Victor N. Paananen, William Blake. Updated Edition. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. ISBN: 0-8057-7053-4. Price: £17.50 ($32.00)

Among English authors there are probably few figures who present as many potential difficulties for an introductory volume as does William Blake. The breadth of Blake's talents as engraver, designer, printer, painter, and poet, as well as the notorious difficulty of his "system" and the composite nature of his illuminated books all conspire to make it tough to discuss Blake as simply or primarily a literary figure. Add to these difficulties intrinsic to the study of Blake's work itself, the vast, diverse, and conflicting contemporary critical approaches to it and the dimensions of the problem begin to assume their proper proportions. All these difficulties ensure a certain number of shortcomings and dissatisfactions with Victor Paananen's update of his William Blake in the Twayne's English Authors Series. The strength of Paananen's update of his book, first published in 1977 (but whose initial draft was completed in 1972), is that it brings his analysis out of the so-called "golden age" of Blake studies by adding a Marxist dimension to its earlier focus on Blake's Christian vision. Concentrating on the dialectical character of Blake's thought, the readings of his works emphasize their critique of the social-material basis of culture. Thus, Paananen's book offers a scholarly, if narrowly-based, introduction to the study of Blake. William Blake gives a first-time reader of Blake a clear approach to his works; one that is, from a critical point of view at least, an improvement on the old recipe of sympathetic and enthusiastic identification with the search for spiritual truth-through-Blake. Paananen's new Marxist emphasis presents a Blake much more in touch with the material realities of the world, a Blake whose poetic vision is less an endlessly baffling elaboration of characters/symbols and geographical/mental regions, than it is an attack on the ideology machine of church and state, decoding their efforts to control the material and spiritual shape of lived experience. To this extent, the update also better serves the purpose of introducing readers to a Blake with whom they can find a more direct connection than did the first edition of William Blake . Still, the limited theoretical scope of William Blake 's approach is also the revised work's greatest shortcoming in that it does little to give a reader an accurate idea of the shape of contemporary Blake studies. The updated preface and bibliography indicate WilliamBlake 's theoretical orientation and expose the gaps in the scholarship which informs it. After three pages in justification of his approach as reflecting the "Marxist turn" in Blake studies (ix), Paananen undermines his own point with the odd claim that "[d]espite my concern with explaining aspects within both Christian and Marxist thought, I do not feel that a book in this series should primarily argue a thesis" (xii). Despite this disclaimer, the book does argue for the significance, to the virtual exclusion of any other, of a Marxist approach. Beyond this, the "Marxist turn" Paananen sees in Blake studies, while an important and vital approach to the subject, seems more a result of his failure to fully inform himself on the shape of contemporary Blake criticism. The studies Paananen cites as evidence for the Marxist Blake, while fine scholarly studies, are all sufficiently dated as to suggest that more or less direct comparisons of Blake and Marx are not the central focus of the most recent scholarship. He claims his approach is both confirmed and inspired by the appearance of E. P. Thompson's "Witness against the Beast:" William Blake and the Moral Law (1993). The reason for Witness ' importance seems to rest with it being "written from the point …