William Blake's Gothic Imagination

William Blake's Gothic Imagination PDF Author: Christopher Bundock
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781526121943
Category : Gothic poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Scholars of the Gothic have long recognised Blake's affinity with the genre. Yet, to date, no major scholarly study focused on Blake's intersection with the Gothic exists. William Blake's gothic imagination seeks to redress this disconnect. The papers here do not simply identify Blake's Gothic conventions but, thanks to recent scholarship on affect, psychology, and embodiment in Gothic studies, reach deeper into the tissue of anxieties that take confused form through this notoriously nebulous historical, aesthetic, and narrative mode. The collection opens with papers touching on literary form, history, lineation, and narrative in Blake's work, establishing contact with major topics in Gothic studies. Then refines its focus to Blake's bloody, nervous bodies, through which he explores various kinds of Gothic horror related to reproduction, anatomy, sexuality, affect, and materiality. Rather than transcendent images, this collection attends to Blake's 'dark visions of torment'.

William Blake's Gothic Imagination

William Blake's Gothic Imagination PDF Author: Christopher Bundock
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781526121943
Category : Gothic poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book

Book Description
Scholars of the Gothic have long recognised Blake's affinity with the genre. Yet, to date, no major scholarly study focused on Blake's intersection with the Gothic exists. William Blake's gothic imagination seeks to redress this disconnect. The papers here do not simply identify Blake's Gothic conventions but, thanks to recent scholarship on affect, psychology, and embodiment in Gothic studies, reach deeper into the tissue of anxieties that take confused form through this notoriously nebulous historical, aesthetic, and narrative mode. The collection opens with papers touching on literary form, history, lineation, and narrative in Blake's work, establishing contact with major topics in Gothic studies. Then refines its focus to Blake's bloody, nervous bodies, through which he explores various kinds of Gothic horror related to reproduction, anatomy, sexuality, affect, and materiality. Rather than transcendent images, this collection attends to Blake's 'dark visions of torment'.

William Blake's Gothic imagination

William Blake's Gothic imagination PDF Author: Chris Bundock
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526121964
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
While overlooked by extant studies of the Gothic, William Blake’s literary and visual oeuvre embodies the same obsessions and fears that inform the Gothic revival with which he was contemporary.

The Visionary Art of William Blake

The Visionary Art of William Blake PDF Author: Naomi Billingsley
Publisher: T&T Clark
ISBN: 9780567694027
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
William Blake (1757-1827) is considered one of the most singular and brilliant talents that England has ever produced. Celebrated now for the originality of his thinking, painting and verse, he shocked contemporaries by rejecting all forms of organized worship even while adhering to the truth of the Bible. But how did he come to equate Christianity with art? How did he use images and paint to express those radical and prophetic ideas about religion which he came in time to believe? And why did he conceive of Christ himself as an artist: in fact, as the artist, par excellence? These are among the questions which Naomi Billingsley explores in her subtle and wide-ranging new study in art, religion and the history of ideas. Suggesting that Blake expresses through his representations of Jesus a truly distinctive theology of art, and offering detailed readings of Blake's paintings and biblical commentary, she argues that her subject thought of Christ as an artist-archetype. Blake's is thus a distinctively 'Romantic' vision of art in which both the artist and his saviour fundamentally change the way that the world is perceived. In drawing upon contemporaneous religious writings and artistic representations of similar subjects, this book presents an historically grounded account of Blake's oeuvre. It offers new interpretations of his individual works while also identifying textual and pictorial sources that previously have been overlooked. It will have strong interdisciplinary appeal: to intellectual historians; scholars and students of religion and literature; art historians; and all those interested in the vivid figural articulation of a uniquely English theological radicalism.

William Blake

William Blake PDF Author: Tilottama Rajan
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487534434
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description
William Blake: Modernity and Disaster explores the work of the Romantic writer, artist, and visionary William Blake as a profoundly creative response to cultural, scientific, and political revolution. In the wake of such anxieties of discovery, including the revolution in the life sciences, Blake’s imagination – often prophetic, apocalyptic, and deconstructive – offers an inside view of such tumultuous and catastrophic change. A hybrid of text and image, Blake’s writings and illuminations offer a disturbing and productive exception to accepted aesthetic, social, and political norms. Accordingly, the essays in this volume, reflecting Blake’s unorthodox perspective, challenge past and present critical approaches in order to explore his oeuvre from multiple perspectives: literary studies, critical theory, intellectual history, science, art history, philosophy, visual culture, and psychoanalysis. Covering the full range of Blake’s output from the shorter prophecies to his final poems, the essays in William Blake: Modernity and Disaster predict the discontents of modernity by reading Blake as a prophetic figure alert to the ends of history. His legacy thus provides a lesson in thinking and living through the present in order to ask what it might mean to envision a different future, or any future at all.

