Sheila A. Spector, The Evolution of Blake’s Myth

Abstract

Spector has spent much of her career championing a “canon of rejected knowledge” that she describes in her book as having been “extirpated from the bibliographies of acceptable resources” (330). The Evolution of Blake’s Myth is her most ambitious and persuasive statement yet on the importance of esoteric or “hidden” traditions, largely Kabbalistic, to Blake’s work. Spector discusses almost all of Blake’s illuminated books and a good number of his paintings; she also develops a vocabulary for Blake’s composite art that allows for a consistently integrated discussion of text and design.