Blake, Nation and Empire

Blake, Nation and Empire PDF Author: D. Worrall
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230597068
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This book examines Blake's work in the context of discourses of nation and empire, of the construction of a public sphere, and restores the longevity to his artistic career by placing emphasis on his work in the 1820s. Relevant contexts include technology, sentimentalism, Ireland and Catholic Emancipation, missionary prospectuses and body politics.

Blake, Nation and Empire

Blake, Nation and Empire PDF Author: D. Worrall
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230597068
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This book examines Blake's work in the context of discourses of nation and empire, of the construction of a public sphere, and restores the longevity to his artistic career by placing emphasis on his work in the 1820s. Relevant contexts include technology, sentimentalism, Ireland and Catholic Emancipation, missionary prospectuses and body politics.

Blake, Nation and Empire

Blake, Nation and Empire PDF Author: Steve Clark
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description


Romantic Epics and the Mission of Empire

Romantic Epics and the Mission of Empire PDF Author: Matthew Leporati
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009285181
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
A lively account of the Romantic-era revival of epic literature set against the background of British imperialism's evangelical turn.

Blake's 'Jerusalem' As Visionary Theatre

Blake's 'Jerusalem' As Visionary Theatre PDF Author: Susanne M. Sklar
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191619140
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Before etching Jerusalem William Blake wrote about creating 'the grandest poem that this world contains.' Blake's avowed intention in constructing the work was to move readers from a solely rational way of being (called Ulro) to one that is highly imaginative (called Eden/Eternity), with each word chosen to suit 'the mouth of a true Orator.' Rational interpretation is of limited use when reading this multifaceted epic and its non-linear structure presents a perennial challenge for readers. Susanne Sklar engages with the interpretive challenges of Jerusalem by considering it as a piece of visionary theatre —an imaginative performance in which characters, settings, and imagery are not confined by mundane space and time— allowing readers to find coherence within its complexities. With his characters, Blake's readers can participate imaginatively in what Blake calls 'the Divine Body, the Saviour's Kingdom,' a way of being in which all things interconnect: spiritually, ecologically, socially, and erotically. Imaginatively engaging with Jerusalem involves close textual reading and analysis. The first part of this book discusses the notion of visionary theatre, and the theological, literary, and historical antecedents of Jerusalem's imagery, characters, and settings. Particular attention is paid to the theological context of Blake's Jesus ('the Divine Body'), and Jerusalem, the heroine of his poem. This prepares the ground for a scene-by-scene commentary of the entire illuminated work. Jerusalem tells the story of Albion's fall, many rescue attempts, escalating violence and oppression, and a surprising apocalypse —in which all living things, awakening, are transfigured in ferocious forgiveness.

Blake, Myth, and Enlightenment

Blake, Myth, and Enlightenment PDF Author: David Fallon
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137390352
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
This book provides compelling new readings of William Blake’s poetry and art, including the first sustained account of his visionary paintings of Pitt and Nelson. It focuses on the recurrent motif of apotheosis, both as a figure of political authority to be demystified but also as an image of utopian possibility. It reevaluates Blake’s relationship to Enlightenment thought, myth, religion, and politics, from The French Revolution to Jerusalem and The Laocoön. The book combines careful attention to cultural and historical contexts with close readings of the texts and designs, providing an innovative account of Blake’s creative transformations of Enlightenment, classical, and Christian thought.

William Blake and the Visionary Law

William Blake and the Visionary Law PDF Author: Matthew Mauger
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031377230
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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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’.

Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness

Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness PDF Author: Susan Matthews
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052151357X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Examines Blake's place within a bourgeois culture in the process of redefining the role and meaning of sexuality.

Blake's Agitation

Blake's Agitation PDF Author: Steven Goldsmith
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421408066
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Since the Romantic period, the critical thinker's enthusiasm has served to substantiate his or her agency in the world. Blake’s Agitation is a thorough and engaging reflection on the dynamic, forward-moving, and active nature of critical thought. Steven Goldsmith investigates the modern notion that there’s a fiery feeling in critical thought, a form of emotion that gives authentic criticism the potential to go beyond interpreting the world. By arousing this critical excitement in readers and practitioners, theoretical writing has the power to alter the course of history, even when the only evidence of its impact is the emotion it arouses. Goldsmith identifies William Blake as a paradigmatic example of a socially critical writer who is moved by enthusiasm and whose work, in turn, inspires enthusiasm in his readers. He traces the particular feeling of engaged, dynamic urgency that characterizes criticism as a mode of action in Blake’s own work, in Blake scholarship, and in recent theoretical writings that identify the heightened affect of critical thought with the potential for genuine historical change. Within each of these horizons, the critical thinker’s enthusiasm serves to substantiate his or her agency in the world, supplying immediate, embodied evidence that criticism is not one thought-form among many but an action of consequence, accessing or even enabling the conditions of new possibility necessary for historical transformation to occur. The resulting picture of the emotional agency of criticism opens up a new angle on Blake’s literary and visual legacy and offers a vivid interrogation of the practical potential of theoretical discourse.

William Blake

William Blake PDF Author: Edina Adam
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 1606066420
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
A richly illustrated, comprehensive introduction to the visionary artist William Blake. William Blake (1757–1827) is a universal artist—an inspiration to musicians, poets, performers, and visual artists worldwide. By combining his poetry and images on the page through radical printing techniques, Blake created some of the most striking and enduring images in art. His personal struggles in a period of political terror and oppression; creativity, inventiveness, and technical innovation; and vision and political commitment keep his work relevant today. Featuring over 130 color images, this accessible yet comprehensive introduction to Blake’s achievements and ambition includes discussions of his legacy in America; relationship to the medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque artists who preceded him; visionary imagination; and unparalleled skill as a printmaker.

William Blake

William Blake PDF Author: Tilottama Rajan
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487534434
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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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.