This panel asks what are the figurations and figurings that bespeak trans and non-binary identity in British Romantic literature, and what is their radical promise? Two of the talks focus on William Blake’s poetic-visual art works, which are rich with figures and refigurings of sexual identity and gender roles. The third paper also treats Blake but extends its focus to S.T. Coleridge and Mary Wollstonecraft, whose works also query sexual identity and gender. The respondent will propose the question “why Blake?” as the British Romantic writer whose work clearly orients new work on transsexual and non-binary identity in the period.

The LLC British Romantic Forum proposes this session in light of the new work being done on the question of trans-identity in canonical and noncanonical literatures. British Romanticism, as a site of self-questioning and radical re-positioning of the self and identity by major literary figures, is a particularly robust field for engaging with this topic. New work on this topic will enable scholars to recalibrate how major texts are traditionally received in vital new directions. Although trans studies has taken off in more contemporary literature, it is only now appearing to take hold in Romantic literature. This panel is positioned to reorient Romantic gender scholarship through this new research on trans and nonbinary identity.

1. Yarberry (“Transness, Transmutability, and Creation in William Blake’s The Book of Urizen”) views Blake’s mythic figure “Urizen” as an allegory for bodily gender identity, arguing that because he is meant to represent human reason, it has been too easy to dismiss his body “as a site of bodily struggle and self-acceptance.” As a “creation story,” The Book of Urizen “is one that can also be read through the lens of transness: this is a story that revolves around a tethering to a corporeal form that differs from a more desirable alternative state. This act of

(self-) creation/(self-)annihilation can, of course, be found throughout Blake’s oeuvre,” but it is most clearly told in Urizen’s own story of creation. Yarberry brings their own trans identity as poet and doctoral student-scholar to bear on Blake’s treatment of non-binary figures and figurings.

Jesse Nyiri (“Trans Romanticism and Trans Allegory”) argues that “the Romantic reorganization of sexual difference produced variously ‘trans’ figures of its transcendence, including Blake’s inventory of androgynous figures, Coleridge’s original ‘bisexual’ man, and the sexless souls and ‘equivocal beings’ with which Wollstonecraft criticized the sentimental sex/gender system. Still, as irreducible to binary sexual difference and anti-identitarian perversity as such figures may be, their place in dedicatedly trans literary scholarship is hardly clear. On the contrary, as ‘explanatory figure[s] for the operation of sex in general,’ as figures of origin, decline, apocalypse, and redemption, these androgynes look less like trans ancestors than like prototypes of what Emma Heaney calls ‘trans feminine allegory.’” Nyrir finds an alternative to an allegory of trans identity in Coleridge’s use of homo androgynous, and proposes to use this to bridge the gap between allegory and an ontological trans life.

Joey S. Kim (“William Blake’s Queer Phenomenology”) returns us to a full focus on Blake’s works: “William Blake’s composite art— calligraphy, illustration, and innovative printing technique—is a site of queer potential with its host of bodies—human, divine, supernatural, animal, and plant. In this paper, I study William Blake’s visuality of images and text, analyzing his figurations of the ‘body’ and its non-binary, unfixed impetus.” By focusing on Blake’s “modular use” of images and linguistic phrases, Kim argues that “Blake’s visual choices align with his semantics of juxtaposed dualities—from its handwriting to its non-normative illustrations of human and spirit bodies. This approach can help the reader engage with Blake’s art from beyond the strictures of the linear page and toward a more dynamic, queer understanding of Blake’s vision.”

In the Response, Elizabeth Fay will query why Blake appears to be one of the most engaged thinkers concerning gender identity as a binary structure. Her response will focus on the various ways Blake translates bimorphia into entwining bodies or variant bodies, and pits masculinities against its failures while offering non-binary substitutes, makes Blake ripe for a newly opening field of Romantic trans studies as represented by the three panelists’ papers.

The Response will be short, ending with a set of questions to open up audience discussion