29 August 2005

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce that

-- The Archive has been designated an Approved Edition by the Modern Language Association. This is the first time the organization has awarded its "seal" to an electronic edition. The MLA's Committee on Scholarly Editions has been fostering rigorous editorial standards for printed editions since 1976. David V. Erdman's Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake received the MLA seal in 1981. The Committee's guidelines for electronic editions were first published in 2004 as part of a major revision of the Committee's editorial guidelines (http://www.mla.org/cse_guidelines; see also Burnard, O'Keefe, and Unsworth, Electronic Textual Editing, MLA/TEI, forthcoming 2006). Previously, the Archive was the recipient of the MLA's Prize for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition, 2003.

-- The British Library has agreed to allow us to publish scholarly editions of its Blake manuscripts. The Library's Blake holdings include some of his most significant extant manuscripts, including the early illustrated poem Tiriel; the notebook in which he drafted poetry, prose, and designs for several decades; and The Four Zoas, the key "prophetic" work of his middle years, on which he worked for about a decade. For the Blake holdings of this and other contributors, click Resources for Further Research on the main page

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible through the continuing support of the Library of Congress, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and by the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
Andrea Laue, technical editor
The William Blake Archive