Supervised by Professor Jon Mee, University of York and Dr Amy Concannon, Curator, British Art 1790鈥1850, Tate
October 2019 鈥
William Blake
Milton (Copy A) plate 32, c.1804–11
This research relates the work of William Blake (1757鈥1827) to the history and theory of mapping. The project situates Blake within networks of people and places, with a view to characterising him as both a cautious participant in, and a canny critic of, contemporaneous mapping practices. The research is interdisciplinary, spanning the fields of literary, intellectual and art history as well as cultural geography. It contributes to historicist Blake scholarship by seeking to restore to Blake a place within eighteenth-century networks, unravelling the notions of otherworldliness, obscurity and Romantic individualism that have so often been fundamental to Blake鈥檚 posthumous reputation.
This project thinks through Blake鈥檚 agonistic engagement with the imagery, formal logic and onto-epistemology of eighteenth-century mapping, understood as a networked set of practices. It is an opportunity to place Blake鈥檚 visual and verbal art in dialogue with that of recent theorists of spatial representation and attendant problematics of knowledge, power and politics.
The research also traces the legacy of Blake鈥檚 contradictorily (anti-)cartographic imagination as it is evoked in creative responses to his work up to the present day, especially within networks of London-based small-press publishers, writers and artists. This aspect of the project combines archival and oral-historical research to seek out Blake鈥檚 ongoing legacy in present-day London, which can in turn inform a reading of the formal and thematic affordances of Blake鈥檚 oeuvre.
About Caroline Anjali Ritchie
Caroline Anjali Ritchie holds a BA in Classics and English from The University of Oxford and an MA in Art History, Curatorship and Renaissance Culture from the Warburg Institute. Broadly, Caroline鈥檚 research interests include mapping, psychogeography, cities, networks, radicalism, counterculture, the 鈥楤ritish Poetry Revival鈥 and independent publishing. She also writes poetry, which has appeared in Culture Matters, and contributes to Zoamorphosis, a blog focusing on the 鈥榓fterlives鈥 of William Blake up to the present day.
Selected publications:
鈥楧iagrammatic Blake: Tracing the Critical Reception of 鈥淭he Mental Traveller鈥濃, Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, vol.54, no.4, 2021
鈥樷, Zoamorphosis, 19 April 2021
鈥樷, Zoamorphosis, 15 March 2021
鈥樷, Culture Matters, 2 March 2021
鈥樷, Culture Matters, 15 January 2021