The spring 2020 issue (vol. 53, no. 4) of the Blake Quarterly is now online and open access until the end of April.
Like every spring issue in recent history, it contains Bob Essick’s annual review of sales of works by Blake and his circle in the previous year. Of note in the latest installment is a newly recorded colored copy of the Night Thoughts engravings, which provides our cover image: a detail of the design from plate 34. This copy is now designated BB to join the other 27 known colored copies (A-Z and AA).
It is no small undertaking to reflect the scope of the recent Blake exhibition at Tate Britain in a single review. Luisa Calè’s substantive and thoughtful assessment, enhanced by installation images provided by Tate, manages just that. I’m very proud that we’re publishing it as our contribution to the discussion around this once in a generation event.
Paul Yoder’s review of Rock and Romanticism, a collection edited by James Rovira, draws a distinction between chapters with a direct point of contact between a Romantic writer and a rock musician, such as a setting of Blake’s poems, and those that discuss an issue of importance to both a writer and a musician, such as melancholy. What does the latter approach mean about the definition of Romanticism in the book?
Finally, we return to both Night Thoughts and the Tate exhibition with Karen Mulhallen’s note on the publisher of Night Thoughts, Richard Edwards, in response to a statement in the exhibition catalogue.
Our latest back issue to become open access is spring 2015 (vol. 48, no. 4). This issue’s “Blake in the Marketplace” records the discovery in 2014 of Blake’s signature hiding in plain sight on the title-page vignette of Stedman. See “Marketplace,” especially illustrations 6-10, or the Blake Archive edition of Stedman, object 1 in either copy and the supplemental views to object 1. The essay on Blake’s attacks on royalty by Paul Miner—“‘Bad’ Queens, ‘Good’ Queens, and George III (as His Satanic Majesty)”—was the last piece Paul wrote for us. For more on him and his scholarship, see our brief tribute on the blog in 2017.
