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Author: M. Green Publisher: Springer ISBN: 0230500277 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 228
Book Description
Incorporating the most recent discoveries concerning Blake's heritage and cultural context, Visionary Materialism in the Early Works of William Blake: The Intersection of Enthusiasm and Empiricism proposes a radical new reading of his early works, that sees them taking enlightenment ideas to heights never dreamed of by Locke and Priestley. Drawing on a careful analysis of key figures from both sides of the enlightenment/counter-enlightenment divide (including Boehme, Swedenborg, the Moravians, Lavater, Brothers, Erasmus Darwin), the discussion traces an alternative tradition that disrupts previous assumptions about important aspects of Blake's thought.
Author: M. Green Publisher: Springer ISBN: 0230500277 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 228
Book Description
Incorporating the most recent discoveries concerning Blake's heritage and cultural context, Visionary Materialism in the Early Works of William Blake: The Intersection of Enthusiasm and Empiricism proposes a radical new reading of his early works, that sees them taking enlightenment ideas to heights never dreamed of by Locke and Priestley. Drawing on a careful analysis of key figures from both sides of the enlightenment/counter-enlightenment divide (including Boehme, Swedenborg, the Moravians, Lavater, Brothers, Erasmus Darwin), the discussion traces an alternative tradition that disrupts previous assumptions about important aspects of Blake's thought.
Author: Jennifer Jesse Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 0739177915 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
In this innovative study, Jesse challenges the prevailing view of Blake as an antinomian and describes him as a theological moderate who defended an evangelical faith akin to the Methodism of John Wesley. She arrives at this conclusion by contextualizing Blake’s works not only within Methodism, but in relation to other religious groups he addressed in his art, including the Established Church, deism, and radical religions. Further, she analyzes his works by sorting out the theological “road signs” he directed to each audience. This approach reveals Blake engaging each faction through its most prized beliefs, manipulating its own doctrines through visual and verbal guide-posts designed to communicate specifically with that group. She argues that, once we collate Blake’s messages to his intended audiences—sounding radical to the conservatives and conservative to the radicals—we find him advocating a system that would have been recognized by his contemporaries as Wesleyan in orientation. This thesis also relies on an accurate understanding of eighteenth-century Methodism: Jesse underscores the empirical rationalism pervading Wesley’s theology, highlighting differences between Methodism as practiced and as publicly caricatured. Undergirding this project is Jesse’s call for more rigorous attention to the dramatic character of Blake’s works. She notes that scholars still typically use phrases like “Blake says” or “Blake believes,” followed by some claim made by a Blakean character, without negotiating the complex narrative dynamics that might enable us to understand the rhetorical purposes of that statement, as heard by Blake’s respective audiences. Jesse maintains we must expect to find reflections in Blake’s works of all the theologies he engaged. The question is: what was he doing with them, and why? In order to divine what Blake meant to communicate, we must explore how those he targeted would have perceived his arguments. Jesse concludes that by analyzing the dramatic character of Blake’s works theologically through this wide-angled, audience-oriented approach, we see him orchestrating a grand rapprochement of the extreme theologies of his day into a unified vision that integrates faith and reason.
Author: Joseph Fletcher Publisher: Anthem Press ISBN: 1785279521 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 276
Book Description
William Blake as Natural Philosopher, 1788-1795 takes seriously William Blake’s wish to be read as a natural philosopher, particularly in his early works, and illuminates the way that poetry and visual art were for Blake an imaginative way of philosophizing. Blake’s poetry and designs reveal a consistent preoccupation with eighteenth-century natural philosophical debates concerning the properties of the physical world, the nature of the soul, and God’s relationship to the material universe. This book traces the history of these debates, and examines images and ideas in Blake’s illuminated books that mark the development of the monist pantheism in his early works, which contend that every material thing is in its essence God, to the idealism of his later period, which casts the natural world as degenerate and illusory. The book argues that Blake’s philosophical thought was not as monolithic as has been previously characterized, and that his deepening engagement with late eighteenth-century vitalist life sciences, including studies of the asexual propagation of the marine polyp, marks his metaphysical turn. In contrast to the vast body of scholarship that emphasizes Blake’s early religious and political positions, William Blake as Natural Philosopher draws out the metaphysics underlying his commitments. In so doing, the book demonstrates that pantheism is important because it entails an ethics that respects the interconnected divinity of all material objects – not just humans – which in turn spurns hierarchical power structures. If everything is alive and essentially divine, Blake’s early work implies, then everything is worthy of respect and capable of giving and receiving infinite delight. Therefore, one should imaginatively and joyfully immerse oneself in the community of other beings in which one is already enmeshed. Often in the works discussed in this book, Blake offers negative examples to suggest his moral philosophy; he dramatizes the disastrous individual and social consequences of humans behaving as if God were a transcendent, immaterial, nonhuman demiurge, and as if they were separate from and ontologically superior to the degraded material universe that they see as composed of inert, lifeless atoms. William Blake as Natural Philosopher traces the evolution of eighteenth-century debates over the vitalist qualities of life and the nature of the soul both in the United Kingdom and on the continent, devoting significant attention to the natural philosophy of Newton, Locke, Berkeley, Leibniz, Buffon, La Mettrie, Hume, Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, and many others.
