Author: Saree Makdisi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226502619
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 421
Book Description
Modern scholars often find it difficult to account for the profound eccentricities in the work of William Blake, dismissing them as either ahistorical or simply meaningless. But with this pioneering study, Saree Makdisi develops a reliable and comprehensive framework for understanding these peculiarities. According to Makdisi, Blake's poetry and drawings should compel us to reconsider the history of the 1790s. Tracing for the first time the many links among economics, politics, and religion in his work, Makdisi shows how Blake questioned and even subverted the commercial, consumerist, and political liberties that his contemporaries championed, all while developing his own radical aesthetic.
William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s
Author: Saree Makdisi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226502619
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 421
Book Description
Modern scholars often find it difficult to account for the profound eccentricities in the work of William Blake, dismissing them as either ahistorical or simply meaningless. But with this pioneering study, Saree Makdisi develops a reliable and comprehensive framework for understanding these peculiarities. According to Makdisi, Blake's poetry and drawings should compel us to reconsider the history of the 1790s. Tracing for the first time the many links among economics, politics, and religion in his work, Makdisi shows how Blake questioned and even subverted the commercial, consumerist, and political liberties that his contemporaries championed, all while developing his own radical aesthetic.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226502619
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 421
Book Description
Modern scholars often find it difficult to account for the profound eccentricities in the work of William Blake, dismissing them as either ahistorical or simply meaningless. But with this pioneering study, Saree Makdisi develops a reliable and comprehensive framework for understanding these peculiarities. According to Makdisi, Blake's poetry and drawings should compel us to reconsider the history of the 1790s. Tracing for the first time the many links among economics, politics, and religion in his work, Makdisi shows how Blake questioned and even subverted the commercial, consumerist, and political liberties that his contemporaries championed, all while developing his own radical aesthetic.
Romantic Imperialism
Author: Saree Makdisi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521586047
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
The years between 1790 and 1830 saw over a hundred and fifty million people brought under British imperial control, and one of the most momentous outbursts of British literary and artistic production, announcing a new world of social and individual traumas and possibilities. This book traces the emergence of new forms of imperialism and capitalism as part of a culture of modernisation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and looks at the ways in which they were identified with and contested in Romanticism. Saree Makdisi argues that this process has to be understood in global terms, beyond the British and European viewpoint, and that developments in India, Africa, and the Arab world (up to and including our own time) enable us to understand more fully the texts and contexts of British Romanticism. New and original readings of texts by Wordsworth, Blake, Byron, Shelley, and Scott emerge in the course of this searching analysis of the cultural process of globalisation. Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 1998.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521586047
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
The years between 1790 and 1830 saw over a hundred and fifty million people brought under British imperial control, and one of the most momentous outbursts of British literary and artistic production, announcing a new world of social and individual traumas and possibilities. This book traces the emergence of new forms of imperialism and capitalism as part of a culture of modernisation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and looks at the ways in which they were identified with and contested in Romanticism. Saree Makdisi argues that this process has to be understood in global terms, beyond the British and European viewpoint, and that developments in India, Africa, and the Arab world (up to and including our own time) enable us to understand more fully the texts and contexts of British Romanticism. New and original readings of texts by Wordsworth, Blake, Byron, Shelley, and Scott emerge in the course of this searching analysis of the cultural process of globalisation. Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 1998.
Reading William Blake
Author: Saree Makdisi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521763037
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 151
Book Description
A new, exciting and accessible approach to reading William Blake, in which leading scholar Saree Makdisi explores key themes.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521763037
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 151
Book Description
A new, exciting and accessible approach to reading William Blake, in which leading scholar Saree Makdisi explores key themes.
William Blake and the Myth of America
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.
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.
