William Blake Online
With all of these exciting changes and opportunities available to us, it seems inevitable that the world of literature will move from paper-bound books to this electronic medium. And what happens when it does? This is a question to which we’re only beginning to find the answers. There may be an infinite number of possibilities, but it seems that a logical place to start is The Blake Archive. This website contains an enormous amount of William Blake’s work, including reproductions of the intricate and elaborate plates on which he produced much of his writing. One could navigate this website for hours, viewing versions of works that even the best university library couldn’t offer. The beauty of this site lies in its accessibility. Anyone with Internet access can visit the site, at any time, and stay as long as s/he desires. There is quite a democratic ideal behind this website: with it, researching the work of William Blake is not an elitist endeavor. Certainly there remains scholarship on his work that maintains an elitist status, but his work is available to anyone who can get to the website. Each person who visits the site is entitled to his or her own, personal, experience. A Blake for each of us; a Blake for the masses.