Mike Goode | Syracuse University (original) (raw)
Books by Mike Goode
Romantic Capabilities argues that popular new media uses of literary texts often activate and mak... more Romantic Capabilities argues that popular new media uses of literary texts often activate and make visible ways the texts were already about their relationship to medium. Devising and modelling a methodology that bridges historicist literary criticism and reception studies with media studies and formalism, it contends that how a literary text behaves when it encounters new media reveals capabilities in media that can transform how we understand the text’s significance for the original historical context in which it was created. Following an introductory chapter that explains and justifies its approach to the archive, the book analyses significant popular “media behaviors” exhibited by three major Romantic British literary corpuses: the viral circulation of William Blake’s pictures and proverbs across contemporary media, the gravitation of Victorian panorama painters and stereoscopic photographers to Walter Scott’s historical fictions, and the ongoing popular practice of writing fanf...
Chapter 1 of Romantic Capabilities: Blake, Scott, Austen, and the New Messages of Old Media (Oxford University Press), 2020
Based on the proposition that new media uses of literary texts often respond to ways texts were a... more Based on the proposition that new media uses of literary texts often respond to ways texts were already about their relationship to medium, the chapter develops a methodology that relies on the specificity of a text’s medial afterlife to open avenues of inquiry into the text’s significance in earlier historical contexts and media ecologies. The chapter contends that the vehicles for how a text culturally persists include the contingent relationship the text bears to medium, a contingency memorialized in how the text hypermedially uses, refers to, and comments on its lack of immediacy. The chapter previews the book’s findings when its new method of historicist reception study is applied to specific medial afterlives of William Blake’s, Walter Scott’s, and Jane Austen’s writings. It also explains how its methodology relies on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the virtual substrate present in any reality, an idea whose Romantic antecedent is the notion of “capabilities.”
Pmla-publications of The Modern Language Association of America, 2006
See uploaded papers for an early version of this chapter.
Romantic Capabilities
The chapter locates the subversive political potential of Blake’s art not in its cultivation of a... more The chapter locates the subversive political potential of Blake’s art not in its cultivation of an audience elite enough to rise to the challenge of the sublime but in its viral medial appeals to audiences’ heterogeneous tastes for beauty. Individual Blake pictures have long tended to circulate apart from the composite, multi-media art to which they are supposedly integral. The chapter argues that this tendency activates formal potentials in the art. Blake worked at a time when aesthetic philosophers conceived of aesthetic experience, particularly of “the beautiful,” as an organic legislative force. The chapter argues for the potential radicalism of Blake’s multi-media art for its own age—and for others—on the grounds that it turns “the beautiful” into a legislative force designed to activate and exploit the disintegrated, heterogeneous wants of the populations that experience it.
NOTE: See uploaded papers below for an early article version of this chapter.
The chapter analyzes how the nineteenth century’s two most significant immersive media—panoramas ... more The chapter analyzes how the nineteenth century’s two most significant immersive media—panoramas and stereoscopic photographs—comment on and draw attention to their differences as media through their respective uses of Walter Scott’s novels and poems, and, in turn, how these medial differences bring into relief the aesthetic and philosophical novelty of Scott’s own efforts to write visually. To make its argument, the chapter draws on a wide variety of archives and forms of evidence, including: period guidebooks to panoramas; the histories of media technologies like camera obscuras, linear perspective, and stereoscopes; Victorian stereographs of Scotland, especially by George Washington Wilson; readings of visually evocative passages in Scott’s Waverley, Ivanhoe, and The Fair Maid of Perth; Eugène Delacroix’s painting Rebecca and the Wounded Ivanhoe; and Romantic writings on optics and vision, including Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft and his friend David Brewster’s scie...
The chapter contends that Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, through its rhetorical and conceptu... more The chapter contends that Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, through its rhetorical and conceptual overlaps with eighteenth-century landscape design, does not align its realist project with representing reality so much as with revealing reality’s capabilities, thereby associating Austenian realism metaphysically and medially with the ecological consciousness and experimentation of landscaping. Contrary to familiar leftist critiques of landscape gardening’s political meanings and abhorrent social effects, the chapter uncovers the conceptual overlaps between, on the one hand, the ecological consciousness and design vocabulary of eighteenth-century landscape theorists like Humphry Repton and Richard Payne Knight, and, on the other hand, contemporary formalism and Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the virtuality extant in any reality. The chapter then traces how Mansfield Park reworks this ecological consciousness and design vocabulary (affordances, allowances, capabilities), arguing that...
