Visionary: How William Blake Changed the World Zoavision

Often hailed as "the Scottish William Blake", Alasdair Gray's love of both the graphic arts and written word does indeed owe much to his admiration for the Romantic poet and engraver. In this talk, originally delivered as part of the Global Blake In Conversation series, Jason Whittaker explores some of the connections between Gray's mythic work and that of Blake, especially in his first novel, Lanark: A Life in Four Books.

In this episode, Annise Rogers looks at the development of the figure of Samson in Blake's early collection, Poetical Sketches, exploring the connections to John Milton's Samson Agonistes, the violent and disturbing allusions to this hero in the Bible, and how he may have served as an early prototype of Orc and, later, the giant Albion.

Critics have long noted the influence of William Blake on James Joyce's final novel, Finnegans Wake. What has been understudied, however, is the way Joyce extends Blake's subversive transformation of the epic tradition in his long poems, especially Jerusalem. While Ulysses is typically regarded as Joyce's major engagement with epic literature, Matthew Leporati argues in this podcast that Finnegans Wake more radically engages it by adapting Jerusalem into a postmodern, postcolonial reflection on empire's fragmentation of the world and on the possibility of creating global unity.

Billy Bragg in conversation with Jason Whittaker on the influence of Blake on his life, music and politics, looking also at questions of the hymn Jerusalem and Englishness.
This is taken from a recording originally made for The Blake Society in 2022.

In this episode, Mike Goode considers the ways in which William Blake's famous invocation, "To see a world in a grain of sand" has become a viral meme jumping across different media formats, from poetry anthologies to popular TV shows and even computer viruses. 
This podcast is adapted from a talk originally made to the Global Blake conference in 2022.

In this episode of Visionary: How William Blake changed the world, Jason Whittaker is joined by Sharon Choe, Annise Rogers, and Hannah McAuliffe to discuss one of the darkest works ever created by Blake - The First Book of Urizen. Pubished in 1794, this illuminated book is a satire on the the Book of Genesis that shows a horrific vision of material creation, human sexuality and the body.