William Blake: The Eighteenth-Century Genius of Intermidiality as a Character in Mad Girl’s Love Song

Abstract

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.35572/rlr.v9i3.1849

The focal point of this work is the appropriation of William Blake’s persona as a character in the novel Mad Girl’s love Song, by the Indian post-colonial writer Rukmini Bhaya Nair. We discuss initially, the intermedial character of Blake's work, as a poet and painter, with emphasis on his copper-engraving technique, the so-called illuminated impression, which constitutes the differential feature of his art. From the concept of remediation of previous media explained by Bolter and Grusin, Blake's work is seen as an eighteenth-century example of the immediacy and hypermediacy that characterize today's digital media. Leo Hoek's concepts of simultaneity and successiveness in intersemiotic translation are used to analyze the phases of production and reception of the text-image dyad The relationship between Bhaya Nair's writing and the Western literary canon is seen not only as the appropriation of its themes, characters and writing techniques but as an instrument of protest against the subaltern position of the post-colonial subject