Notes and References
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Notes and References 1 Blake Studies: A Critiul Survey 1. Bakhtin, Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences', in Speech Gellres lind Otller Late Essays, ed. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 170. 2. 'Blake' (1920), rep. in T.S. Eliot: Selected Prose, ed. by John Haywood (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), pp. 159--62 (p. 162). For a rather different treatment of this issue see Nelson Hilton, 'Blake and the Apocalypse of the Canon', Modern LAnguage Studies, 16, 1 (Winter 1988),134-49. 3. Some of these deficiencies are being remedied by writers whose work I shall discuss laler, the following are especiall y valuable: Jon Mee, Dangerolls Enthusiasm: William Blakt~ and the Cull un! of Radi calism in the 1790s (Ox ford : Clarendon Press, 1992); David Worrall, Radical Culture; Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance, 1790-1820 (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992) and E.P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral LIIW (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 4. 'Toward a Methodology', p. 170. 5. A good sense of the scope of this debate can be found in the 44 works (89 vols) reprinted in the series, 'The Feminist Controversy in England, 1788-1810', ed. by Gina Luria (New York and lon don: Garland Publishing Inc, 1974). See too, Women, the Fllmily lind Freedom: The: Debate in Documents, Vol. I 1750-1880, ed. by Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983). 6. Valentin Nikolayevich Volo~inov, Marxism olld the Philosophy of LoII gZloge (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 21 (Note: one issue as yet unresolved by Bakhtin scholars is that of the authorship of a number of disputed texts, in these in stances I use the name 'Bakhlin' to refer to all the authors of the so-called 'Bakhtin school': Mikhail Bakhtin, Valentin Nikolayevich Volo~inov and r.N. Medvedev). Bakhtin's now fashionable theories have been appropriated by a variety of critics And it is beyond the scope of this study to detail their different interpretations. However, the kinds of under standing of his work which inform my study are provided by such writers as, Terry Eagleton, 'Wittgenstein's Friends', in Against tIle Grain (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 99-130; Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (London and New York: Methuen 1979), pp. 75- 96; Ken Hirschkopp, 'Bakhtin, Discourse and Democracy', NLR, 160 (1986),92- 113; Bakhtin and Czlltural Theory, ed. by Ken Hirschkopp 184 Notes and References 185 and David Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989) and Graham Pechey, 'Bakhtin, Marxism and Post-Structur alism', in Literature, Politics and Theory, ed. by Francis Barker et al. (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 104-25. 7. Peter Ackroyd, Blake (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995), p. 162. 8. Philosophy of Language pp. 14; 19. 9. Various types of 'double-voiced discourse' are summarized in Prob lems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans and ed. by Caryl Emerson (Man chester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 199. 10. Philosophy of Language, p. 41; Discourse in the Novel, in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. by Michael Holquist (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259-422, (p. 276); Philosophy of Language, p. 23. 11. As Clive Thomson notes, 'there is general agreement that the ad dition of the category of gender to the theory of the dialogic is possible. But the addition of this discursive category entails ad justments in the utopian tendency of Bakhtin's dialogic', 'Mikhail Bakhtin and Contemporary Anglo-American Feminist Theory', Critical Studies, 1, 2 (Summer, 1989), 141-61, (p. 158). From the same volume see too, Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz, 'Bakhtin, Discourse and Feminist Theories', 121-39, and Nancy Glazener, 'Dialogic Subversion: Bakhtin, the Novel and Gertrude Stein', in Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, pp. 109-29. Also of interest are Dale Baur, Femi nist Dialogics: A Theory of Failed Community (New York: University of New York Press, 1988) and Jacqueline Howard, Reading Gothic Fiction: a Bakhtinian Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 12. Philosophy of Language, p. 86. 13. Discourse in the Novel, p. 293. 14. For Bakhtin's views on poetry see, Discourse in the Novel, esp pp. 296-300 and David H. Richter's excellent article, 'Dialogism and Poetry', Studies in the Literary Imagination, 23, 2 (Spring 1990), 9-27. 15. See especially the early chapters of, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. 16. Epic and Novel, in The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 3-40, (p. 7). 17. Discourse in the Novel, pp. 286; 297. 18. Ibid, p. 298. 19. Dostoevsky, p. 252. 20. Literal Imagination: Blake's Vision of Words (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1983), p. 2. 