the penultimate issue (titled “Look On My Works, Ye Mighty…”) when Veidt’s plot is revealed. In the final panel, the epigraph is a slightly longer quotation from Shelley that includes this post’s title, with proper attribution. Much of the rest of the time, Ozymandias’s Egyptian connections are given the spotlight, rather than Shelley, perhaps hoping to keep association with works that would cause despair latent in the reader’s mind rather than explicit.

Tales of the Black Freighter

Elsewhere in the comic (and absent from the movie in its theatrical form, by all accounts) is the metatextual and fictional Tales of the Black Freighter comic book, which seems to be influenced by Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner as much as by its acknowledged sources, 1950s EC comics and Brecht’s pirate ship from Threepenny Opera. The panels of the comic-within-a-comic are interpolated such that the twin tragic endings come at much the same time. In the story, (much of which is told in the sixth issue, “Fearful Symmetry,” which ends with a longer Blake epigraph) a sailor whose shipmates have been slaughtered by the pirate crew of the Black Freighter makes a raft of their bodies to try to get back to his hometown to warn them of the coming pirate plague. His time on the sea is punctuated by the killing and eating of a seagull, his hallucinated conversations with his dead crewmembers, and an encounter with a giant shark reminiscent of John Singleton Copley’s Romantic-era Watson and the Shark. When he arrives, he finds to his horror that he’s misunderstood; there has been no pirate invasion of his hometown, and he himself is the real monster.

Moore’s work beyond Watchmen is no stranger to Romantic figures either: Blake is referenced in Moore’s V for Vendetta, and appears as a character in his From Hell. Moore also wrote and performed a full length spoken-word piece about Blake at the Tate Gallery in 2001 called Angel Passage (it was released on CD in 2002, but is now out of print). Another spoken word piece, Highbury Working, features a mediation on a late-in-life Coleridge’s opium dream of Sara Hutchinson (which is also on CD, and out of print).

A new stop-motion animation film based on a story by Neil Gaiman offers a slightly more than passing allusion to Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” Directed by Henry Selick (Nightmare Before Christmas), Coraline follows a young girl neglected and ignored by her parents into a parallel world (discovered through a small door in the old mansion into which they’ve recently moved) that contains a set of “other” parents, led by the mother, who have mastered the art of wish-fulfillment. The only difference between the real world and the alternate one: the characters in the latter have buttons sewn over their eyes, marking them as automota of a sort. As the “other mother” begins to ply Coraline with goodies and entertainments, it quickly becomes clear that the former has devious plans for Coraline. And it is not long before the “other mother” gives Coraline an ultimatum: to remain in this happy world, she must abandon her real parents and agree to have buttons sewn over her eyes, like the rest of the characters in the parallel world.

Coraline’s immediate rejection of this proposal unmasks the “other mother” as the sinister, manipulative “Belle Dame” she is. The latter name is given the mother by the ghosts of three children she has previously goaded into her world and subsequently locked away for eternity. A sustained meditation of Keats’ poem this movie is not. But it does contain an interesting take on the poem’s themes of seduction,  economy of exchange (highlighted by the Merci / Mercy pun in the title), the danger of dreams, the abomination of  love, and, most importantly,  the enslavement of the seductress’ victims in a state of perpetual, ghostly death-in-life.  Most conspicuously absent, as might be expected, is the theme of sexual seduction in Keats’ poem; the abomination of love in the movie is of the motherly kind. Absent the sexual politics (that makes possible an empowered reading of the Belle Dame in Keats’ poem), the “other mother” of the movie is thoroughly villainous. What’s more, the dominating visual imagery of the film is that of dolls and puppetry, something Keats poem only addresses by analogy.

For reasons entirely other than its debts to Keats, the film has received mostly favorable reviews, and if that’s not enough, it is projected in stereoscopic 3D! (But not, unfortunately, at this blogger’s theater.)

2001: 9/11 (Bush on holiday with dossier that says “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in Mainland USA”)

2003– Iraq (“Stuff happens”)

2005 Hurricane Katrina

2008 Wall Street implodes

Anyone see a pattern here?

Apres moi le deluge needs to be updated to “Simultaneously with moi, le deluge”—no?

Capitalism is reactive. The environmental crisis demands proactive attention (as does everything else on this list…).

Hi again.

School starts soon (quarter system). I returned from the retreats. And I’m finishing an essay called “Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals,” for SubStance.

All feeble excuses for my not yet posting my final thoughts on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

They’re about the sheer “thereness” of existence, its density—what “world” subsumes and half erases. And its relation to intimacy.

I’ve been getting some excellent feedback on my first draft of The Ecological Thought.

The SubStance essay is a study of Solaris, the incredible science fiction story of a psychologist’s encounter with a radically other mind.

It claims that just as Derrida argues that logocentrism underlies Western philosophy’s attempt to ground meaning in an essential form, I hold that ecologocentrism underpins most environmentalist philosophy, preventing access to the full scope of interconnectedness.

Thinking, even environmentalist thinking, has set up “Nature” as a reified thing in the distance, “over there,” under the sidewalk, on the other side where the grass is always greener, preferably in the mountains, in the wild.  This “Nature” accords with Walter Benjamin’s proposition about the aura: it is a function of distance.  Benjamin uses an image from “Nature”—or from the picturesque?  But that is my and his point—to describe the aura: “We define the aura . . . as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close [the object] may be.  If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.”

Hi everyone.

You may be wondering what I’m going to do with these posts. Well—I decided before I started that I was going to experiment with this new medium by posting some close reading. And that I was going to write things that wouldn’t be in any of my forthcoming books or essays.

So this is where you get it…

Close reading is itself an endangered species, as presses close their doors to books on literature. (UC press doesn’t do it at all any more, for instance; and try getting a book on poetry or theory out there, esp. in the UK.) Close reading’s environment is dying.

I think blogging provides an excellent habitat for close reading.

I was wondering how my assumption was working—my assumption that the blog medium itself, and the RC site in particular, would provide the necessary context for these organs without bodies…

Hi Everyone,

Click here for an account of a green videoconference I just did for ASLE UK (the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment). Science has just done a piece about it.

It seems so obvious that in the future we will need to reconfigure conferencing so that their dates overlap! That way keynote speakers can be shared by videoconference without wasting carbon.

Polycom is a pretty neat, cheap application on the new pcs that supports excellent videoconferencing (better than Skype).

Advantages: saving money, carbon; getting 1+n lots of feedback for the price of one; no jet lag.

Disadvantages: you don’t get to visit the luxurious resorts at which literature conferences are so often held : ) And it may take you a little time to get up to speed with your audiences (no face to face chats in bars, etc.)—I found this highly workable, actually.