539 research outputs found
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The twelve large colour prints of William Blake: a study on techniques, materials and context
No full textThe aim of this thesis is to study in entirety the group of large colour prints which William Blake made between 1795 and 1805. The series of prints represents the single most important and complete development of Blake’s skill as an innovative printmaker. Although they include some of Blake’s best-known images, they have not been studied before in their entirety or from the point of view of analysing the techniques and methods Blake had used. My study will show how Blake executed these truly impressive prints in terms of materials, method and motives. The first half of the thesis deals with the materialistic aspects of Blake’s colour printing. In chapter one tracing the controversial two-pull discussion to the root, I will make clear the focus points as well as revealing the early tradition of experimental criticism on Blake’s colour printing method. Focusing on two important critics, W. Graham Robertson and Ruthven Todd, and the periods they lived, I attempt to reveal the role they played in a wider context. Also I show how the tradition of Blake’s art was inherited directly through the Ancients to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which leads to Robertson and Todd. In the second chapter I deal with the development of Blake’s colour printing experiments. It is obvious that the Twelve Large Colour Prints were produced as a result of Blake’s series of colour printing experiments, starting with monocolour simple prints, going through the illuminated books progressing with more colours and higher skills
Book review: Genesis: William Blake's Last Illuminated Work
No full textA review of 'Genesis: William Blake's Last Illuminated Work', edited by:Mark Crosby and Robert N. Essick, with an introduction by Robert R. Wark. San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 2012. ISBN:978-0-87328-247-
Job’s Gethsemane: tradition and imagination in William Blake’s illustrations for the book of job
No full textBlake created two versions of his Illustrations of the Book of Job, and it is now agreed that about twenty years separates his first watercolour series and the final engraved set of plates. The first chapter is biographical and technical: it establishes that the Butts series of water-colours was the product of the tumultuous and creative years 1805-10, following a time wh6n Blake experienced a strong sense of vision and Christian regeneration; whereas the engraved set was produced 1821-1826, at the end of his life. It also reviews all Blake's treatments of the Job theme. The friends-turned-accusers seem to have been a central pre-occupation. Blake's illustrations contain important elements which are not found in the Old Testament text. I have followed Bo Lindberg's principle that explanation should be sought in the artistic tradition, and in the work itself The second chapter concentrates on the tradition available to Blake, following and supplementing Lindberg's examination of the influence of the apocryphal Testament of Job, and of the artistic tradition of seeing Job as alter Christus and as Christian. Chapters three to five, interpreting Blake's imaginative use of this material, are new both in focussing on the Butts set, and in exploring the importance to Blake of St.Teresa, Fenelon, Mme. Guyon, Hervey and other people of prayer. Also discussed are Joseph Hallett's radical biblical commentary, of which Blake owned a copy, variant proofs discovered by Robert Essick of the first and last engraved plates, and the thirteenth century Job wall- paintings discovered in 1800 in St. Stephen's Chapel, Westminster. Blake's Job was unique in the corpus of his work. Previous studies have followed Wicksteed in concentrating on the engraved set, and no one has explored the implications of the earlier dating now agreed for the watercolour series. The thesis is essentially concerned with Blake's Christocentric theme, and Job's inner journey of prayer, in these illustrations. Conclusions drawn differ substantially from Wicksteed's
William Blake and the visionary poetry of the law.
No full textPhDThis dissertation examines the meaning of law in Blake's work. I argue that Blake's poetry
intersects with contemporaneous challenges to the traditional model of the ancient constitution,
a debate which I present as a conflict between custom and code. Blake's support for the French
Revolution's overthrow of the customary systems of the ancien regime is countered by his
nervousness about the rights-based discourse advanced by leading radical intellectuals such as
Thomas Paine, a belief that the new systems which they proposed merely re-stated those which
they sought to replace within an even narrower compass.
Law is also a contested ground within radical political discourse of this period; although the
dominant proposals advocated the enshrinement of fundamental rights and the codification of
law, there was also a tendency towards a more enthusiastic radicalism These millenarian
groups, emerging from antinomian heresy, rejected the notion of life being framed within a set
of moral laws. I argue that Blake cannot easily be placed in either group; his work exhibits a
fidelity to the redemptive potential of law, coupled with a real concern that to define freedoms
in legal terms serves to limit rather than to liberate.
Blake's work thus engages with a problem of the period: how to understand the new
discourses of law. The customary account of the ancient English conunon law is predicated on
the idea that it is codified, yet not written down; secular, though grounded in divine principle.
These ambivalences are exploited by Blake in his poetic exploration of the law in the 1790s. In
his nineteenth-century epics, Blake finds increasing help in dissenting religion's reconstruction
of a radicalized Jesus. Through this radical prophetic voice, Blake is able to construct a
redemptive legality founded on a deinstitutio-nalized Christianity, a constitutionalism that is
also recovered from the conventional customary account
Parameter Estimation for Gravitational-wave Bursts with the BayesWave Pipeline
No full textWe provide a comprehensive multi-aspect study of the performance of a pipeline used by the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration for estimating parameters of gravitational-wave bursts. We add simulated signals with four different morphologies (sine-Gaussians (SGs), Gaussians, white-noise bursts, and binary black hole signals) to simulated noise samples representing noise of the two Advanced LIGO detectors during their first observing run. We recover them with the BayesWave (BW) pipeline to study its accuracy in sky localization, waveform reconstruction, and estimation of model-independent waveform parameters. BW localizes sources with a level of accuracy comparable for all four morphologies, with the median separation of actual and estimated sky locations ranging from 25.°1 to 30.°3. This is a reasonable accuracy in the two-detector case, and is comparable to accuracies of other localization methods studied previously. As BW reconstructs generic transient signals with SG wavelets, it is unsurprising that BW performs best in reconstructing SG and Gaussian waveforms. The BW accuracy in waveform reconstruction increases steeply with the network signal-to-noise ratio (S/N), reaching a 85% and 95% match between the reconstructed and actual waveform below S/N and S/N, respectively, for all morphologies. The BW accuracy in estimating central moments of waveforms is only limited by statistical errors in the frequency domain, and is also affected by systematic errors in the time domain as BW cannot reconstruct low-amplitude parts of signals that are overwhelmed by noise. The figures of merit we introduce can be used in future characterizations of parameter estimation pipelines
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Variation in the autism candidate gene GABRB3 modulates tactile sensitivity in typically developing children
No full textBackground: Autism spectrum conditions have a strong genetic component. Atypical sensory sensitivities are one of the core but neglected features of autism spectrum conditions. GABRB3 is a well-characterised candidate gene for autism spectrum conditions. In mice, heterozygous Gabrb3 deletion is associated with increased tactile sensitivity. However, no study has examined if tactile sensitivity is associated with GABRB3 genetic variation in humans. To test this, we conducted two pilot genetic association studies in the general population, analysing two phenotypic measures of tactile sensitivity (a parent-report and a behavioural measure) for association with 43 SNPs in GABRB3.
