Being Form'd--thinking Through Blake's Milton PDF Download

Author: Mark Bracher
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Author: Brian Russell Graham
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000811107
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
Using a framework based on J. L. Austin’s understanding of performative speech and Angela Esterhammer’s work on how things are done with words in Milton’s and Blake’s poetry, this study provides an extended close reading of the speech acts of characters in Blake’s epic poem Milton. With the exception of what we learn about in the part of the poem known as the Bard’s Song, Blake’s Milton is dedicated to providing an incredibly detailed account of the numerous facets of the instant of time immediately prior to apocalypse, an instant in which Milton is the protagonist, and Blake himself a participant. This study explores how in the poem sacred history proceeds towards and through the instant by means of the speech act. This extended commentary is intended for not just Blake scholars but also the common reader who wishes to approach Blake’s brief epic for the first time. For scholars, this monograph offers a full account of a crucial but previously unexplored theme in the scholarship about Milton. For the common reader, it offers a comprehensive introduction to what Northrop Frye called ‘one of the most gigantic imaginative achievements in English poetry’.

Author: Hazard Adams
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786479582
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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A seminal figure in Romantic poetry and visual arts, William Blake continues to influence modern literary criticism. In this book, Blake scholar Hazard Adams presents a selection of essays that span his long career exploring the work and thought of the groundbreaking artist. Topics range from the symbolic form in Blake's poem Jerusalem, the world view of Blake in relation to cultural policy and the notion of contrariety in Blake's writings to the relation of Chinese literary thought to that of the West, the critical work of Northrop Frye and Murray Krieger and the cultural and academic status of the humanities. The essays chart the evolution of Adams' own neo-Blakean literary thought over the past four decades, chronicling an effort to seek not merely a method but a philosophical base for the practice of literary criticism.

Author: William Blake
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691001487
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Milton is a difficult and cryptic poem for those uninitiated in the ways of Blake's allusive and allegorical style. In an introductory essay, the editors directly address the nature of the poem's complexity, demonstrate how Blake's methods set out to disconcert conventional concepts of time, space, and human identity, and suggest some ways readers coming to Milton for the first time can understand and enjoy the challenges it offers. The editors also present a plate-by-plate commentary on how the illustrations contribute to the creation of a composite, visual-verbal experience. The extensive notes to the newly-edited letterpress text will also assist readers through Milton, its central themes and its byways, its heights and its depths. An equally helpful introduction and notes are provided for the three shorter works. Scholars will find much new information in this volume.

Author: Jeanne Moskal
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 9780817306786
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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It demonstrates that Blake's protests are directed to laws based on obligation, which assume that all human persons are essentially alike, while Blake's advocacy of forgiveness among human beings assumes an ethics of character based on the cultivation of virtues.

Author: Julia M. Wright
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821415190
Category : Alienation (Social psychology) in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Despite his reputation as a staunch individualist and repeated attacks on institutions that constrain the individual's imagination, Julia Wright argues that William Blake rarely represents isolation positively and explores his concern with the kind of national community being established.

Author: G. A. Rosso
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838752401
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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"While William Blake's The Four Zoas may be fascinating to Blake scholars, it presents formidable obstacles to even the most ardent Romanticist, let alone interested critics or the general reader. Blake's Prophetic Workshop attempts to clear some of these obstacles by studying the work from a variety of critical perspectives. It assumes some familiarity with Blake's prophecies, but is cast between the introductory and advanced levels of the two previous books published on the poem." "Although the major reading strategy is close textual analysis, the poem is marked by various cultural and social contexts that need elucidation. Chapters alternate between sketching these contexts and traditions and providing detailed readings within these contexts. The first chapters give a reception history of the work and set it within the tradition of the eighteenth-century "long poem," namely Thomson's Seasons, Pope's An Essay on Man, and Young's Night Thoughts, texts that Blake critiques as Newtonian substitutions of Miltonic prophecy. Chapter three tests these assertions by reading the poem's creation narratives in terms of Anglican-Dissenting apologetics. The final chapters sift the cultural contexts that shape Blake's use of biblical typology and scrutinize several continental philosophies of history, and how they encroach on The Four Zoas, as well as situate the poem in the apocalyptic moment of the 1790s." "While a pluralist approach is followed, author George Anthony Rosso, Jr., subscribes to a fundamentally historical theory that places The Four Zoas in the broad and eclectic tradition of English poetic prophecy. Aware of recent critiques of "the prophetic," Rosso pursues his theory with flexibility and tolerance for other viewpoints." "An appendix provides a useful commentary on the relations between the text and certain designs, drawings, and sketches in the manuscript. Its aim is to show that Blake repeats key images in various frames to provide a sense of context and development, and that the drawings expose what the narrative represses, often in graphic sexual detail. Rosso presents a Blake who is both deadly serious and disarmingly ironic about the relevance of prophecy in the modern world."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Author: Jules van Lieshout
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004489002
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
William Blake's literary works are characterized by a ceaseless dynamics constituted in the fierce interactions of the language, thought, and narrative of his myth. Highlighting the critical problems facing the linear approach that the study of Blake has adopted from the traditional methodology of Newtonian science, Jules van Lieshout argues that nonlinearity is the key to understanding Blake's prophecies. Throughout his discussions, Van Lieshout focuses on the relation of Blake's Generation and Eternity, which he identifies as Bakhtinian 'world views'. In Generation, existence is finalized as a hierarchy of geometric 'dark globes', each assuming the character of universal whole to the exclusion of all others. Eternity, on the other hand, is Blake's fractal 'human form' of existence that is continuously organized and reorganized in the dynamic interaction of whole and parts. Blake represents these world views as interinvolved. Their dynamic interaction reflects and refracts his conceptual thought, mythological narrative, and poetic language. Hence, his visionary epic self-organizes into a self-similar complex system whose patterns of behaviour are not merely remarkably like those that modern applications of nonlinear dynamics are revealing in the physical world, but are indeed inherent in the processes of writing and reading his individual works.

Author: Steve Clark
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230366686
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Blake said of his works, 'Tho' I call them Mine I know they are not Mine'. So who owns Blake? Blake has always been more than words on a page. This volume takes Blake 2.0 as an interactive concept, examining digital dissemination of his works and reinvention by artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers across a variety of twentieth-century media.

Author: Diane Piccitto
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137378018
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Blake's Drama challenges conventional views of William Blake's multimedia work by reinterpreting it as theatrical performance. Viewed in its dramatic contexts, this art form is shown to provoke an active spectatorship and to depict identity as paradoxically essential and constructed, revealing Blake's investments in drama, action, and the body.