Umeå University's logo

This book explores the dark regions of Romantic imagination in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and art. It uncovers the palpable and pleasing anxiety about the human body in the works of Henry Fuseli, William Blake, and Mary Shelley, focusing on the negotiations of pleasure and pain, life and death, beauty and monstrosity. Each of the works examined revolves in some manner around the breakdown of an idealized body in order to illuminate the transition from organic to fragmented form. This approach involves reorienting conventional accounts of Romanticism around the emergence of a visual paradigm. Engaging with cultures of print, aesthetic discourse, anatomical art, as well as natural historical knowledge circulating in England at the turn of the century, Dark Romanticism cultivates visual literacy and argues that literary and pictorial elements are inseparable when imagination is at work.

William Hayley’s literary relationship with Dante had a central role in the rediscovery of the Italian poet at the turn of the nineteenth century in England. His knowledge of Dante likely dates back to his student years at Trinity Hall in the 1760s, when he learned “to read, write, and speak Italian with fluency” from his master Agostino Isola, “an elderly, ingenious and distressed Italian” who taught in Cambridge. Hayley invoked Dante in The Triumphs of Temper (1781) and An Essay on Epic Poetry (1782) and was one of the earliest to attempt rendering the Commedia from the original terza rima, offering the most extended English version available in print at the time. The translation was first published in his notes to An Essay on Epic Poetry and encompassed the first three cantos of Inferno. Contemporary writers’ views on his Dante translation, particularly those expressed by Anna Seward and Horace Walpole, are significant. Seward had little admiration for “the fire and smoke poet” and Walpole was notorious for his hostility to Dante. However, they greatly admired Hayley’s version, even more so than Boyd’s. In a letter to Helen Williams, Seward confesses that “after reading and comparing it with Mr. Hayley’s sublime English version of the three first cantos, we cannot place great confidence in Boyd’s justice to his author” (25 August 1785). Boyd himself praised Hayley’s translation and highlighted that in his edition “many biographical particulars of Dante, are taken from Mr. Hayley’s Notes to his Essay on Epic Poetry.” But Hayley’s An Essay on Epic Poetry, apart from his acclaimed translation of the Commedia, includes other noteworthy parts such as his translations of sonnets by Dante, Petrarch, and Camõens and a series of European poets’ biographies, including those of Dante, Boccaccio, and Tasso. In his sketch of Dante’s life, Hayley emphasizes “the lighter graces of sprightly composition,” going beyond the common perception of Dante as a poet “inclined to melancholy.” Hayley’s notes raise questions about the readership of Italian poetry at the time, particularly in what way poets such as Dante were introduced to the English reader, and how the inclusion of Dante’s biography in An Essay might have contributed to the reception of his verse-in-translation. This chapter revolves around the exploration of these concerns in order to contextualize Hayley as a prominent figure who, besides his important connections to Blake and Romney, crucially contributed to literary and artistic negotiations across borders.

The physical peculiarities of The Four Zoas challenge our practice of consuming this work in its unfinished state suspended between printmaking and manuscript-making. Through the medium of paper, pen, and ink Blake could have explored compositional possibilities beyond the artisanal execution afforded by copper, quills, and acid. What one often encounters across The Four Zoas is instead the body and mind of an engraver. The conception of graphic forms seems to echo elements which occur in his illuminated books. How then, does the hand of an engraver show on paper with regards to words and images—in one word, lines? What follows will examine Blake's practice in selected pages of the manuscript, focusing on the way layout, calligraphy, and symbols are embedded in his style as well as the extent to which the boundaries between paper and copperplate become permeable.

Dante's journey in the otherworld has introduced generations of readers to the consequences of the divine judgment, the architecture of sin and salvation, the moral condemnation of materialism, and the pilgrim's encounter with God. God is the "somma luce" (Par. 33.67) ("eternal beam," Cary 3: 293), which cannot be grasped by means of human understanding. The blinding light of redemption thus remains a mystery untold in the Commedia. Toward the end of his life, the sixty-seven-year-old William Blake approached Dante's incommunicable experience by revisiting his poetics of line versus color. For his illustrations to the poem, he worked back and forth on 102 designs, leaving them in various stages of development. From Inferno to Paradiso through Purgatorio, Blake captured the condition of the fallen against the purity of the redeemed. Though the two are treated with the same medium, there is ambiguity in the conception of the human frame. Are the density and articulation of colors and contours in the Dante designs accidental modifications of form, or do they spell out the artist's own judgment upon the souls?

Sibylle Erle and Morton D. Paley took up the ambitious task of editing the first comprehensive and systematic reference guide to Blake’s European afterlife, in collaboration with international scholars. The study resulted in a monumental collection of twenty-six chapters arranged in two volumes. Covering an extraordinary diversity of disciplines, Reception comprises essays on Blake editions, music, exhibitions, and the reception histories in Ireland, France, Belgium, Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, Romania, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the Nordic countries, the Czech Republic, Poland, Russia and the USSR, Hungary, the former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey. The work also contains an introduction, a thoroughly compiled timeline of Blake’s reception in continental Europe, and a detailed bibliography in each volume, divided by chapter, including the major translations in the countries covered.