BIROn - Birkbeck Institutional Research Online

    Reading revolutions: Corrado Costa’s William Blake in Beulah, a visionary cartoon essay in 1977 Italy

    Calè, Luisa (2022) Reading revolutions: Corrado Costa’s William Blake in Beulah, a visionary cartoon essay in 1977 Italy. Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 55 (3), ISSN 0160-628x.

    [img] Text
    Calè Reading Revolutions Costa's William Blake in Beulah.pdf - Author's Accepted Manuscript
    Restricted to Repository staff only

    Download (602kB)
    [img] Text
    43332a.pdf - Published Version of Record

    Download (25MB)

    Abstract

    Under what conditions might Blake’s Beulah offer a script for a revolutionary present? This essay explores an episode in the visual reception of Blake as a letter-press poet published at a time of civil unrest in 1977 Italy. Corrado Costa’s William Blake in Beulah: Saggio Visionario su un Poeta a Fumetti (William Blake in Beulah: A visionary essay on a poet in comic strips, 1977) is an avantgarde experiment in visual adaptation inspired by lettrism, dada, and neo-avantgarde critiques of typography. Their analysis of the loss of the visual elements of writing certainly applies to the textual transmission of Blake’s works, which separated the poet from the artist in order to publish his poetry in typographical layouts. Abstracted from the visual form of the illuminated book, Blake’s poetry offered an ideal testing ground for Costa’s “visionary essay” in the sense of a creative-critical attempt to turn poetry into comic-strip captions. Costa extracted clusters of words from Jerusalem, A Song of Liberty, The French Revolution and ‘The Mental Traveller’, fragmented, re-segmented, and distributed Blake’s words across comic-strip panels, releasing them from the constraints of language and genre, testing how Blake might fare as a comic-strip poet. In what follows, I will explore how Costa’s comic-strip Blake subverts the orders of language, genre, and the medium of the book, focusing on the most experimental section of Blake in Beulah in which Costa reinvents Blake’s The French Revolution as a prophetic cue for the 1977 movement, showing how his revolution in poetic language reads in revolutionary times.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): William Blake, Reception, Corrado Costa, 1977, The French Revolution, avantgarde, comics, visual culture
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
    Depositing User: Luisa Cale
    Date Deposited: 10 Mar 2021 10:42
    Last Modified: 09 Aug 2023 12:50
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/43332

    Statistics

    Activity Overview
    6 month trend
    81Downloads
    6 month trend
    309Hits

    Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.

    Archive Staff Only (login required)

    Edit/View Item
    Edit/View Item