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Every so often I publish a Q&A, and today’s guest is Michael Phillips, guest curator of the William Blake: Apprentice & Master exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in 2014-15. I had a very murky idea of how an exhibition comes to life, so thought I’d find out.
Continue readingToday I published a new version of the journal’s index. I update the index every time we publish an issue, and I don’t usually draw attention to the fact, so you may be wondering what’s special about this occasion.
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Blake’s eyeglasses now live at the Fitzwilliam Museum—here’s the museum’s catalogue record. There’s an image of them in the checklist of publications and discoveries that appeared in our spring 1996 issue (vol. 29, no. 4), at p. 141.
Continue readingWhile working on the journal’s index this morning I noticed how many poems we have published over the years. We might go from one year to the next without any verse, but over nearly fifty years we have enough for a chapbook. Since the Blake blog is usually quiet on Fridays, I thought I could use the space to draw attention to some of these poems.
Continue readingIn the process of preparing the team to correct spelling errors in the digital archive of Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly (errors in the transcription and in the original print version), I have made a few interesting observations about word distribution in the BIQ corpus (before the first online issues). On the principle that misspellings occur less frequently than correct spellings, I used a series of PHP scripts to generate a wordlist sorted by the number of instances of each unique word. The team is beginning by checking the spellings of rare words (appearing 1-3 times in the whole print-only run of BIQ), in hopes of encountering a higher percentage of errors more efficiently. The word list itself, however, tells us some interesting things about the word choices of Blake scholars.
Continue readingWilliam Pressly’s James Barry’s Murals at the Royal Society of Arts won the prestigious Berger Prize for British Art History in December 2015. The review below, by Alexander Gourlay, will appear in the spring 2016 issue of Blake; we are posting it in advance on the blog to celebrate the recognition that the book has received.
Continue readingOur winter issue (vol. 49, no. 3) has just been published. It contains:
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Today the Blake Archive reunites three copies of Songs of Innocence that are geographically disparate (I in the United States, X in Australia, and Z in Germany).
Continue readingThe winners of our Blake Quarterly subscription giveaway are Harriet Linkin and Sylva Ficová. Congratulations to them and thanks to all who entered.
We’ll probably have another giveaway next year, so stay tuned.
Continue readingIn October I noticed (thanks to a Twitter post celebrating National Opera Week) that Opera Omaha (@operaomaha) is developing a work based on the life of Blake. Stranger from Paradise (the working title) will premiere in May 2017. The librettist and director, Kevin Lawler, very kindly agreed to answer my questions about his inspiration and the production.
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