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Steve Clark and David Worrall, eds. Blake, Nation and Empire. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Pp. 263. $75.00.
Given the peculiar demands of its featured author, Blake criticism has always formed something of its own world within Romantic studies, even when Blakeans have turned to other sources for leverage, as they once did with theory and now do with history. Readers seeking a window onto the current state of the art will find a useful sample in Steve Clark and David Worrall's new collection of essays, Blake, Nation and Empire, the third in a series that began with Historicizing Blake in 1994. Most of the leading lights are here, some showcasing aspects of the work that established their wellearned reputations (Saree Makdisi on empire, orientalism, and modernity; Morris Eaves on technologies of production and the art market; Christopher Hobson on gender and homosexuality), others extending favorite themes into new territory (Jon Mee on circulation and the regulation of the passions; Joseph Viscomi on the earliest attempts to reproduce Blake's images for a wider reading authence; Robert Essick on making peace between formalists and historicists). Consonant with recent historicist trends, readers will often find themselves in the company of obscure documents retrieved because they parallel Blake's discourse in some way: a Swedenborgian proposal to launch a republican colony in Sierra Leone (from Worrall's essay); Hayley's Essay on Old Maids (from Susan Matthews'); tracts and sermons espousing "missionary enthusiasm" (from Clark's).
Readers will also discover enough internal disagreement among historicists to justify Blake's famous aphorisms about "opposition" ("true friendship") and "contraries" (without which there "is no progression"). There is contrariety aplenty here. Does Blake's later poetry, which receives special attention in this volume, tend toward the ecumenical inclusiveness of an early nineteenth-century Christianity eager to ward off secularist incursions by asserting its universality or does it reflect the anti-Catholic divisiveness of "an abrasive brand of Protestant nationalism" (171) that grew ever more virulent in the decade leading up to Catholic emancipation in 1829? Arguing the former thesis, Andrew Lincoln suggests that Blake made room even for Catholic notions concerning the Virgin Mary in his representation of Ololon in Milton; arguing the latter, Clark suggests that Mary is the archetype underlying Blake's reviled "Female Will" in Jerusalem. I offer...