Romantic Capabilities
The chapter contends that Austen fanfiction set within her novels’ “canonical universe” reveals h... more The chapter contends that Austen fanfiction set within her novels’ “canonical universe” reveals how fanfiction is a design medium. The chapter analyzes how Austen prequels, sequels, and rewrites, through their medial gravitation to epistolary forms (letters and diaries), collectively render their explorations of narrative possibility a means of perceiving and undoing the medial foreclosures enacted by Austen’s narrative voice and its reliance on free indirect discourse. It further contends that, as a population, canonical-universe fanfiction collectively renders narrative a vehicle of virtual place-making, thereby aligning fanfiction more with open-source media design—for example, Software Development Kits (SDKs)—than with the documentary impulses implied by the figure of the fanfiction “archive.” Given that canonical-universe Austen fanfiction preserves the geographical centrality of Austen novels’ fictional English country estates to their canonical universes, the estates become h...
<p>The epilogue contends that the book's methodology politically challenges canons by t... more <p>The epilogue contends that the book's methodology politically challenges canons by taking seriously the media commentaries and medial savviness of genres and texts that tend to be denigrated as "derivative" on account of their secondary relationship to canonical texts. It then proposes that the markedly different medial afterlives that Walter Scott's novels and Jane Austen's novels have enjoyed in film and in fanfiction derive in part from differences in historical consciousness that their respective fictions promote. Whereas fanfiction has been medially hailed by Austen's novels, Scott's novels survive in the project of living history museums. The epilogue concludes with a reading of William Blake's proverb "As the plow follows words, so God rewards prayers."</p>
Papers by Mike Goode
Oxford University Press eBooks, Oct 1, 2020
The chapter contends that Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, through its rhetorical and conceptu... more The chapter contends that Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, through its rhetorical and conceptual overlaps with eighteenth-century landscape design, does not align its realist project with representing reality so much as with revealing reality’s capabilities, thereby associating Austenian realism metaphysically and medially with the ecological consciousness and experimentation of landscaping. Contrary to familiar leftist critiques of landscape gardening’s political meanings and abhorrent social effects, the chapter uncovers the conceptual overlaps between, on the one hand, the ecological consciousness and design vocabulary of eighteenth-century landscape theorists like Humphry Repton and Richard Payne Knight, and, on the other hand, contemporary formalism and Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the virtuality extant in any reality. The chapter then traces how Mansfield Park reworks this ecological consciousness and design vocabulary (affordances, allowances, capabilities), arguing that Austen theorizes the novel form as a design medium wherein narrative is just a contingent ecological experiment.
European Romantic Review, Jul 4, 2019
The Review of English Studies, Jun 20, 2012
The Review of English Studies, Jan 13, 2023
Goode explores how Scott’s “potent historical fictions,” their “historically resigned but elegiac... more Goode explores how Scott’s “potent historical fictions,” their “historically resigned but elegiac narrative of the Jacobite rebellions,” are deployed by Jefferson Davis, former President of the Southern Confederacy, to make sense of the “noble lost cause” of the American Civil War. For Goode, Scott’s own narrative “revivification” is best understood as an “ontological project of historical reenactment,” one that not only found resonance with apologists of the vanquished Confederacy but that is literalized in the long-running fantasy spectacle of the “living history museum” at “colonial” Williamsburg, Virginia.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020
Modern Philology, Nov 1, 2009
Oxford University Press eBooks, Oct 1, 2020
The chapter contends that Austen fanfiction set within her novels’ “canonical universe” reveals h... more The chapter contends that Austen fanfiction set within her novels’ “canonical universe” reveals how fanfiction is a design medium. The chapter analyzes how Austen prequels, sequels, and rewrites, through their medial gravitation to epistolary forms (letters and diaries), collectively render their explorations of narrative possibility a means of perceiving and undoing the medial foreclosures enacted by Austen’s narrative voice and its reliance on free indirect discourse. It further contends that, as a population, canonical-universe fanfiction collectively renders narrative a vehicle of virtual place-making, thereby aligning fanfiction more with open-source media design—for example, Software Development Kits (SDKs)—than with the documentary impulses implied by the figure of the fanfiction “archive.” Given that canonical-universe Austen fanfiction preserves the geographical centrality of Austen novels’ fictional English country estates to their canonical universes, the estates become hypermedial figures for realist Austen fanfiction’s own place-making practices and its media platforms.