21. Although my comments about Hilton are largely negative, his work in chapters six and seven on, 'Spinning and Weaving [The Text, 1]" pp. 102-26 and, 'Veil, Vale, and Vala [The Text, 2], pp. 127-46, touches on many issues central to a feminist historicist reading of Blake. 22. Hilton's review of Leopold Damrosch, Symbol and Truth in Blake's Myth, in BQ, 15, 4 (Spring 1982), 192-96, (p. 196). 23. Hilton elaborated his ideas in, 'Literal Tiriel Material', in Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method, ed. by Dan Miller, Mark Bracher and Donald AuIt (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1987), pp. 99-110, (pp. 99-100). And note that Morton Paley, 186 Notes and References for instance, speaks of Hilton as one of the, 'best writers on Blake' who has been able to 'assimilate post-structuralist theory to (his] own critical sensibilities', SiR, 21, 3 (Fall 1982), 426. 24. Cleckner, 'Most Holy Forms of Thought'. in Essential Articles for the Sllldy of William Blake, 1970-1984, ed. by Nelson Hilton (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1986). pp. 91-118, (p. 100). 25. Ibid" preface. 26. The Index of Ullllam'd Forms: Blake alld Textuality, ed. by Nelson Hilton and Thomas Vogler (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1986) is replete with references to Derrirla, Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, Freud. Nietzsche and even Julia Kristeva, but no member of the Bakhtin school is invoked. Given this the collection is seriously deficient, although the essays of David Simpson and Robert Essick traverse a lillie of the ground which I have pointed to. Essick's more detailed study, William Blake and the Language of Adam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), is also note worthy in this context. He focuses upon linguistic issues but, strangely, given his otherwise exemplary historicist writings, finds no place for comment upon the Bakhtin school's ideas. 27. Philosophy of Language, p. 82. 28. Creating States ... (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), p. xiv. 29. Rethinking Blake's Texluality (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1993), pp. 1; 2. 30. ' Representations of Revolution: From The French Revolution to The Four Zoas', in Critical Paths, pp. 244-70, (pp. 244; 246). 31. Other 'radical' critics who have invoked in some way the ideas of Bakhtin are: Stewart Crehan, Blake in CO/Itext (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Humanities Press, 1984), pp. 185; 188; Edward Larrissy, William Blake (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), passim, and David Punier in a number of articles reworked in The Romantic Un con scious: A Study in Narcissism afld Patriarchy (Hemel Hempstead: Har vester Wheatsheaf, 1989). The only Blake critic who has used Bakhtin in an extensive way is Graham Pechey, in 'The Marriage of Heaven arId Hell: A Text and Its Conjunctions', Oxford Literary Review, 3, iii (1979), 52-76. 32. Norma A. Greco, 'Mother Figures in Blake's Sarlgs of Innocence and The Female Will', Romanticism Past and Present, 10, 1 (Winter 1986), 1-15, (p. 6). 33. To gain some sense of the quantitative mass of Blake s tudies one need only look at a number of bibliographies; in particular, G.E. Bentley Jr, Blake Books (Ox ford: at the Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 707-1001; Joseph P. Natoli, Twentieth Century Blake Criticism (New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc, 1982); Mary Lynn Johnson, 'William Blake', in The English Romantic Poets: A Review of Research alld Criticism 4th edition, ed. by Frank Jordan (New York: The Modern Languages Association of America, 1985), pp. 113-253 and at the annual, 'Blake Circle' bibliography that appears in Blake: Atl 1Il1istrated Quarterly. Notes and References 187 34. The classic misogynist account of Blake's attitude to women ap pears in Bernard Blackstone's chapter, 'Desire, Love and Marriage', in his English Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949), pp.288-99. 35. Eaves, 'Introduction', to 'Inside the Blake Industry: Past, Present and Future', SiR, 21, 3 (Fall 1982), 389-443, (pp. 389-90). Its con tributors were the honoured David Erdman along with Robert Essick, Hazard Adams, Joseph Viscomi, W.J.T. Mitchell, Nelson Hilton, Morton D. Paley, Karl Kroeber, Robert Gleckner and John E. Grant. It is extraordinary that Mary Lynn Johnson (herself a noteworthy omission from the list) should acknowledge of the Blake Industry that, 'No art historian, British or commonwealth subject, neoclas sicist or feminist scholar of any gender or discipline - sits on the board of directors', whilst also claiming, 'the clan is representa tive enough to air the main agenda of Blakists within the whole of academia', in The English Romantic Poets, p. 250. See too her defence of the 'Blake Industry', pp. 148-9. 36. Comments of this nature appear in the contributions of David Erdman, p. 394 and Karl Kroeber, p. 428. Only W.J.T. Mitchell's, 'Dangerous Blake' deals at length with questions of sexuality, pp. 410-16 - especially in his section on 'Obscenity', pp. 413-14.