Susanne Sklar engages with the interpretive challenges of William Blake's illuminated epic poem Jerusalem by considering it as a piece of visionary theatre - an imaginative performance in which characters, settings, and imagery are not confined by mundane space and time - allowing readers to find coherence within its complexities.
William Blake (1757-1827) is considered one of the most singular and brilliant talents that England has ever produced. Celebrated now for the originality of his thinking, painting and verse, he shocked contemporaries by rejecting all forms of organized worship even while adhering to the truth of the Bible. But how did he come to equate Christianity with art? How did he use images and paint to express those radical and prophetic ideas about religion which he came in time to believe? And why did he conceive of Christ himself as an artist: in fact, as the artist, par excellence? These are among the questions which Naomi Billingsley explores in her subtle and wide-ranging new study in art, religion and the history of ideas. Suggesting that Blake expresses through his representations of Jesus a truly distinctive theology of art, and offering detailed readings of Blake's paintings and biblical commentary, she argues that her subject thought of Christ as an artist-archetype. Blake's is thus a distinctively 'Romantic' vision of art in which both the artist and his saviour fundamentally change the way that the world is perceived.
Blake's Drama challenges conventional views of William Blake's multimedia work by reinterpreting it as theatrical performance. Viewed in its dramatic contexts, this art form is shown to provoke an active spectatorship and to depict identity as paradoxically essential and constructed, revealing Blake's investments in drama, action, and the body.
William Blakes Jerusalem Explained is the first line by line analysis of this major epic, his plot and mythic unity are detailed and the golden string of the plot clearly expressed so the parts are in context an aesthetic whole. Thereby, his epic is seen as an aesthetic masterpiece. Dr Whitmarsh-Knights scholarship means Jerusalem should no longer be presented as fractal, plotless, impenetrable or as confused. In his recommendations for the companion book on William Blakes The Four Zoas by Dr Whitmarsh-Knight, Emeritus Professor Frederick Cogswell wrote that his scholarship is a: remarkable contribution, a major breakthrough that challenges the views of some greats in the field, a significant contribution to knowledge and eminently worthy of publication. Blakes genius for conscious plot construction and chronological narrative design in Jerusalem can be clearly followed on a scholarly readable line by line basis. Now his genius is accessible to the visionary imagination of the reader.
The poem was inspired by the apocryphal story that a young Jesus, accompanied by his uncle Joseph of Arimathea, a tin merchant, travelled to what is now England and visited Glastonbury during the unknown years of Jesus. The legend is linked to an idea in the Book of Revelation describing a Second Coming, wherein Jesus establishes a new Jerusalem. The Christian Church in general, and the English Church in particular, has long used Jerusalem as a metaphor for Heaven, a place of universal love and peace. In the most common interpretation of the poem, Blake implies that a visit by Jesus would briefly create heaven in England, in contrast to the "dark Satanic Mills" of the Industrial Revolution. Blake's poem asks questions rather than asserting the historical truth of Christ's visit. Thus the poem merely implies that there may, or may not, have been a divine visit, when there was briefly heaven in England. William Blake (1757 – 1827) was a British poet, painter, visionary mystic, and engraver, who illustrated and printed his own books. Blake proclaimed the supremacy of the imagination over the rationalism and materialism of the 18th-century. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age.
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.
Blake's combination of verse and design invites interdisciplinary study. The essays in this collection approach his work from a variety of perspectives including masculinity, performance, plant biology, empire, politics and sexuality.
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.