Representations, 2003
This essay attempts to widen the discursive contexts through which scholars understand Romantic h... more This essay attempts to widen the discursive contexts through which scholars understand Romantic historicism and the role of Walter Scott's Waverley Novels in its development. Placing Scott's The Antiquary (1816) and ''Dedicatory Epistle'' to Ivanhoe (1819) in dialogue with contemporaneous verbal and visual discourse over antiquaries, Edmund Burke, and the Lady Hamilton affair, the essay proposes that Romantic historicism disciplined bodies as it defined and authorized new forms of knowledge. Romantic historicists perceived the ability to relate to and know the past properly as dependent on the manliness of the historical thinker's sentimental and sexual constitution. Thus, the era's arguments over the legitimacy of different forms of historical inquiry, as well as over the historical novel's cultural authority in relation to the field of history, frequently became contests over the manliness and sensibility of their practitioners' bodies.
Oxford University Press eBooks, Oct 1, 2020
Based on the proposition that new media uses of literary texts often respond to ways that texts w... more Based on the proposition that new media uses of literary texts often respond to ways that texts were already about their relationship to media, the chapter develops a methodology that relies on the specificity of a text’s medial afterlife to open avenues of inquiry into the text’s significance in earlier historical contexts and media ecologies. The chapter contends that the vehicles for how a text culturally persists include the contingent relationship the text bears to media, a contingency memorialized in how it hypermedially uses, refers to, and comments on its lack of immediacy. The chapter previews the book’s findings when its new method of historicist reception study is applied to specific medial afterlives of William Blake’s, Walter Scott’s, and Jane Austen’s writings. It also explains how its methodology relies on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the virtual substrate present in any reality, an idea whose Romantic antecedent is the notion of “capabilities.”
Palgrave studies in adaptation and visual culture, 2023
Romantic Capabilities argues that popular new media uses of literary texts often activate and mak... more Romantic Capabilities argues that popular new media uses of literary texts often activate and make visible ways the texts were already about their relationship to medium. Devising and modelling a methodology that bridges historicist literary criticism and reception studies with media studies and formalism, it contends that how a literary text behaves when it encounters new media reveals capabilities in media that can transform how we understand the text’s significance for the original historical context in which it was created. Following an introductory chapter that explains and justifies its approach to the archive, the book analyses significant popular “media behaviors” exhibited by three major Romantic British literary corpuses: the viral circulation of William Blake’s pictures and proverbs across contemporary media, the gravitation of Victorian panorama painters and stereoscopic photographers to Walter Scott’s historical fictions, and the ongoing popular practice of writing fanf...
Chapter 1 of Romantic Capabilities: Blake, Scott, Austen, and the New Messages of Old Media (Oxford University Press), 2020
Based on the proposition that new media uses of literary texts often respond to ways texts were a... more Based on the proposition that new media uses of literary texts often respond to ways texts were already about their relationship to medium, the chapter develops a methodology that relies on the specificity of a text’s medial afterlife to open avenues of inquiry into the text’s significance in earlier historical contexts and media ecologies. The chapter contends that the vehicles for how a text culturally persists include the contingent relationship the text bears to medium, a contingency memorialized in how the text hypermedially uses, refers to, and comments on its lack of immediacy. The chapter previews the book’s findings when its new method of historicist reception study is applied to specific medial afterlives of William Blake’s, Walter Scott’s, and Jane Austen’s writings. It also explains how its methodology relies on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the virtual substrate present in any reality, an idea whose Romantic antecedent is the notion of “capabilities.”
Pmla-publications of The Modern Language Association of America, 2006
See uploaded papers for an early version of this chapter.
Romantic Capabilities
The chapter locates the subversive political potential of Blake’s art not in its cultivation of a... more The chapter locates the subversive political potential of Blake’s art not in its cultivation of an audience elite enough to rise to the challenge of the sublime but in its viral medial appeals to audiences’ heterogeneous tastes for beauty. Individual Blake pictures have long tended to circulate apart from the composite, multi-media art to which they are supposedly integral. The chapter argues that this tendency activates formal potentials in the art. Blake worked at a time when aesthetic philosophers conceived of aesthetic experience, particularly of “the beautiful,” as an organic legislative force. The chapter argues for the potential radicalism of Blake’s multi-media art for its own age—and for others—on the grounds that it turns “the beautiful” into a legislative force designed to activate and exploit the disintegrated, heterogeneous wants of the populations that experience it.
