RECEIVING │ PERCEIVING WILLIAM BLAKE. A TRANSDISCIPLINARY MEETING

RECEIVING │ PERCEIVING WILLIAM BLAKE.
A TRANSDISCIPLINARY MEETING

This meeting has its origin in the invitation from Sibylle Erle (Bishop Grosseteste University) to Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa (Universidade de Lisboa) to participate in the volume on the reception of William Blake in Europe, edited by Erle and Morton D. Paley (Professor Emeritus of English, University of California, Berkeley), to be published in 2017 as part of the series “The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe”, edited by Elinor Shaffer (Fellow of the British Academy).

The transdisciplinary character of the concept of reception shaping Shaffer’s project stands out when we observe the three categories into which each author’s collected data are divided – “Translations”, “Criticism”, ”Other” – from the first book in the series, The Reception of Virginia Woolf  in Europe (eds Mary Ann Caws and Nicola Luckhurst, 2002), until the latest one, The Reception of George Eliot  in Europe (Eds Elinor Shaffer and Catherine Brown, 2016). Moreover, the category «Other» includes different materials such as the performance of Virginia, in Greece, in 1998, a play by the Irish Edna O’Brien,  (Virginia Woolf in Europe, Timeline) or the adaptation of Middlemarch by the BBC, in 1994 (George Eliot in Europe, Timeline). Occasionally, due to the very characteristics of the works to be examined, an enlarged transdisciplinary approach to the author is required, like in The Reception of Robert Burns in Europe (ed. Murray Pittock, 2014), where the category «Other» comprises the musical adaptation of «Comin’ thro’ the rye» by the Russian Shostakovich, in 1942 (Burns in Europe, Timeline), or in The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe (eds Thomas F. Glick and Elinor Shaffer, 2014), where the second and third categories are renamed so as to be expanded – “Literature, Criticism, Influential Science” and “Celebrations, commemorations, public events, commemorative volumes“, the last one comprising, for example, a colloquium on the centenary of Darwin’s death, organised by the Faculty of Pharmacy, Lisbon, in 1983 (Darwin in Europe, Timeline for Portugal by Ana Leonor Pereira, Pedro Ricardo Fonseca  and Patricia Silva Mcneill).

Will the reception of William Blake  in Europe, and particularly in Portugal, be also strikingly transdisciplinary? Such is the question to be pondered in this academic and cultural meeting, during the open classes, round tables and performances involving Literature, Visual Arts, Music, Science, Gastronomy, Cinema, Commerce of Old and Rare Books and Engravings, and Digital Humanities.