The Cambridge Companion to William Blake
Author: Morris Eaves
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521786775
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 332
Book Description
Poet, painter, and engraver William Blake died in 1827 in obscure poverty with few admirers. The attention paid today to his remarkable poems, prints, and paintings would have astonished his contemporaries. Admired for his defiant, uncompromising creativity, he has become one of the most anthologized and studied writers in English and one of the most studied and collected British artists. His urge to cast words and images into masterpieces of revelation has left us with complex, forceful, extravagant, some times bizarre works of written and visual art that rank among the greatest challenges to plain understanding ever created. This Companion aims to provide guidance to Blake's work in fresh and readable introductions: biographical, literary, art historical, political, religious, and bibliographical. Together with a chronology, guides to further reading, and glossary of terms, they identify the key points of departure into Blake's multifarious world and work.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521786775
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 332
Book Description
Poet, painter, and engraver William Blake died in 1827 in obscure poverty with few admirers. The attention paid today to his remarkable poems, prints, and paintings would have astonished his contemporaries. Admired for his defiant, uncompromising creativity, he has become one of the most anthologized and studied writers in English and one of the most studied and collected British artists. His urge to cast words and images into masterpieces of revelation has left us with complex, forceful, extravagant, some times bizarre works of written and visual art that rank among the greatest challenges to plain understanding ever created. This Companion aims to provide guidance to Blake's work in fresh and readable introductions: biographical, literary, art historical, political, religious, and bibliographical. Together with a chronology, guides to further reading, and glossary of terms, they identify the key points of departure into Blake's multifarious world and work.
A Guide to the Cosmology of William Blake
Author: Kathryn S. Freeman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317188071
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
It is not surprising that visitors to Blake’s cosmology – the most elaborate in the history of British text and design – often demand a map in the form of a reference book. The entries in this volume benefit from the wide range of historical information made available in recent decades regarding the relationship between Blake’s text and design and his biographical, political, social, and religious contexts. Of particular importance, the entries take account of the re-interpretations of Blake with respect to race, gender, and empire in scholarship influenced by the groundbreaking theories that have arisen since the first half of the twentieth century. The intricate fluidity of Blake’s anti-Newtonian universe eludes the fixity of definitions and schema. Central to this guide to Blake's work and ideas is Kathryn S. Freeman's acknowledgment of the paradox of providing orientation in Blake’s universe without disrupting its inherent disorientation of the traditions whereby readers still come to it. In this innovative work, Freeman aligns herself with Blake’s demand that we play an active role in challenging our own readerly habits of passivity as we experience his created and corporeal worlds.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317188071
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
It is not surprising that visitors to Blake’s cosmology – the most elaborate in the history of British text and design – often demand a map in the form of a reference book. The entries in this volume benefit from the wide range of historical information made available in recent decades regarding the relationship between Blake’s text and design and his biographical, political, social, and religious contexts. Of particular importance, the entries take account of the re-interpretations of Blake with respect to race, gender, and empire in scholarship influenced by the groundbreaking theories that have arisen since the first half of the twentieth century. The intricate fluidity of Blake’s anti-Newtonian universe eludes the fixity of definitions and schema. Central to this guide to Blake's work and ideas is Kathryn S. Freeman's acknowledgment of the paradox of providing orientation in Blake’s universe without disrupting its inherent disorientation of the traditions whereby readers still come to it. In this innovative work, Freeman aligns herself with Blake’s demand that we play an active role in challenging our own readerly habits of passivity as we experience his created and corporeal worlds.
William Blake - Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Author: Sarah Haggarty
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350308919
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267
Book Description
Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) is William Blake's best-known work, containing such familiar poems as 'London', 'Sick Rose' and 'The Tyger'. Evolving over the author's lifetime, the collection was printed by Blake himself on his own press. This Reader's Guide: - Explains the unique development of Songs as an illuminated book - Considers the earliest reactions to the text during Blake's lifetime, and his gathering posthumous reputation in the nineteenth century - Explores modern critical approaches and recent debates - Discusses key topics that have been of abiding interest to critics, including the relationship between text and image in Blake's 'composite art' Insightful and stimulating, this introductory guide is an invaluable resource for anyone who is seeking to navigate their way through the mass of criticism surrounding Blake's most widely-studied work.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350308919
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267
Book Description
Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) is William Blake's best-known work, containing such familiar poems as 'London', 'Sick Rose' and 'The Tyger'. Evolving over the author's lifetime, the collection was printed by Blake himself on his own press. This Reader's Guide: - Explains the unique development of Songs as an illuminated book - Considers the earliest reactions to the text during Blake's lifetime, and his gathering posthumous reputation in the nineteenth century - Explores modern critical approaches and recent debates - Discusses key topics that have been of abiding interest to critics, including the relationship between text and image in Blake's 'composite art' Insightful and stimulating, this introductory guide is an invaluable resource for anyone who is seeking to navigate their way through the mass of criticism surrounding Blake's most widely-studied work.
