Blake's Nostos
Author: Kathryn S. Freeman
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 1997-01-01
Total Pages: 222
ISBN-13: 9780791432976
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEstablishes Blake's controversial, unfinished epic, The Four Zoas, as the culmination of his mythos.
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A Guide to the Cosmology of William Blake
Author: Kathryn S. Freeman
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-12-01
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13: 1317188071
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIt 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.
William Blake
Author: Tilottama Rajan
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2021-01-07
Total Pages: 490
ISBN-13: 1487534434
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWilliam 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.
William Blake and Gender
Author: Magnus Ankarsjö
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2015-01-27
Total Pages: 221
ISBN-13: 0786483032
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe 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.
Blake, Lavater, and Physiognomy
Author: Sibylle Erle
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-12-02
Total Pages: 276
ISBN-13: 1351193694
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"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 Reception of Blake in the Orient
Author: Steve Clark
Publisher: A&C Black
Published: 2006-04-01
Total Pages: 362
ISBN-13: 1441143432
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume brings together research from international scholars focusing attention on the longevity and complexity of Blake`s reception in Japan and elsewhere in the East. It is designed as not only a celebration of his art and poetry in new and unexpected contexts but also to contest the intensely nationalistic and parochial Englishness of his work, and in broader terms, the inevitable passivity with which Romanticism (and other Western intellectual movements) have been received in the Orient.
The Chained Boy
Author: Christopher Z. Hobson
Publisher: Associated University Presse
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 418
ISBN-13: 9780838753859
DOWNLOAD EBOOKStudy of William Blake's radical thought in light of his major works, such as Jerusalem (1804-20).
Brahma in the West
Author: David Weir
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2012-02-01
Total Pages: 185
ISBN-13: 0791486400
DOWNLOAD EBOOKExamining William Blake's poetry in relation to the mythographic tradition of the eighteenth century and emphasizing the British discovery of Hindu literature, David Weir argues that Blake's mythic system springs from the same rich historical context that produced the Oriental Renaissance. That context includes republican politics and dissenting theology—two interrelated developments that help elucidate many of the obscurities of Blake's poetry and explain much of its intellectual energy. Weir shows how Blake's poetic career underwent a profound development as a result of his exposure to Hindu mythology. By combining mythographic insight with republican politics and Protestant dissent, Blake devised a poetic system that opposed the powers of Church and King.
Religion, Enlightenment and Empire
Author: Jessica Patterson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2021-12-16
Total Pages: 369
ISBN-13: 1009037536
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the second half of the eighteenth century, several British East India Company servants published accounts of what they deemed to be the original and ancient religion of India. Drawing on what are recognised today as the texts and traditions of Hinduism, these works fed into a booming enlightenment interest in Eastern philosophy. At the same time, the Company's aggressive conquest of Bengal was facing a crisis of legitimacy and many of the prominent political minds of the day were turning their attention to the question of empire. In this original study, Jessica Patterson situates these Company works on the 'Hindu religion' in the twin contexts of enlightenment and empire. In doing so, she uncovers the central role of heterodox religious approaches to Indian religions for enlightenment thought, East India Company policy, and contemporary ideas of empire.
Wonders Divine
Author: Sheila A. Spector
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: 2001
Total Pages: 234
ISBN-13: 9780838754689
DOWNLOAD EBOOKExplores Blake's esoteric and religious influences
