Interests and Information
Romantic literature, painting, and graphic
arts
The art and poetry of William Blake
Editing and hypertext theory
The James G. Kenan Distinguished
Professor of English
(Hire Date: 1984)
Ph. D., Columbia University, 1980
M.Phil., Columbia University, 1978
M.A., Columbia University, 1974
Ph.B., Monteith College, Wayne State University, 1973
jsviscom@email.unc.edu
(919) 962-8764
James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor of English
Literature
I am co-editor/creator with Robert Essick and Morris Eaves of the William
Blake Archive, a hypertext of Blake's poetry and art, based on approximately
5500 images (2/3rds from the illuminated books and 1/3rd from Blake's
paintings, drawings, and engravings) transferred to digital form. Conceived
and designed in 1993-95, and a free site on the World Wide Web since 1996,
the Archive is an international public resource that provides unified
access to major works of visual and literary art that are highly disparate,
widely dispersed, and often severely restricted as a result of their value,
rarity, and extreme fragility. The Archive is sponsored by the Library
of Congress and supported by the Getty
Grant Program and National Endowment
for the Humanities, Sun Microsystems,
the Institute for Advanced Technology
in the Humanities (University of Virginia), and UNC
at Chapel Hill. It has been designed for use by a broad audience
of scholars and students in classrooms and museums. In 2003, the Blake Archive received the Prize
for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition, awarded every two years by
the Modern Language Association - and the first time it has been awarded
to an electronic edition. In 2005 the Blake Archive was designated An Approved Edition by the MLA Committee for Scholarly Editions, making it the first electronic edition so designated. In 2006, Viscomi was awarded the Knowledge Trust Exploration Award for his work on the Blake Archive.
The structure and rationale of the Archive grew out of my earlier editing projects for the Blake Trust (vols. 3 and 5 of William Blake's Illuminated Books, Tate Gallery/Princeton U. P, 1993) and my Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton UP, 1993). I continue to examine the various ways in which Blake's techniques and the idea of creating figure into his poetry and designs, and to examine the development of watercolor painting, print technology, and lyrical poetry in the Romantic period, focusing on works by major and minor figures, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Turner, Constable, Cozens, and Gilpin.