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News from the Thames (Blake! There’s something in the water)

chapter
posted on 2023-06-09, 15:44 authored by Bethan StevensBethan Stevens
Investigating the Thames, this chapter explores late eighteenth-century newspaper articles that narrate stories of animals, such as: a gigantic eel trapped in a coffin, eroticised swan-men, and blindfolded tigers arriving on the docks after Tipu Sultan’s defeat in Mysore. These articles provoke new ways of reading motifs of sexuality, empire and hell in works by Blake, including The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Urizen, the Large and Small Books of Designs, and illustrations to John Gabriel Stedman, Dante and the Bible. The chapter draws on writing by Walter Benjamin and J. Hillis Miller, developing the idea of the literary caption as an alternative form of academic writing. By using sensationalist animal stories as captions for Blake, we can discover new magical and ethical aspects of his work, within a circulation of fantastical narratives around the Thames. Human–animal relationships become a model for understanding the relationship between texts and images—intimate and visionary, infecting each other without directly touching.

History

Publication status

  • Published

Publisher

Palgrave

Page range

253-291

Book title

Beastly Blake

Place of publication

Cham

ISBN

9783319897875

Series

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

Department affiliated with

  • English Publications

Research groups affiliated with

  • Centre for Creative and Critical Thought Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Editors

Helen P Bruder, Tristanne Connolly

Legacy Posted Date

2018-11-06

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