Scholars of the Gothic have long recognised Blake's affinity with the genre. Yet, to date, no major scholarly study focused on Blake's intersection with the Gothic exists. William Blake's gothic imagination seeks to redress this disconnect. The papers here do not simply identify Blake's Gothic conventions but, thanks to recent scholarship on affect, psychology, and embodiment in Gothic studies, reach deeper into the tissue of anxieties that take confused form through this notoriously nebulous historical, aesthetic, and narrative mode. The collection opens with papers touching on literary form, history, lineation, and narrative in Blake's work, establishing contact with major topics in Gothic studies. Then refines its focus to Blake's bloody, nervous bodies, through which he explores various kinds of Gothic horror related to reproduction, anatomy, sexuality, affect, and materiality. Rather than transcendent images, this collection attends to Blake's "dark visions of torment".

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Elizabeth Effinger is an Associate Professor of English at the University of New Brunswick where she teaches British Romanticism with special interests in William Blake, the intersections of Romantic science and literature, the Anthropocene, human-animal studies, pedagogy and the public humanities. She co-edited William Blake’s Gothic Imagination: Bodies of Horror (Manchester University Press, 2018).

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