NOTE: See uploaded papers below for an early article version of this chapter.
The chapter analyzes how the nineteenth century’s two most significant immersive media—panoramas ... more The chapter analyzes how the nineteenth century’s two most significant immersive media—panoramas and stereoscopic photographs—comment on and draw attention to their differences as media through their respective uses of Walter Scott’s novels and poems, and, in turn, how these medial differences bring into relief the aesthetic and philosophical novelty of Scott’s own efforts to write visually. To make its argument, the chapter draws on a wide variety of archives and forms of evidence, including: period guidebooks to panoramas; the histories of media technologies like camera obscuras, linear perspective, and stereoscopes; Victorian stereographs of Scotland, especially by George Washington Wilson; readings of visually evocative passages in Scott’s Waverley, Ivanhoe, and The Fair Maid of Perth; Eugène Delacroix’s painting Rebecca and the Wounded Ivanhoe; and Romantic writings on optics and vision, including Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft and his friend David Brewster’s scie...
The chapter contends that Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, through its rhetorical and conceptu... more The chapter contends that Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, through its rhetorical and conceptual overlaps with eighteenth-century landscape design, does not align its realist project with representing reality so much as with revealing reality’s capabilities, thereby associating Austenian realism metaphysically and medially with the ecological consciousness and experimentation of landscaping. Contrary to familiar leftist critiques of landscape gardening’s political meanings and abhorrent social effects, the chapter uncovers the conceptual overlaps between, on the one hand, the ecological consciousness and design vocabulary of eighteenth-century landscape theorists like Humphry Repton and Richard Payne Knight, and, on the other hand, contemporary formalism and Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the virtuality extant in any reality. The chapter then traces how Mansfield Park reworks this ecological consciousness and design vocabulary (affordances, allowances, capabilities), arguing that...
Romantic Capabilities
The chapter contends that Austen fanfiction set within her novels’ “canonical universe” reveals h... more The chapter contends that Austen fanfiction set within her novels’ “canonical universe” reveals how fanfiction is a design medium. The chapter analyzes how Austen prequels, sequels, and rewrites, through their medial gravitation to epistolary forms (letters and diaries), collectively render their explorations of narrative possibility a means of perceiving and undoing the medial foreclosures enacted by Austen’s narrative voice and its reliance on free indirect discourse. It further contends that, as a population, canonical-universe fanfiction collectively renders narrative a vehicle of virtual place-making, thereby aligning fanfiction more with open-source media design—for example, Software Development Kits (SDKs)—than with the documentary impulses implied by the figure of the fanfiction “archive.” Given that canonical-universe Austen fanfiction preserves the geographical centrality of Austen novels’ fictional English country estates to their canonical universes, the estates become h...
<p>The epilogue contends that the book's methodology politically challenges canons by t... more <p>The epilogue contends that the book's methodology politically challenges canons by taking seriously the media commentaries and medial savviness of genres and texts that tend to be denigrated as "derivative" on account of their secondary relationship to canonical texts. It then proposes that the markedly different medial afterlives that Walter Scott's novels and Jane Austen's novels have enjoyed in film and in fanfiction derive in part from differences in historical consciousness that their respective fictions promote. Whereas fanfiction has been medially hailed by Austen's novels, Scott's novels survive in the project of living history museums. The epilogue concludes with a reading of William Blake's proverb "As the plow follows words, so God rewards prayers."</p>
Oxford University Press eBooks, Oct 1, 2020
The chapter contends that Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, through its rhetorical and conceptu... more The chapter contends that Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, through its rhetorical and conceptual overlaps with eighteenth-century landscape design, does not align its realist project with representing reality so much as with revealing reality’s capabilities, thereby associating Austenian realism metaphysically and medially with the ecological consciousness and experimentation of landscaping. Contrary to familiar leftist critiques of landscape gardening’s political meanings and abhorrent social effects, the chapter uncovers the conceptual overlaps between, on the one hand, the ecological consciousness and design vocabulary of eighteenth-century landscape theorists like Humphry Repton and Richard Payne Knight, and, on the other hand, contemporary formalism and Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the virtuality extant in any reality. The chapter then traces how Mansfield Park reworks this ecological consciousness and design vocabulary (affordances, allowances, capabilities), arguing that Austen theorizes the novel form as a design medium wherein narrative is just a contingent ecological experiment.
