William Blake's Gothic Imagination: Bodies of Horror
- Submitting institution
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The University of Essex
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 2837
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Manchester University Press
- ISBN
- 9781526121943
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- April
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This book is the first collection focused on the intersection between the poetry and visual art of William Blake and the Gothic genre. Comprising ten essays by world-leading experts (eg. Colebrook, Whittaker, Otto, Lusser) complemented by high-quality contributions from junior/mid-career scholars from around the globe, the collection cuts across media both visual and literary, engages cross-disciplinary scholarship in film, medicine, feminist theory, book history, psychology, art history, and popular culture, and entailed significant work with archives, especially The Yale Centre for British Art.
The original idea for the collection sprang from Bundock's interdisciplinary research on eighteenth-century visual culture, Romanticism, and Gothic art. Along with other editorial tasks, he shared the writing of the critical Introduction (10,483 words) 50/50 with his co-editor for which he surveyed a substantial body of secondary criticism in both Blake and Gothic scholarship. He focused especially on the historical and aesthetic evolution of the Gothic from the eighteenth century to the contemporary moment, developed connections between Blake’s training at the Royal Academy and his vexed relationship to popular forms of mysticism, and contributed innovative analyses of several of the Lambeth Books, the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Milton: A poem.
The collection was six years in the making. The editors worked closely with contributors and Press readers, providing and responding to feedback, and to forge robust cross-references. The Introduction is described as 'masterful' for its rigorous coverage of the topic and its reverberations in popular culture (Prof Tristanne Connolly, Waterloo) while the collection as a whole is praised for being not only ‘a major scholarly study focused on Blake's intersections with the Gothic [but also] a landmark in Blake scholarship' (Sibylle Erle, British Association for Romantic Studies-BARS). The project was funded in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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