Findings: Across both tactile sensitivity measures, three SNPs (rs11636966, rs8023959 and rs2162241) were nominally associated with both phenotypes, providing a measure of internal validation. Parent-report scores were nominally associated with six SNPs (P <0.05). Behaviourally measured tactile sensitivity was nominally associated with 10 SNPs (three after Bonferroni correction).
Conclusions: This is the first human study to show an association between GABRB3 variation and tactile sensitivity. This provides support for the evidence from animal models implicating the role of GABRB3 variation in the atypical sensory sensitivity in autism spectrum conditions. Future research is underway to directly test this association in cases of autism spectrum conditions
Radical Blake: Influence and Afterlife from 1827
No full textThis is the first full-length study to be published on Blake’s influence on subsequent writers and artists since R. Bertholf and A. Levitt’s William Blake and the Moderns in 1987, and the first text to consider that influence across a wider range of cultural formats and activities such as music, film, and political thinking. Its contribution has been noted in the field and stimulated an increased interest in the study of Blake’s reception, notably in texts such as The Reception of Blake in the Orient (eds. S. Clark and S. Masashi) and Blake and Modern Literature (E. Larrissy), with citations in a wide range of articles and books that have been published on Blake in the past five years. Radical Blake for Blake studies moved considerations of reception beyond the immediate audience for Blake’s original texts.
In terms of scholarship, Radical Blake draws particularly upon work undertaken in the last two decades in the fields of new historicism (Essick, Worrall, Mee, Makdisi) and what is referred to as the ‘new bibliography’ (Bentley, Viscomi, Essick), areas that changed our understanding of Blake’s ideas and methods. Whereas earlier reception studies tended to concentrate on formal characteristics that indicated the influence of Blake’s art and poetry, the methodology employed within Radical Blake emphasises the significance of cultural materialist contexts for new texts, supported in many cases by archival research to locate and identify the new areas where Blake’s art transformed and inspired artistic and literary production
Radical Blake: influence and afterlife from 1827
No full textThis is the first full-length study to be published on Blake?s influence on subsequent writers and artists since R. Bertholf and A. Levitt?s William Blake and the Moderns in 1987, and the first text to consider that influence across a wider range of cultural formats and activities such as music, film, and political thinking. Its contribution has been noted in the field and stimulated an increased interest in the study of Blake?s reception, notably in texts such as The Reception of Blake in the Orient (eds. S. Clark and S. Masashi) and Blake and Modern Literature (E. Larrissy), with citations in a wide range of articles and books that have been published on Blake in the past five years. Radical Blake for Blake studies moved considerations of reception beyond the immediate audience for Blake?s original texts. In terms of scholarship, Radical Blake draws particularly upon work undertaken in the last two decades in the fields of new historicism (Essick, Worrall, Mee, Makdisi) and what is referred to as the ?new bibliography? (Bentley, Viscomi, Essick), areas that changed our understanding of Blake?s ideas and methods. Whereas earlier reception studies tended to concentrate on formal characteristics that indicated the influence of Blake?s art and poetry, the methodology employed within Radical Blake emphasises the significance of cultural materialist contexts for new texts, supported in many cases by archival research to locate and identify the new areas where Blake?s art transformed and inspired artistic and literary production.</p
Radical Blake: influence and afterlife from 1827
No full textThis is the first full-length study to be published on Blake?s influence on subsequent writers and artists since R. Bertholf and A. Levitt?s William Blake and the Moderns in 1987, and the first text to consider that influence across a wider range of cultural formats and activities such as music, film, and political thinking. Its contribution has been noted in the field and stimulated an increased interest in the study of Blake?s reception, notably in texts such as The Reception of Blake in the Orient (eds. S. Clark and S. Masashi) and Blake and Modern Literature (E. Larrissy), with citations in a wide range of articles and books that have been published on Blake in the past five years. Radical Blake for Blake studies moved considerations of reception beyond the immediate audience for Blake?s original texts. In terms of scholarship, Radical Blake draws particularly upon work undertaken in the last two decades in the fields of new historicism (Essick, Worrall, Mee, Makdisi) and what is referred to as the ?new bibliography? (Bentley, Viscomi, Essick), areas that changed our understanding of Blake?s ideas and methods. Whereas earlier reception studies tended to concentrate on formal characteristics that indicated the influence of Blake?s art and poetry, the methodology employed within Radical Blake emphasises the significance of cultural materialist contexts for new texts, supported in many cases by archival research to locate and identify the new areas where Blake?s art transformed and inspired artistic and literary production.</p
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