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Author: Steffen Laaß
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640146751
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 42
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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, 13 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: "We have war, injustice, and unhappiness because our way of life is founded on mistaken beliefs." This quotation by William Blake set me thinking and distracted me from my actual project: I wanted to write an essay on a poem. But during my work I, fortunately, ended up in a chaos of philosophical questions: Who are we? Where do we come from? Is our universe only a dust particle of something larger? Is there a force guiding us? Who or what is God? From time immemorial, people have been racking their brains over these ageless and puzzling questions, and I doubt whether we are able to provide convincing responses to them. Someone who might give us a wise answer is William Blake (1757-1827). He is considered to be the first major Romantic poet, and a central theme of his works is religion (e.g. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Book of Urizen). Admittedly, there is no easy access to Blake because he is one of the most obscure and inscrutable poets. Nevertheless, I would like to make the daring attempt to uncover the secrets of Blake's religious mysticism. For this reason, I will discuss one of his first works There Is No Natural Religion (1788). My design is to make this essay accessible to a wide readership, especially to those who have so far avoided profoundly dealing with a particular topic: religion. I also had no serious interest in religion at all - until I started to learn Arabic. Once you have mastered "Allah's difficult but most ornate language", you have got a completely different outlook on the world. Beside this, I felt an urgent personal need to deal with the concept of faith in greater detail. This has in part something to do with the changing idea and role of religion in the 21st century. Unfortunately, a number of armed conflicts have be
Author: Steffen Laaß
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640146751
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 42
Get Book Here
Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, 13 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: "We have war, injustice, and unhappiness because our way of life is founded on mistaken beliefs." This quotation by William Blake set me thinking and distracted me from my actual project: I wanted to write an essay on a poem. But during my work I, fortunately, ended up in a chaos of philosophical questions: Who are we? Where do we come from? Is our universe only a dust particle of something larger? Is there a force guiding us? Who or what is God? From time immemorial, people have been racking their brains over these ageless and puzzling questions, and I doubt whether we are able to provide convincing responses to them. Someone who might give us a wise answer is William Blake (1757-1827). He is considered to be the first major Romantic poet, and a central theme of his works is religion (e.g. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Book of Urizen). Admittedly, there is no easy access to Blake because he is one of the most obscure and inscrutable poets. Nevertheless, I would like to make the daring attempt to uncover the secrets of Blake's religious mysticism. For this reason, I will discuss one of his first works There Is No Natural Religion (1788). My design is to make this essay accessible to a wide readership, especially to those who have so far avoided profoundly dealing with a particular topic: religion. I also had no serious interest in religion at all - until I started to learn Arabic. Once you have mastered "Allah's difficult but most ornate language", you have got a completely different outlook on the world. Beside this, I felt an urgent personal need to deal with the concept of faith in greater detail. This has in part something to do with the changing idea and role of religion in the 21st century. Unfortunately, a number of armed conflicts have be
Author: Jennifer Jesse
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739177915
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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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: Andrew W. Hass
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781009048644
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
How do we talk meaningfully about the sacred in contexts where conventional religious expression has so often lost its power? Inspired by the influential work of David Jasper, this important volume builds on his thinking to identify sacrality in a world where the old religious and secular debates have exhausted themselves and theology struggles for a new language in their wake. Distinguished writers explore here the idea of the sacred as one that exists, paradoxically, in a space that is both possible and impossible: profoundly theological on the one hand, but also deeply this-worldly and irreligious on the other. This is a sacredness that is simultaneously 'present' and 'absent': one which encompasses - as Jasper himself characterises it - 'the impossible possibility of an absolute vision'. The book teaches us that the sacred assumes a renewed potency when fully engaged with the creativity that happens across religion, literature, philosophy and the arts.
Author: Magnus Ankarsjö
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786455489
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 173
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Book Description
Over the last ten years the field of Blake studies has profited from new discoveries about Blake's life and work. This book examines the effect that Blake's mother's recently discovered Moravianism has had on our understanding of his poetry, and gives special attention to Moravianism and Swedenborgianism and their relation to his sexual politics. This is accomplished by a close reading of Blake's poetry, which examines in detail the subjects of religion, sex, and the attempted colonization of Africa by a Swedenborgian utopian group.
Author: Jennifer G. Jesse
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0739177907
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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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: Elizabeth Ludlow
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030400824
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
This book is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that explores the variety of ways in which the interface between understanding the figure of Christ, the place of the cross, and the contours of lived experience, was articulated through the long nineteenth century. Collectively, the chapters respond to the theological turn in postmodern thought by asking vital questions about the way in which representations of Christ shape understandings of personhood and of the divine.
Author: Linda Freedman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019254277X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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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: Albert D. Pionke
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1783089350
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
Designed for both first-time teachers of survey courses in later British literature and more experienced instructors seeking a new way to approach familiar material, ''Teaching Later British Literature' seeks to recapture the interconnectedness within and among Romantic, Victorian and Modern literature. Focusing on some of the defining historical, intellectual and artistic preoccupations that individual works explore in common with their literary peers, the book also invites teachers to help their students to rethink the criteria by which periods are defined and to reconceive the relationship between texts written within these periods. 'Teaching Later British Literature' is suitable for reading alongside any of the anthologies used in courses that survey the second half of British literature—from the advanced high school classroom to the lower-division university lecture hall—and seeks to complement their already robust content by offering teachers a synthetic and highly adaptable framework for guiding students through British literary history from the 1780s through the 1940s.
Author: William Blake
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780500600252
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 480
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Book Description
In his illuminated books,William Blake combined his handwritten text with his exuberant imagery on pages the like of which had not been seen since the great decorated books of the Middle Ages. To read such books as Jerusalem, America and Songs of Innocence and of Experience in cold letterpress bears no comparison to seeing and reading them as Blake conceived them, infused with his sublime and exhilarating colours. At times tiny figures and forms dance among the lines of the text, flames appear to burn up the page, and dense passages of Biblical-sounding text are brought to a jarring halt by startling images of death, destruction and liberation. This edition, produced together with The William Blake Trust, contains all the pages of Blakes twenty or so illuminated books reproduced in true size, an appendix with all Blakes text set in type and an introduction by the noted Blake scholar, David Bindman. They can at last become part of the lives of all lovers of art and poetry.
Author: Michael D. Hurley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474234097
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
In this ambitious book, Michael D. Hurley explores how five great writers – William Blake, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot – engaged their religious faith in poetry, with a view to asking why they chose that literary form in the first place. What did they believe poetry could say or do that other kinds of language or expression could not? And how might poetry itself operate as a unique mode of believing? These deep questions meet at the crossroads of poetics and metaphysics, and the writers considered here offer different answers. But these writers also collectively shed light on the interplay between literature and theology across the long nineteenth century, at a time when the authority and practice of both was being fiercely reimagined.
