Illuminating Resistance: An Intermedial Approach to William Blake’s Hybrid Poetic Forms
Building upon critical discussions about William Blake’s ‘radical form of mixed art’ (Frye 1951), this article mobilises concepts from the field of intermedial studies to excavate Blake’s visions for liberation embedded in the hybrid verbo-visual forms of his illuminated poems. I first offer Blake’s...
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| הוצא לאור ב: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/interfaces, |
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| מחבר ראשי: | |
| פורמט: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| שפה: | Anglais |
| יצא לאור: |
Interfaces
2026
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| נושאים: | |
| גישה מקוונת: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| סיכום: | Building upon critical discussions about William Blake’s ‘radical form of mixed art’ (Frye 1951), this article mobilises concepts from the field of intermedial studies to excavate Blake’s visions for liberation embedded in the hybrid verbo-visual forms of his illuminated poems. I first offer Blake’s Laocoön (1826) as both a visual nexus for the centuries-spanning debate on poetic intermediality and a springboard for further investigating the connections between Blake’s radical politics and intermedial forms in the earlier illuminated poems. Applying an intermedial perspective to close readings of ‘London’ (1794) and ‘Jerusalem’ (1804–c. 1820), I demonstrate how the interactions between the words and images reveal visions for liberation from material conditions of struggle in Blake’s London at the turn of the 19th century. Throughout, I situate what I determine as Blake’s intermedial poetics of resistance in relation to his historical position as a working-class artisan engraver, at odds with the dominant aesthetic and political cultures of his time. |
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