European Romantic Review, Jul 4, 2019
The Review of English Studies, Jun 20, 2012
The Review of English Studies, Jan 13, 2023
Goode explores how Scott’s “potent historical fictions,” their “historically resigned but elegiac... more Goode explores how Scott’s “potent historical fictions,” their “historically resigned but elegiac narrative of the Jacobite rebellions,” are deployed by Jefferson Davis, former President of the Southern Confederacy, to make sense of the “noble lost cause” of the American Civil War. For Goode, Scott’s own narrative “revivification” is best understood as an “ontological project of historical reenactment,” one that not only found resonance with apologists of the vanquished Confederacy but that is literalized in the long-running fantasy spectacle of the “living history museum” at “colonial” Williamsburg, Virginia.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020
Modern Philology, Nov 1, 2009
Oxford University Press eBooks, Oct 1, 2020
The chapter contends that Austen fanfiction set within her novels’ “canonical universe” reveals h... more The chapter contends that Austen fanfiction set within her novels’ “canonical universe” reveals how fanfiction is a design medium. The chapter analyzes how Austen prequels, sequels, and rewrites, through their medial gravitation to epistolary forms (letters and diaries), collectively render their explorations of narrative possibility a means of perceiving and undoing the medial foreclosures enacted by Austen’s narrative voice and its reliance on free indirect discourse. It further contends that, as a population, canonical-universe fanfiction collectively renders narrative a vehicle of virtual place-making, thereby aligning fanfiction more with open-source media design—for example, Software Development Kits (SDKs)—than with the documentary impulses implied by the figure of the fanfiction “archive.” Given that canonical-universe Austen fanfiction preserves the geographical centrality of Austen novels’ fictional English country estates to their canonical universes, the estates become hypermedial figures for realist Austen fanfiction’s own place-making practices and its media platforms.
Representations, 2003
This essay attempts to widen the discursive contexts through which scholars understand Romantic h... more This essay attempts to widen the discursive contexts through which scholars understand Romantic historicism and the role of Walter Scott's Waverley Novels in its development. Placing Scott's The Antiquary (1816) and ''Dedicatory Epistle'' to Ivanhoe (1819) in dialogue with contemporaneous verbal and visual discourse over antiquaries, Edmund Burke, and the Lady Hamilton affair, the essay proposes that Romantic historicism disciplined bodies as it defined and authorized new forms of knowledge. Romantic historicists perceived the ability to relate to and know the past properly as dependent on the manliness of the historical thinker's sentimental and sexual constitution. Thus, the era's arguments over the legitimacy of different forms of historical inquiry, as well as over the historical novel's cultural authority in relation to the field of history, frequently became contests over the manliness and sensibility of their practitioners' bodies.
Oxford University Press eBooks, Oct 1, 2020
Based on the proposition that new media uses of literary texts often respond to ways that texts w... more Based on the proposition that new media uses of literary texts often respond to ways that texts were already about their relationship to media, the chapter develops a methodology that relies on the specificity of a text’s medial afterlife to open avenues of inquiry into the text’s significance in earlier historical contexts and media ecologies. The chapter contends that the vehicles for how a text culturally persists include the contingent relationship the text bears to media, a contingency memorialized in how it hypermedially uses, refers to, and comments on its lack of immediacy. The chapter previews the book’s findings when its new method of historicist reception study is applied to specific medial afterlives of William Blake’s, Walter Scott’s, and Jane Austen’s writings. It also explains how its methodology relies on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the virtual substrate present in any reality, an idea whose Romantic antecedent is the notion of “capabilities.”
Palgrave studies in adaptation and visual culture, 2023
Representations, 2012
This essay argues that the behavior of Blake's pictures over time points the historicist crit... more This essay argues that the behavior of Blake's pictures over time points the historicist critic to a new understanding of the potential radicalism of Blake's composite verbal-visual artworks at the time of their production. In so doing, the essay proposes a new kind of historicist reception study, which it also tries to put into practice. Ascribing the formal and cultural disintegration of Blake's visual-verbal texts over time in part to their beauties, the essay argues for the potential radicalism of Blake's art for its own age—and for other times and places—precisely on the grounds that the regulatory force of its aesthetics looks to exploit the disintegrated, heterogeneous regulatory wants of whatever world receives it.
