The Evolution of Blake’s Myth

The Evolution of Blake’s Myth PDF Author: Sheila Spector
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351108417
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
Interpreting Blake has always proved challenging. Hermeneutics, as the on-going negotiation between the horizon of expectations and a given text, hinges on the preconceptions that structure thought. The structure, in turn, is derived from myth, a cultural narrative predicated on a particular set of foundational principles, and organized in terms of the resulting symbolic form. The primary impediment to interpreting Blake has been the failure to recognize that he and much of his audience have thought in terms of two radically different myths. In The Evolution of Blake’s Myth, Sheila A. Spector establishes the dimensions of the myth that structures Blake’s thought. In the first of three parts, she uses Jerusalem, Blake’s most complete book, as the basis for extrapolating the components of the consolidated myth. She then traces the chronological development of the myth from its origin in the late 1780s through its crystallization in Milton. Finally, she demonstrates how Blake used the myth hermeneutically, as the horizon of expectations for interpreting not only his own work, but the Bible and the visionary texts of others, as well.

The Evolution of Blake’s Myth

The Evolution of Blake’s Myth PDF Author: Sheila Spector
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351108417
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 429

Get Book Here

Book Description
Interpreting Blake has always proved challenging. Hermeneutics, as the on-going negotiation between the horizon of expectations and a given text, hinges on the preconceptions that structure thought. The structure, in turn, is derived from myth, a cultural narrative predicated on a particular set of foundational principles, and organized in terms of the resulting symbolic form. The primary impediment to interpreting Blake has been the failure to recognize that he and much of his audience have thought in terms of two radically different myths. In The Evolution of Blake’s Myth, Sheila A. Spector establishes the dimensions of the myth that structures Blake’s thought. In the first of three parts, she uses Jerusalem, Blake’s most complete book, as the basis for extrapolating the components of the consolidated myth. She then traces the chronological development of the myth from its origin in the late 1780s through its crystallization in Milton. Finally, she demonstrates how Blake used the myth hermeneutically, as the horizon of expectations for interpreting not only his own work, but the Bible and the visionary texts of others, as well.

Wonders Divine

Wonders Divine PDF Author: Sheila A. Spector
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838754689
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Explores Blake's esoteric and religious influences

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.

Translating Myth

Translating Myth PDF Author: Ben Pestell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134862563
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Ever since Odysseus heard tales of his own exploits being retold among strangers, audiences and readers have been alive to the complications and questions arising from the translation of myth. How are myths taken and carried over into new languages, new civilizations, or new media? An international group of scholars is gathered in this volume to present diverse but connected case studies which address the artistic and political implications of the changing condition of myth – this most primal and malleable of forms. ‘Translation’ is treated broadly to encompass not only literary translation, but also the transfer of myth across cultures and epochs. In an age when the spiritual world is in crisis, Translating Myth constitutes a timely exploration of myth’s endurance, and represents a consolidation of the status of myth studies as a discipline in its own right.

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.

Converse in the Spirit

Converse in the Spirit PDF Author: Kevin Fischer
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838640067
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Underlining the importance to both of a living creative and spiritual tradition, Converse in the Spirit argues that the relationship between Blake and Boehme was a meeting of like minds that transcended place and time, that each regarded himself as part of a community of vision and aspiration, and believed that any predominant form of thought and understanding was only partial. Through this, Boehme is used to illuminate the more esoteric aspects of Blake, and Blake those of Boehme. Their writings are not a simple or direct description on the movements of divinity, nor of what divinity is or is not, but a medium for approaching it, and for participating in the creation of the sacred, the giving of personal, individual form to the divine.

Sexy Blake

Sexy Blake PDF Author: H. Bruder
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137332840
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
This book lays bare numerous sexy Blakes, arguing for both chastity and pornography, violence and domination as well as desire and redemption, and also journeying in the realms of conceptual sex and conceptual art. Fierce tussles over the body in, and the body of, the poet-artist's work celebrate Blakean attractions and repulsions.

The Evolution of Modern Fantasy

The Evolution of Modern Fantasy PDF Author: Jamie Williamson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137515791
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
In this comprehensive study, Williamson traces the literary history of the fantasy genre from the eighteenth century to its coalescence following the success of Tolkien's work in the 1960s. While some studies have engaged with related material, there has been no extended study specifically exploring the roots of this now beloved genre.

William Blake and the Moderns

William Blake and the Moderns PDF Author: Robert J. Bertholf
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 9780791496640
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Robert Bertholf and Annette Levitt have assembled thirteen essays that establish Blake as a "central voice molding modern literature and thought." The essays in this volume examine Blake's influence on modern poetry, the modern novel, and modern thought from various critical approaches. This collection maps out the lines of direct literary influences and indirect intellectual affinities that make up the tradition of enacted form. Through the use of various aspects of Blake's form and ideas, this book reasserts the idea of continuity, the drive for wholeness, and the arrival of new poetic forms. Blake is considered one of the major and most modern of Romantics. This collection positions him as a precursor of the modern, using his vision and poetry as a base for discussing a central issue in literary theory today—influence and the literary tradition—just how is the legacy of a literary artist passed on, and how is it resurrected in the works of subsequent generations.

Romantic Futures

Romantic Futures PDF Author: Evy Varsamopoulou
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003808697
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Romantic Futures is a collection which explores the significance of futurity in British Romanticism from a comparative perspective in three defining manifestations: the future as conscious legacy, by which is meant both influences or continuities and the (anticipations of) impact on the future; the future as revealed by prophecy, whether via religious figures or superstitions; and a meditation on the temporality of the future, or the future as a concept. The book brings together a wide range of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives: from utopian studies, history, religion, and cultural theory to future studies, neuroscience, video games, and art history. Aiming to increase and diversify current critical engagement and highlight the contemporary relevance of the Romantics’ multivalent preoccupation with the future, this collection renews the dialogue between Romanticism and our critical relation to its contemporaneity, especially as it speaks to current understandings of the future in the sciences, arts, and humanities.