Keynote Lecture: William Blake in the 21st century This lecture introduces Blake as artist, poet, and prophet by mapping his attempts radically to transform traditional understandings of the book, from the Songs of Innocence (1789) to the Laocoön engraving (c.1815). The interactive, open-ended, multi-media forms he created are a radical response to the modern, commercial culture of Romantic-era London; yet, as I will suggest, these same forms also seem at home in the early 21st century, where they gesture towards ideals often promised but rarely realised in our now digitally connected world. Speaker Prof…