Oxford University Press eBooks, Oct 1, 2020
Romantic Capabilities argues that popular new media uses of literary texts often activate and mak... more Romantic Capabilities argues that popular new media uses of literary texts often activate and make visible ways the texts were already about their relationship to medium. Devising and modelling a methodology that bridges historicist literary criticism and reception studies with media studies and formalism, it contends that how a literary text behaves when it encounters new media reveals capabilities in media that can transform how we understand the text’s significance for the original historical context in which it was created. Following an introductory chapter that explains and justifies its approach to the archive, the book analyses significant popular “media behaviors” exhibited by three major Romantic British literary corpuses: the viral circulation of William Blake’s pictures and proverbs across contemporary media, the gravitation of Victorian panorama painters and stereoscopic photographers to Walter Scott’s historical fictions, and the ongoing popular practice of writing fanfiction set in the worlds of Jane Austen’s novels and their imaginary country estates. Blake emerges from the study as an important theorist of how viral media can be used to undermine law, someone whose art deregulates through the medium of its audiences’ heterogeneous tastes and conflicting demands for wisdom. Scott’s novels are shown to have fostered a new experience of vision and understanding of frame that helped launch modern immersive media. Finally, Austenian realism is revealed as a mode of ecological design whose project fanfiction grasps and extends.
Textual Practice, 2005
... Alison Lee, Realism and Power: Postmodern British Fiction (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 14,... more ... Alison Lee, Realism and Power: Postmodern British Fiction (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 14, 379; Amy Elias, 'Meta-mimesis? The problem of British postmodern realism', in Theo d'Haen and Hans Bertens (eds), British Postmodern Fiction (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), pp. ...
The Review of English Studies
This article argues that the circulation of Blake’s proverbs in contemporary Anglo-American cultu... more This article argues that the circulation of Blake’s proverbs in contemporary Anglo-American culture cannot be mapped and that this unmappability is both critically and politically instructive. Opening historicist literary criticism and reception study out to one another, the article contends that popular citations of Blake’s proverbs today point the historicist critic to radical political potential that Blake’s poetic form possessed (but never successfully unleashed) within the “original” historical contexts in which he wrote. Understanding the proverb form and its centrality to Blake’s poetry can clarify how and why his poetry resists analysis through familiar literary historical categories like “text,” “corpus,” and “reader.” Recognizing this resistance clarifies in turn how, through its use of proverbs and proverb-like sentences, his poetry constituted a heterogeneous regulatory challenge to the regulatory power of systems of laws—common, religious, and divine.
Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle, eds., Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism (Fordham University Press), 2016
From the editors' introduction to Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism (Fordham Universit... more From the editors' introduction to Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism (Fordham University Press, 2016):
"Goode explores how Scott’s “potent historical fictions,” their “historically resigned but elegiac narrative of the Jacobite rebellions,” are deployed by Jefferson Davis, former President of the Southern Confederacy, to make sense of the “noble lost cause” of the American Civil War. For Goode, Scott’s own narrative “revivification” is best understood as an “ontological project of historical reenactment,” one that not only found resonance with apologists of the vanquished Confederacy but that is literalized in the long-running fantasy spectacle of the “living history museum” at “colonial” Williamsburg, Virginia."
Making the case for a new kind of historicist reception study, which the essay also puts into pra... more Making the case for a new kind of historicist reception study, which the essay also puts into practice, I contend that the behavior of Blake’s pictures over time points the historicist critic to a new understanding of the potential radicalism of Blake’s composite verbal-visual artworks at the time of their production. Blake’s pictures have tended to circulate apart from the composite works to which they are supposedly integral, and their formal potential within these works arguably undermines the works’ integrity as things. Blake produced these artworks at a time when European aesthetic philosophy tended to conceive of aesthetic experience, particularly the experience of beautiful pictures, as a hegemonic, legislative regulatory force. Attributing the formal and cultural disintegration of Blake’s composite art over time in part to its beauties, I argue for the potential radicalism of Blake’s art for its own age – and for others – precisely on the grounds that its hegemonic, legislative regulatory force exploits the disintegrated, heterogeneous wants of the world that receives it.