Steve Clark and David Worrall, Eds.: Blake, Nation and Empire (Book Review‪)‬

Steve Clark and David Worrall, eds. Blake, Nation and Empire. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Pp. 263. $75.00. Given the peculiar demands of its featured author, Blake criticism has always formed something of its own world within Romantic studies, even when Blakeans have turned to other sources for leverage, as they once did with theory and now do with history. Readers seeking a window onto the current state of the art will find a useful sample in Steve Clark and David Worrall's new collection of essays, Blake, Nation and Empire, the third in a series that began with Historicizing Blake in 1994. Most of the leading lights are here, some showcasing aspects of the work that established their well-earned reputations (Saree Makdisi on empire, orientalism, and modernity; Morris Eaves on technologies of production and the art market; Christopher Hobson on gender and homosexuality), others extending favorite themes into new territory (Jon Mee on circulation and the regulation of the passions; Joseph Viscomi on the earliest attempts to reproduce Blake's images for a wider reading audience; Robert Essick on making peace between formalists and historicists). Consonant with recent historicist trends, readers will often find themselves in the company of obscure documents retrieved because they parallel Blake's discourse in some way: a Swedenborgian proposal to launch a republican colony in Sierra Leone (from Worrall's essay); Hayley's Essay on Old Maids (from Susan Matthews'); tracts and sermons espousing "missionary enthusiasm" (from Clark's).