[1] From: "David L. Gants" <dgants@english.uga.edu> (37)
Subject: Hypertext resources
[2] From: Matt Kirschenbaum (75)
<mgk3k@jefferson.village.virginia.edu>
Subject: Blake Archive's April Update
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 1998 14:28:22 -0400 (EDT)
From: "David L. Gants" <dgants@english.uga.edu>
Subject: Hypertext resources
>> From: "Alan B. Howard" <abh9h@unix.mail.virginia.edu>
Students and faculty in the American Studies Program at the University of
Virginia have been working for some time to provide a variety of internet
resources for the AS community. These now have enough richness and
diversity that they may be of interest to subscribers to this list.
Most immediately useful are a series of core-texts in American literature
and history, hypertexts, hypertexts with search utilities, hypertexts with
critical apparatus, and fully developed hypertexts that include large
arrays of projects that place the central text in cultural con-texts.
Texts now available include: The Education of Henry Adams, Wieland, The
Red Badge of Courage, Letters from an American Farmer, Dicken's American
Notes, Emerson's Representative Men, Sister Carrie, Uncle Remus, Incidents
in the life of a Slave Girl, Studies in Classic American Literature, The
Journals of Lewis and Clark (abridged), Melville's The Confidence Man, The
Oregon Trail, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Walden, Turner's The Frontier in American
History, Twain's Connecticut Yankee, Huckleberry Finn, Innocents Abroad,
and Tom Sawyer, and Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. In addition,
the texts of Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The West as Symbol and Myth
and of Alexis deTocqueville's Democracy in America are presented inside of
extensive hyper con-texts.
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/hypertex.html
In addition, we have an on-going project on the National Capitol
Building where we are trying to read and re-present that structure as a
hypertext, a quasi-sacred text of national identity.
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/cap_home.html
We also maintain the American Studies Yellow Pages, a series of subject
specific guides for American Studies and related fields. These current,
selective, and descriptive pointers to internet resources can be found at:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~YP/yp_home.html
Finally, those subscribers who are interested in the ways in which this
site and these assets are integrated into the teaching and learning
process here at Virginia should go to:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~AS@UVA/aspgrm.html
Thank you.
alan
Alan B. Howard
The University of Virginia
abh9h@virginia.edu
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Date: Sat, 25 Apr 1998 12:38:15 -0400 (EDT)
From: Matt Kirschenbaum <mgk3k@jefferson.village.virginia.edu>
Subject: Blake Archive's April Update
The latest news of work completed here at the Blake Archive. Apologies for
cross-posting. Please forward as appropriate. Matt K.
--The editors of the William Blake Archive <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/blake> are pleased to announce the publication of seven new electronic editions of Blake's illuminated books. They are:
_The [First] Book of Urizen_ copy G _The Book of Los_ copy A _The Book of Ahania_ copy A _The Song of Los_ copy B _America, a Prophecy_ copy A _Europe, a Prophecy_ copy E _Visions of the Daughters of Albion_ copy F
We had announced _Urizen_ copy G as forthcoming two months ago, but formatting the double-columned text diplomatically in SGML for both Netscape and Internet Explorer proved more taxing and time consuming than anticipated. Such are the joys and tribulations of electronic publishing. Solving the problems there, though, ensured diplomatic transcriptions for Blake's other books with double-columned texts, _The Book of Ahania_ and _The Book of Los_. Together, these three works are often referred to as Blake's Bible of Hell or, simply, the Urizen books. _Urizen_, of which there are only seven extant copies, was first produced in 1794, color printed to form copies A, C, D, E (untraced), F, and J. It was printed again in 1795 to form copy B, which was produced as part of a set of illuminated books printed on large paper, and then one last time in c. 1818 to form copy G, which was produced in Blake's late printing and coloring style. The editors are currently working on copies A, B, C, and F and expect to have them in the Archive by the end of the year. _The Book of Ahania_ and _The Book of Los_ exist in unique copies, with only a few proof impressions extant. They were printed in 1795 and executed in intaglio instead of in relief etching, the technique Blake normally used for his illuminated books. Although their texts are printed in intaglio, their frontispieces are beautifully color printed from the surface of the plates.
With _The Song of Los_, which consists of two parts entitled "Africa" and "Asia," we complete Blake's other series of illuminated books, sometimes known as the Continental Prophecies, begun in 1793 with _America_ and continued in 1794 with _Europe_. The copy of _The Song of Los_ included here is one of six extant; all were color printed in the same printing session in 1795.
With fourteen complete copies extant, _America_ is not as rare as these other illuminated books, but copy A, which was printed and colored in 1795 as part of Blake's large-paper set of books, is, along with copies K, O, and M, one of only four colored copies-- and it was the model for copy K. Moreover, only it and copy O have the last four lines on plate 4, which was masked in the printing of the other copies. The Archive will include copies M and O (c. 1807 and 1818) later this year.
Only nine copies of _Europe_ are extant, and only two of those, copies H and O (1795 and 1818), have plate 3, the Preludium. The Archive will include both of these copies by the end of the year. Copy E, included here, was lightly color printed on both sides of the paper in 1794 and joins copy B, color printed more heavily on one side of the paper the same year.
_Visions of the Daughters of Albion_ copy F is an exquisitely beautiful copy, heavily color printed (especially its frontispiece) in c. 1794, and never before reproduced. It joins copies C and J (both 1793), and will be joined later this year by copies G and P (1795 and 1818).
All of these editions have newly edited texts; all images in the editions were scanned from either 4x5 or 8x10 transparencies, nearly all of which were made specifically for the Archive. Like our other editions, these are all SGML-encoded, fully searchable for both text and images and supported by the unique Inote and ImageSizer applications described in our previous updates.
The Archive now contains sixteen copies of ten illuminated books. In the coming months, we will be adding copies of _All Religions are One_, _There is No Natural Religion_, _For the Sexes_, _Milton_, and _Jerusalem_, along with copies of books already in the Archive but from different printings. Our goal is to have the entire illuminated canon online this year. In addition, work continues on the SGML edition of David V. Erdman's _Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake_, which we anticipate releasing sometime this spring.
Morris Eaves Robert Essick Joseph Viscomi
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