Handbook of British Romanticism
Author: Ralf Haekel
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110393409
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 770
Book Description
The Handbook of British Romanticism is a state of the art investigation of Romantic literature and theory, a field that probably changed more quickly and more fundamentally than any other traditional era in literary studies. Since the early 1980s, Romantic studies has widened its scope significantly: The canon has been expanded, hitherto ignored genres have been investigated and new topics of research explored. After these profound changes, intensified by the general crisis of literary theory since the turn of the millennium, traditional concepts such as subjectivity, imagination and the creative genius have lost their status as paradigms defining Romanticism. The handbook will feature discussions of key concepts such as history, class, gender, science and the use of media as well as a thorough account of the most central literary genres around the turn of the 19th century. The focus of the book, however, will lie on a discussion of key literary texts in the light of the most recent theoretical developments. Thus, the Handbook of British Romanticism will provide students with an introduction to Romantic literature in general and literary scholars with a discussion of innovative and groundbreaking theoretical developments.
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110393409
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 770
Book Description
The Handbook of British Romanticism is a state of the art investigation of Romantic literature and theory, a field that probably changed more quickly and more fundamentally than any other traditional era in literary studies. Since the early 1980s, Romantic studies has widened its scope significantly: The canon has been expanded, hitherto ignored genres have been investigated and new topics of research explored. After these profound changes, intensified by the general crisis of literary theory since the turn of the millennium, traditional concepts such as subjectivity, imagination and the creative genius have lost their status as paradigms defining Romanticism. The handbook will feature discussions of key concepts such as history, class, gender, science and the use of media as well as a thorough account of the most central literary genres around the turn of the 19th century. The focus of the book, however, will lie on a discussion of key literary texts in the light of the most recent theoretical developments. Thus, the Handbook of British Romanticism will provide students with an introduction to Romantic literature in general and literary scholars with a discussion of innovative and groundbreaking theoretical developments.
Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture
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.
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.
William Blake and the Visionary Law
Author: Matthew Mauger
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031377230
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239
Book Description
This book examines the difficult relationship between individual intellectual freedom and the legal structures which govern human societies in William Blake’s works, showing that this tension carries a political urgency that has not yet been recognised by scholars in the field. In doing so, it offers a new approach to Blake’s corpus that builds on the literary and cultural historical work of recent decades. Blake’s pronouncements about law may often sound biblical in tone; but this book argues that they directly address (and are informed by) eighteenth-century legal debates concerning the origin of the English common law, the autonomy of the judicature, the increasing legislative role of Parliament, and the emergence of the notions of constitutionalism and natural rights. Through a study of his illuminated books, manuscript works, notebook drafts and annotations, this study considers Blake’s understanding that law is both integral to humanity itself and a core component of its potential fulfilment of the ‘Human Form Divine’.
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031377230
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239
Book Description
This book examines the difficult relationship between individual intellectual freedom and the legal structures which govern human societies in William Blake’s works, showing that this tension carries a political urgency that has not yet been recognised by scholars in the field. In doing so, it offers a new approach to Blake’s corpus that builds on the literary and cultural historical work of recent decades. Blake’s pronouncements about law may often sound biblical in tone; but this book argues that they directly address (and are informed by) eighteenth-century legal debates concerning the origin of the English common law, the autonomy of the judicature, the increasing legislative role of Parliament, and the emergence of the notions of constitutionalism and natural rights. Through a study of his illuminated books, manuscript works, notebook drafts and annotations, this study considers Blake’s understanding that law is both integral to humanity itself and a core component of its potential fulfilment of the ‘Human Form Divine’.