Author: Sheila Spector Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351108417 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 429
Book Description
Interpreting Blake has always proved challenging. Hermeneutics, as the on-going negotiation between the horizon of expectations and a given text, hinges on the preconceptions that structure thought. The structure, in turn, is derived from myth, a cultural narrative predicated on a particular set of foundational principles, and organized in terms of the resulting symbolic form. The primary impediment to interpreting Blake has been the failure to recognize that he and much of his audience have thought in terms of two radically different myths. In The Evolution of Blake’s Myth, Sheila A. Spector establishes the dimensions of the myth that structures Blake’s thought. In the first of three parts, she uses Jerusalem, Blake’s most complete book, as the basis for extrapolating the components of the consolidated myth. She then traces the chronological development of the myth from its origin in the late 1780s through its crystallization in Milton. Finally, she demonstrates how Blake used the myth hermeneutically, as the horizon of expectations for interpreting not only his own work, but the Bible and the visionary texts of others, as well.
Author: Linda Freedman Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 019254277X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
This volume tells the story of William Blake's literary reception in America and suggests that ideas about Blake's poetry and personality helped shape mythopoeic visions of America from the Abolitionists to the counterculture. It links high and low culture and covers poetry, music, theology, and the novel. American writers have turned to Blake to rediscover the symbolic meaning of their country in times of cataclysmic change, terror, and hope. Blake entered American society when slavery was rife and civil war threatened the fragile experiment of democracy. He found his moment in the mid twentieth-century counterculture as left-wing Americans took refuge in the arts at a time of increasingly reactionary conservatism, vicious racism, pervasive sexism, dangerous nuclear competition, and an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam, the fires of Orc raging against the systems of Urizen. Blake's America, as a symbol of cyclical hope and despair, influenced many Americans who saw themselves as continuing the task of prophecy and vision. Blakean forms of bardic song, aphorism, prophecy, and lament became particularly relevant to a literary tradition which centralised the relationship between aspiration and experience. His interrogations of power and privilege, freedom and form resonated with Americans who repeatedly wrestled with the deep ironies of new world symbolism and sought to renew a Whitmanesque ideal of democracy through affection and openness towards alterity.
Author: Andrew M. Cooper Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351872923 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 533
Book Description
Challenging the idea that a writer’s work reflects his experiences in time and place, Andrew M. Cooper locates the action of William Blake’s major illuminated books in the ahistorical present, an impersonal spirit realm beyond the three-dimensional self. Blake, Cooper shows, was a formalist who exploited eighteenth-century scientific and philosophical research on vision, sense, and mind for spiritual purposes. Through irony, dialogism, two-way syntax, and synesthesia, Blake extended and refined the prophetic method Milton forged in Paradise Lost to bring the performativity of traditional oral song and storytelling into print. Cooper argues that historicist attempts to place Blake’s vision in perspective, as opposed to seeing it for oneself, involve a deeply self-contradictory denial of his performativity as a poet-artist. Rather, Blake’s expansion of linear reading into a space of creative, self-conscious collaboration laid the basis for his lifelong critique of dualism in religion and science, and anticipated the non-Euclidean geometrics of twentieth-century Modernism.
Author: Nicholas Marsh Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1137094729 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
William Blake was ignored in his own time. Now, however, his Songs of Innocence and Experience and 'prophetic books' are widely admired and studied. The second edition of this successful introductory text: - Leads the reader into the Songs and 'prophetic books' via detailed analysis of individual poems and extracts, and now features additional insightful analyses - Provides useful sections on 'Methods of Analysis' and 'Suggested Work' to aid independent study - Offers expanded historical and cultural context, and an extended sample of critical views that includes discussion of the work of recent critics - Provides up-to-date suggestions for further reading William Blake: The Poems is ideal for students who are encountering the work of this major English poet for the first time. Nicholas Marsh encourages you to enjoy and explore the power and beauty of Blake's poems for yourself.
Author: Joshua Schouten de Jel Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3030888886 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
This book demonstrates the way in which William Blake aligned his idiosyncratic concept of the Selfhood – the lens through which the despiritualised subject beholds the material world – with the atomistic materialism of the Epicurean school as it was transmitted through the first-century BC Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. By addressing this philosophical debt, this study sets out a threefold re-evaluation of Blake’s work: to clarify the classical stream of Blake’s philosophical heritage through Lucretius; to return Blake to his historical moment, a thirty-year period from 1790 to 1820 which has been described as the second Lucretian moment in England; and to employ a new exegetical model for understanding the phenomenological parameters and epistemological frameworks of Blake’s mythopoeia. Accordingly, it is revealed that Blake was not only aware of classical atomistic cosmogony and sense-based epistemology but that he systematically mapped postlapsarian existence onto an Epicurean framework.
Author: S. Clark Publisher: Springer ISBN: 0230210775 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 251
Book Description
This book explores the ways in which Blake reacted to the subcultures of his day, as well as how he has inspired popular, modernist and postmodernist figures until the present day. Blake's influence on later generations of writers and artists is more important than ever, extending into film, psychology, children's literature and graphic novels.
Author: M. Green
Author: M. Green
Author: Matthew Green
Author: Jennifer Jesse
Author: Joseph Fletcher
Author: Sheila Spector
Author: Linda Freedman
Author: Andrew M. Cooper
Author: Nicholas Marsh
Author: Joshua Schouten de Jel
Author: S. Clark