Blake's Visionary Universe

Blake's Visionary Universe PDF Author: John B. Beer
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description

Blake's Visionary Universe

Blake's Visionary Universe PDF Author: John B. Beer
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 460

Get Book Here

Book Description


A Guide to the Cosmology of William Blake

A Guide to the Cosmology of William Blake PDF Author: Kathryn S. Freeman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317188071
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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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.

Blake's Humanism

Blake's Humanism PDF Author: John Beer
Publisher: Humanities-Ebooks
ISBN: 184760000X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
It considers the guiding forces behind Visions of the Daughters of Albion and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the roles of vision and energy in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience and lyrics such as' The Mental Traveller', Blakes's attempts at mythological interpretation of current events, first in' The French Revolution' and then in the prophetic books America, Europe and The Song of Los, and how Blake's fourfold vision is employed as a means of interpreting and illustrating major predecessors such as Milton and Chaucer.

Blake, Lavater, and Physiognomy

Blake, Lavater, and Physiognomy PDF Author: Sibylle Erle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351193694
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
"William Blake never travelled to the continent, yet his creation myth is far more European than has ever been acknowledged. The painter Henry Fuseli introduced Blake to traditional European thinking, and Blake responded to late 18th century body-theory in his Urizen books (1794-95), which emerged from his professional work as a copy-engraver on Henry Hunter's translation of Johann Caspar Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy (1789-98). Lavater's work contains hundreds of portraits and their physiognomical readings. Blake, Fuseli, Joshua Reynolds and their contemporaries took a keen interest in the ideas behind physiognomy in their search for the right balance between good likeness and type in portraits. Blake, Lavater, and Physiognomy demonstrates how the problems occurring during the production of the Hunter translation resonate in Blake's treatment of the Genesis story. Blake takes us back to the creation of the human body, and interrogates the idea that 'God created man after his own likeness.' He introduces the 'Net of Religion', a device which presses the human form into material shape, giving it personality and identity. As Erle shows, Blake's startlingly original take on the creation myth is informed by Lavater's pursuit of physiognomy: the search for divine likeness, traced in the faces of their contemporary men."

The Moment of Explosion

The Moment of Explosion PDF Author: Stephen C. Behrendt
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803211698
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
William Blake thought that John Milton had been betrayed by both his commentators and his illustrators, and he set out to recover Milton's vision, particularly in Paradise Lost, from the misguided academic and Augustan misinterpretation to which it had been subjected. The Moment of Explosion: Blake and the Illustration of Milton is the first detailed. analysis of all of Blake's illustrations for Milton's poetry. Blake explicitly believed he was correcting errors that Milton wanted corrected, and he felt that his illustration was interpretive criticism in its highest sense, a re-vision that would broadcast Milton's revolutionary ethic afresh. Stephen C. Behrendt blends a close reading of Blake and Milton with meticulous and provocative examination of the illustrations of Blake, his predecessors, and his contemporaries. The focus on visual art as criticism establishes the book as a major essay on the interaction of the arts within and across cultural periods. Fifty-four black-and-white illustrations document that radical, Romantic assault by Blake on tradition in the name of tradition. The highlight of the book is Blake's two sets of Paradise Lost illustrations, reproduced here in twenty-four color plates?Blake's final statements on Paradise Lost and the culmination of his aesthetic and critical development. This beautiful book presents a wealth of illustration previously scattered or inaccessible. It will be of major interest to students of Blake, Milton, Romanticism, art history, and the history of ideas.

Twentieth-Century Blake Criticism

Twentieth-Century Blake Criticism PDF Author: Joseph P. Natoli
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317381203
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
First published in 1982 this book provides a bibliography of commentary, criticism, and scholarship on the works of William Blake. It covers the period from Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry in 1947 to 1980. The criticism is organised according to eleven classifications in order to help direct the research of students and scholars and each chapter is preceded by an introductory essay in order to guide the reader.

William Blake and Gender

William Blake and Gender PDF Author: Magnus Ankarsjö
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786483032
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
The closing years of the eighteenth century were the particular domain of literary radicals whose work challenged ideas on gender and sexuality. During this transitional period, the poetry of William Blake reflected the changing mores of society as well as his own developing notions of gender. This work presents an in-depth exploration of gender issues in Blake's three epic poems, The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem. The opening chapter discusses basic concepts such as notions of apocalypse, utopia and gender, all essential to the author's reading of Blake. Background regarding the literary atmosphere of the time, which included influence from the tradition of dissent, English Jacobinism and early feminism, is also included, effectively setting the context for Blake's work. The book then examines the poems in chronological order. It concentrates particularly on male and female activity within each work (refuting the common assumption that Blake was anti-feminist) while exploring the symbolism of the poetry. Blake's repeated theme of the struggle between the sexes receives special emphasis, as does the progress of his gender vision through the three poems.

William Blake

William Blake PDF Author: J. Beer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230554865
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This volume on Blake follows the writer's life and combines biography and critical analysis. Covering Blake's early career, his major works and his work as a visual artist, this new study will be a must for all Blake scholars and enthusiasts. Recent discoveries concerning Blake's forebears and their religion make this new study additionally timely.

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.

Visionary Materialism in the Early Works of William Blake

Visionary Materialism in the Early Works of William Blake PDF Author: M. Green
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230500277
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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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.