Our autumn 2021 issue (vol. 55, no. 2) is out now; it will be open access for a week.
It contains:
- Morton Paley’s remembrance of Bo Ossian Lindberg
- Silvia Riccardi, “The Body in the Line: ‘Trasumanar’ in Blake’s Dante”
- Christopher Z. Hobson, “Blake, Methodism, and ‘Christian Perfection’”
- R. Paul Yoder, review of Sheila A. Spector, The Evolution of Blake’s Myth. (Many thanks to Meaghan Green, a graduate student at the University of Rochester and a luminary of the Blake Archive team here, for taking on the copyediting and layout of this review.)
- Wayne C. Ripley, review of Susan Mitchell Sommers, The Siblys of London: A Family on the Esoteric Fringes of Georgian England
Silvia’s article, which is in honor of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, discusses Blake’s use of line and color in his watercolor series. As such, it was important to reproduce a number of the drawings: the twelve that Silvia suggested are spread among five institutions, reflecting the dispersal of the set after the Linnell sale of 1918. This could have been an expensive proposition. We were fortunate in that six (including Dante Adoring Christ, the beautiful cover image above) belong to the National Gallery of Victoria, which allowed us as an academic publication to reproduce them at no charge; one is from the Harvard Art Museums, which required a formal permission but no fee; and one (the famous Circle of the Lustful) resides at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, which has a liberal use policy for works in the public domain. We incurred reproduction fees only for the three from the Tate and one from the British Museum.
Chris wanted an engraving of the Rev. George Whitefield in full preaching flow as one of the illustrations for his article on Whitefield’s, John Wesley’s, and Blake’s views on our ability to overcome sin. The first candidate was available from Getty Images for roughly the price of an arm and a leg, so we scouted round and found a different engraving on the same theme from the British Museum. Though we had to pay for new photography, it was a bargain by comparison and felt like a victory.
Our latest issue to become completely open access is fall 2016 (vol. 50, no. 2), from our fiftieth-anniversary year.
Serendipitously, it includes pieces of relevance to this autumn’s issue. Sheila Spector’s article on Frye’s disregard of the esoteric context for Blake’s work relates to Chuck Ripley’s review of her new book, The Evolution of Blake’s Myth. There are also reviews of Jennifer Jesse’s William Blake’s Religious Vision and Michael Farrell’s Blake and the Methodists, two works that Chris discusses in his article.