Intermedial Blake: Convention, Unconvention, and the Infernal Method

This thesis reconsiders William Blake’s participation in “conventional” forms of British Romantic mediation—that is, his letterpressed, engraved, and multimedial works. Conventional media play a significant role in forwarding his “vision”, wherein an object only exists insofar as it is mediated by a subject. Under this idealist conception, the technical conventions of printing act as tools that liberate one’s senses from their “fallen” state and “redeem” humankind. In making this argument, I reappraise a tradition begun by Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi, who hold that Blake’s experimental mode of relief etching, his “Infernal Method”, was uniquely suited to the way he saw reality as a product of art-making. It is thus an assumed premise in Blake studies that the poet’s relief etched oeuvre constitutes his primary output, while his conventional works are read exclusively with an eye for their relationship to a relief etched counterpart. Applying methodologies associated with the field of Book History, my dissertation decentres relief etching as the primary mode of understanding Blake’s work, widening the study of Romantic print processes to show how Blake’s experiment materially and philosophically overlaps with conventional media. Blake prints the world into life, but he does so intermedially, and relief etching is but one node in a complex network of conventions. Using historical letterpress equipment in the Bibliography Room at Massey College in the University of Toronto, I produced a facsimile of The French Revolution. My first chapter reads this text through the process of recreating it using historical techniques. In Chapters Two and Three, I analyze facsimiles of the engraved Illustrations of the Book of Job and the multimedial 1808 edition of Blair’s The Grave in order to show how Blake’s vision is fueled by the technicalities of intersecting processes. Chapter Four reframes the significance of Blake’s relief etching method by contextualizing it within the constraints and opportunities presented to a British Romantic engraver. Blake indeed produces an unorthodox product, but only by intermixing established conventions. Without denying Blake’s radicalism, then, I show how the intermedial logics spelled out by his experimental and conventional techniques propel his philosophical vision.

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