Blake and the Failure of Prophecy
Blake and the Failure of Prophecy

Author: Lucy Cogan

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-05-24

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 3030676889

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This monograph reorients discussion of Blake’s prophetic mode, revealing it to be not a system in any formal sense, but a dynamic, human response to an era of momentous historical change when the future Blake had foreseen and the reality he was faced with could not be reconciled. At every stage, Blake’s writing confronts the central problem of all politically minded literature: how texts can become action. Yet he presents us with no single or, indeed, conclusive answer to this question and in this sense it can be said that he fails. Blake, however, never stopped searching for a way that prophecy might be made to live up to its promise in the present. The twentieth-century hermeneuticist Paul Ricoeur shared with Blake a preoccupation with the relationship between time, text and action. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics thus provide a fresh theoretical framework through which to analyse Blake’s attempts to fulfil his prophetic purpose.

Speech Acts in Blake’s Milton
Speech Acts in Blake’s Milton

Author: Brian Russell Graham

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-11-16

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 1000811107

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Using a framework based on J. L. Austin’s understanding of performative speech and Angela Esterhammer’s work on how things are done with words in Milton’s and Blake’s poetry, this study provides an extended close reading of the speech acts of characters in Blake’s epic poem Milton. With the exception of what we learn about in the part of the poem known as the Bard’s Song, Blake’s Milton is dedicated to providing an incredibly detailed account of the numerous facets of the instant of time immediately prior to apocalypse, an instant in which Milton is the protagonist, and Blake himself a participant. This study explores how in the poem sacred history proceeds towards and through the instant by means of the speech act. This extended commentary is intended for not just Blake scholars but also the common reader who wishes to approach Blake’s brief epic for the first time. For scholars, this monograph offers a full account of a crucial but previously unexplored theme in the scholarship about Milton. For the common reader, it offers a comprehensive introduction to what Northrop Frye called ‘one of the most gigantic imaginative achievements in English poetry’.

Romantic Prophecy and the Resistance to Historicism
Romantic Prophecy and the Resistance to Historicism

Author: Christopher M. Bundock

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2016-01-01

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1442630701

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Romantic writers invoked prophecy throughout their work. However, the failure of prophecy to materialize didn't deter them. Why then do Romantic writers repeatedly invoke prophecy when it never works? The answer to this question is at the heart of Romantic Prophecy and the Resistance to Historicism. In this remarkably erudite work, Christopher Bundock argues that the repeated failure of prophecy in Romantic thought is creative and enables a renewable potential for expression across disciplines. By focusing on new readings of canonical Romantic authors as well as their more obscure works, Bundock makes a bold intervention into major concepts such as Romantic imagination, historicity, and mediation. Romantic Prophecy and the Resistance to Historicism glides across Kant's Swedenborgian dreams to Mary Shelley's Last Man and reveals how Romanticism reinvents history by turning prophecy inside out.

William Blake’s Divine Love
William Blake’s Divine Love

Author: Joshua Schouten de Jel

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-03-15

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1040003656

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Despite the fact that William Blake summarises the plot of Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) in just eight lines in the prefatory ‘Argument,’ there are several contentious moments in the poem which continue to cause debate. Critics read Oothoon’s call to Theotormon’s eagles and her offer to catch girls of silver and gold as either evidence of her rape-damaged psyche or confirmation of her selfless love which transcends her socio-sexual state. How do we reconcile the attack of Theotormon’s eagles and the wanton play of the girls with Oothoon’s articulate and highly sophisticated expressions of spiritual truth and free love? In William Blake’s Divine Love: Visions of Oothoon, Joshua Schouten de Jel explores the hermeneutical possibilities of Oothoon’s self-annihilation and the epistemological potential of her visual copulation by establishing an artistic and hagiographical heritage which informs the pictorial representation and poetic pronunciation of Oothoon’s enlightened entelechy. Working with Michelangelo’s The Punishment of Tityus (1532) and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–51), Oothoon’s ecstatic figuration reflects two iconographic traditions which, framed by the linguistic tropes of divine love expressed within a female-centred mystagogy, reveal the soteriological significance of Oothoon’s willing self-sacrifice.

William Blake and the Visionary Law
William Blake and the Visionary Law

Author: Matthew Mauger

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-10-15

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 3031377230

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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’.

The Failure of Bible Prophecy
The Failure of Bible Prophecy

Author: Sandoval Chris Sandoval

Publisher: Trafford Publishing

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 142692383X

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Fundamentalists say the fulfillment of prophecy proves the divine inspiration of the Bible. Supposedly, the prophets predicted Jesus Christ's birth, ministry, death, and resurrection centuries before he existed. They also supposedly predicted the rise and fall of nations such as Tyre, Egypt, Edom, and Babylon. And they claim to have described the threat of Russia, the founding of Israel in 1948, and the political unification of Europe. Upon closer examination, the claims do not hold up. The so-called messianic prophecies are taken out of context and have nothing to do with Jesus. This book proves: * Nebuchadnezzar never made a wasteland out of Egypt for forty years as Ezekiel predicted. * The world did not end immediately after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD as Jesus had purportedly predicted in Matthew 24. * The biblical prophets predicted nothing about Christ or Antichrist in the distant future but plenty about apocalyptic doom and messianic glory in their own near future. * And much more! Find out why biblical explanations of the world today do not add up and why this matters in The Failure of Bible Prophecy.

Blake's Visionary Forms Dramatic
Blake's Visionary Forms Dramatic

Author: David V. Erdman

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-03-14

Total Pages: 575

ISBN-13: 1400886767

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The twenty contributors to this volume offer a new perspective on the relationship between Blake's poetry and his visionary forms. Their illustrated discussions explore and debate the nature of Blake's mixed art and the energetic interaction of text and design. Originally published in 1971. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Radical Blake
Radical Blake

Author: S. Dent

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2002-10-02

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0230287409

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Blake has maintained an enduring popularity amongst a large and diverse audience as a poet, artist and engraver. There are probably more artists, writers, filmmakers and composers working under the influence of Blake than any other figure from the Romantic era. Radical Blake traces his influence and afterlife across a range of major themes such as Metropolitan Blake, Blake and Nationalism, and Blake and Women.