Songs of Innocence

Songs of Innocence PDF Author: William Blake
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Illumination of books and manuscripts
Languages : en
Pages : 35

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Book Description


Gothic Nightmares

Gothic Nightmares PDF Author: Martin Myrone
Publisher: Tate
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
"Gothic Nightmares explores the taste for weird, supernatural and fantastic themes in British art between 1770 and 1830. Presenting the wildly original and extravagant images of Henry Fuseli and his contemporaries in the context of the 'Gothic', it shows how art, taste and ideas of the self were transformed in an era of revolutionary change, helping lay the foundations of modern culture."--BOOK JACKET.

Eternity's Sunrise

Eternity's Sunrise PDF Author: Leo Damrosch
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300216297
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
William Blake, overlooked in his time, remains an enigmatic figure to contemporary readers despite his near canonical status. Out of a wounding sense of alienation and dividedness he created a profoundly original symbolic language, in which words and images unite in a unique interpretation of self and society. He was a counterculture prophet whose art still challenges us to think afresh about almost every aspect of experience—social, political, philosophical, religious, erotic, and aesthetic. He believed that we live in the midst of Eternity here and now, and that if we could open our consciousness to the fullness of being, it would be like experiencing a sunrise that never ends. Following Blake’s life from beginning to end, acclaimed biographer Leo Damrosch draws extensively on Blake’s poems, his paintings, and his etchings and engravings to offer this generously illustrated account of Blake the man and his vision of our world. The author’s goal is to inspire the reader with the passion he has for his subject, achieving the imaginative response that Blake himself sought to excite. The book is an invitation to understanding and enjoyment, an invitation to appreciate Blake’s imaginative world and, in so doing, to open the doors of our perception.

Terror and Wonder

Terror and Wonder PDF Author: Dale Townshend
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780712357913
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Gothic imagination, that dark predilection for horrors and terrors, specters and sprites, occupies a prominent place in contemporary Western culture. First given fictional expression in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto of 1764, the Gothic mode has continued to haunt literature, fine art, music, film, and fashion ever since its heyday in Britain in the 1790s. Terror and Wonder, which accompanies a major exhibition at the British Library, is a collection of essays that trace the numerous meanings and manifestations of the Gothic across time, tracking its prominent shifts and mutations from its 18th-century origins, through the Victorian period, and into the present day. Edited and introduced by Dale Townshend, and consisting of original contributions by Nick Groom, Angela Wright, Alexandra Warwick, Andrew Smith, Lucie Armitt, and Catherine Spooner, Terror and Wonder provides a compelling and comprehensive overview of the Gothic imagination over the past 250 years.

The Religion of Empire

The Religion of Empire PDF Author: G. A. Rosso
Publisher: Literature, Religion, & Postse
ISBN: 9780814213162
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
The Religion of Empire: Political Theology in Blake's Prophetic Symbolism is the first full-length study devoted to interpreting Blake's three long poems, showing the ways in which the Bible, myth, and politics merge in his prophetic symbolism. In this book, G. A. Rosso examines the themes of empire and religion through the lens of one of Blake's most distinctive and puzzling images, Rahab, a figure that anchors an account of the development of Blake's political theology in the latter half of his career. Through the Rahab figure, Rosso argues, Blake interweaves the histories of religion and empire in a wide-ranging attack on the conceptual bases of British globalism in the long eighteenth century. This approach reveals the vast potential that the question of religion offers to a reconsideration of Blake's attitude to empire. The Religion of Empire also reevaluates Blake's relationship with Milton, whose influence Blake both affirms and contests in a unique appropriation of Milton's prophetic legacy. In this context, Rosso challenges recent views of Blake as complicit with the nationalism and sexism of his time, expanding the religion-empire nexus to include Blake's esoteric understanding of gender. Foregrounding the role of female characters in the longer prophecies, Rosso discloses the variegated and progressive nature of Blake's apocalyptic humanism.

Genesis

Genesis PDF Author: William Blake
Publisher: Huntington Library Press
ISBN: 9780873282475
Category : Bible
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
William Blake drew inspiration from the Bible throughout his life. Shortly before his death in 1827, he began an illuminated manuscript of the Book of Genesis, revisiting such key themes as creation, division, and forgiveness. This edition of Blake's Genesis provides a full-size reproduction of the Huntingdon Library's manuscript.