Palgrave Macmillan will publish a new collection of essays, William Blake's Manuscripts: Praxis, Puzzles, and Palimpsests, edited by Mark Crosby and Josephine McQuail on May 27:
This collection of essays examines how close analysis of William Blake’s manuscripts can yield new discoveries about his techniques, his working habits, and his influences. With the introduction of facsimile editions and more particularly, the William Blake Archive, the largest digital repository of Blake materials online, scholars have been able to access Blake’s work in as close its original medium, leading to important insights into Blake’s creative process and mythopoetic system. Recent advancements in digital editing and reproduction has further increased interest in Blake’s manuscripts. This volume brings together both established Blake scholars, including G.E. Bentley Jnr’s final essay on Blake, and upcoming scholars whose research is at the intersection of digital humanities, critical theory, textual scholarship, queer theory, transgender studies, reception history, and bibliographical studies. The chapters seek to cover the breadth of Blake’s manuscripts: poetry, letters, notebook entries, and annotations. Together, these chapters offer an overview of the current state of research in Blake studies on manuscripts at a point when his manuscripts have become increasingly available in digital environments, and gesture to a possible future of Blake scholarship in general.
Mark Crosby is Associate Professor at Kansas State University. His main area of research is eighteenth-century and Romantic-period literature and art. He is particularly interested in how authors and artists negotiated the various economies of patronage operating during the long eighteenth-century.
Josephine McQuail is a Professor of English at TTU. She was recently awarded a Non-instructional research grant (sabbatical) which she is using to research William Blake and James Joyce in London.
William Blake's Manuscripts: Praxis, Puzzles, and Palimpsests is available from Palgrave Macmillan and other bookstores.