| dc.description.abstract | William Blake sought, though his poetry and printmaking, to change the fundamental
nature of reality and to set humanity on a redemptive course. Inspired in his studio, the artist
channeled what he called "Divine Vision" into his complicated poetry and visual designs—what
is commonly referred to as his unique "composite" art. The cosmic transformations that Blake
sought to bring about through the dissemination of his art, however, began in the material
processes of his studio, in the performance of the novel "relief etching" method of printmaking
he invented. This paper examines two tropes Blake used extensively in his art, what I call
"framing" and "inversions," and traces their origins in his works' production. I consider framing
as it is displayed in the short lyric "The Tyger," which is about physical and conceptual acts of
framing at the same time that it uses frames in its structure and poetics. To define and describe
Blake's inversions, this paper focuses on Blake's epic poem Jerusalem The Emanation of the
Giant Albion, in which inversions infuse the language and visual designs even as they govern the
poem's narrative order. A concluding section demonstrates the two tropes' intersection in a series
of framings and inversions performed by the artist in his studio where, working the wheels of his
press, Blake animates not only his illuminated books but, in his mind, alternative orders of
reality. | en_US |
