The horrors of creation: Globes, englobing powers, and Blake's archaeologies of the present

Abstract

By the mid 1790s William Blake (1757-1827) had concluded that the regenerated France foreshadowed by the fall of the Bastille (July 14, 1789) and glimpsed on occasions such as the féte de la fédération (July 14, 1790) had slipped out of reach. Still worse, the past seemed to have reappeared in the present, albeit in new guise. Why? What had ‘enabled the past to colonize the present and supplant it—its desires, its intentions, its very identity as the moment when the future is determined afresh’? In this chapter, I explore Blake’s attempts to answer these questions, as represented by the seventeenth plate of The Book of Urizen (1794). I argue that this colour-printed relief etching provides a..