The Captive of the Castle of Sennaar is a utopian novel in two parts. In this scholarly edition, G.E. Bentley, Jr, places George Cumberland's late eighteenth-century work among the earliest historical novels in English and identifies it as a rare example of the "Romantic novel." He shows that while each part of the work adopts a very different form of utopia, the two utopias complement and modify one another. He also shows the work to be unusual for the sexual and political freedom encouraged and the Christian fundamentalism advocated, as well as for its setting, in lands never visited by Europeans at the time of writing.
The captivity narrative has always been a literary genre associated with America. Joe Snader argues, however, that captivity narratives emerged much earlier in Britain, coinciding with European colonial expansion, the development of anthropology, and the rise of liberal political thought. Stories of Europeans held captive in the Middle East, America, Africa, and Southeast Asia appeared in the British press from the late sixteenth through the late eighteenth centuries, and captivity narratives were frequently featured during the early development of the novel. Until the mid-eighteenth century, British examples of the genre outpaced their American cousins in length, frequency of publication, attention to anthropological detail, and subjective complexity. Using both new and canonical texts, Snader shows that foreign captivity was a favorite topic in eighteenth-century Britain. An adaptable and expansive genre, these narratives used set plots and stereotypes originating in Mediterranean power struggles and relocated in a variety of settings, particularly eastern lands. The narratives' rhetorical strategies and cultural assumptions often grew out of centuries of religious strife and coincided with Europe's early modern military ascendancy. Caught Between Worlds presents a broad, rich, and flexible definition of the captivity narrative, placing the American strain in its proper place within the tradition as a whole. Snader, having assembled the first bibliography of British captivity narratives, analyzes both factual texts and a large body of fictional works, revealing the ways they helped define British identity and challenged Britons to rethink the place of their nation in the larger world.
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.
The Annual Bibliography of the History of the Printed Book and Libraries records articles of scholarly value that relate to the history of the printed book, to the history of arts, crafts, techniques and equipment, and of the economic, social and cultural environment involved in their production, distribution, conservation and description.
One of Jerry’s greatest talents was creating research pretexts to travel to the far corners of the globe. He explored England and continental Europe, first as a student and later when he returned regularly for research. Once he had settled into his career at the University of Toronto, Jerry sought adventure with his young family while teaching for a year in places which did not at the time attract many Western academics - Algeria in the 1960s, India in the 1970s, China in the early 1980s. In each of these places he found expectations about teaching, university administration and social interactions vastly different, often baffling, and always entertaining. The volume concludes with three essays in which Jerry chronicles his academic endeavours, as a scholar of William Blake, forms the basis of the most important collection of Blake works in Canada. With eloquence and humour, Jerry brings to life in Boondoggles the people he met and the grandeur of the places he visited, as both a restless professor and an endlessly curious observer of human nature, long before the era of mass tourism made such travels commonplace.
Blake in Our Time explores the work of British poet and artist William Blake in the context of the material culture of his era. In the 1960s, University of Toronto scholar G.E. Bentley, Jr almost singlehandedly shifted the focus of Blake criticism from formalism and symbolism to the materiality that contextualizes Blake's work. Following in the footsteps of Bentley's pioneering scholarship, this collection, richly illustrated, demonstrates that the locus of Blake's work lies in the elements that are historically particular to his place and time. Topics include the impact of the town of Chichester on Blake's imagination, the material processes of Blake's painting, the detection of a Blake forgery, and new biographical materials, using archives and online resources, on Blake's contemporaries, patrons, peers, and friends. Essays on the importance of Blake collections world-wide, on variant printings, and on the heirs of Blake in British painting extend the focus of this remarkable investigation to include chalcography and book history.
Writer and religious rebel, William Blake ((1757-1827) sowed the seeds for Romanticism in his innovative poems concerning faith and the visions that inspired him throughout his life. Whether describing his own spirituality, the innocence of youth or the corruption caused by mankind, his writings depict a world in which spirits dominate and the mind is the gateway to Heaven. This collection of his greatest works spans his entire poetic life from the early, exquisite lyrics of Poetic Sketches to his Songs of Innocence and Experience - a compelling exploration of good and evil. Together, they illuminate a self-made realm that has fascinated artists and poets as diverse as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Yeats and Ginsberg.
Brimming with the fascinating eccentricities of a complex andconfusing movement whose influences continue to resonate deeply,30 Great Myths About the Romantics adds great clarity towhat we know – or think we know – about one ofthe most important periods in literary history. Explores the various misconceptions commonly associated withRomanticism, offering provocative insights that correct and clarifyseveral of the commonly-held myths about the key figures of thisera Corrects some of the biases and beliefs about the Romanticsthat have crept into the 21st-century zeitgeist – for examplethat they were a bunch of drug-addled atheists who believed in freelove; that Blake was a madman; and that Wordsworth slept with hissister Celebrates several of the mythic objects, characters, and ideasthat have passed down from the Romantics into contemporary culture– from Blake’s Jerusalem and Keats’sOde on a Grecian Urn to the literary genre of thevampire Engagingly written to provide readers with a fun yet scholarlyintroduction to Romanticism and key writers of the period, applyingthe most up-to-date scholarship to the series of myths thatcontinue to shape our appreciation of their work
