William Blake's Selfhood and the Atomistic Materialism of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura
Author : Joshua Schouten de Jel
Publisher :
Page : pages
File Size : 46,29 MB
Release : 2021
Category :
ISBN :
Author : Joshua Schouten de Jel
Publisher :
Page : pages
File Size : 46,29 MB
Release : 2021
Category :
ISBN :
Author : Joshua Schouten de Jel
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 26,56 MB
Release : 2021-11-23
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 3030888886
This book demonstrates the way in which William Blake aligned his idiosyncratic concept of the Selfhood – the lens through which the despiritualised subject beholds the material world – with the atomistic materialism of the Epicurean school as it was transmitted through the first-century BC Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. By addressing this philosophical debt, this study sets out a threefold re-evaluation of Blake’s work: to clarify the classical stream of Blake’s philosophical heritage through Lucretius; to return Blake to his historical moment, a thirty-year period from 1790 to 1820 which has been described as the second Lucretian moment in England; and to employ a new exegetical model for understanding the phenomenological parameters and epistemological frameworks of Blake’s mythopoeia. Accordingly, it is revealed that Blake was not only aware of classical atomistic cosmogony and sense-based epistemology but that he systematically mapped postlapsarian existence onto an Epicurean framework.
Author : Joshua Schouten de Jel
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 36,59 MB
Release : 2024-03-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1040003656
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.
Author : Laura Quinney
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 48,67 MB
Release : 2010-05-15
Category :
ISBN : 0674054466
It has been clear from the beginning that William Blake was both a political radical and a radical psychologist, and in William Blake on Self and Soul Laura Quinney uses her sensitive, surprising readings of the poet to reveal his innovative ideas about the experience of subjectivity.
Author : Joshua Schouten de Jel
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 28,72 MB
Release : 2024
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781032706306
"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 as 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"
Author : Joseph Fletcher
Publisher : Anthem Press
Page : 295 pages
File Size : 41,60 MB
Release : 2021-12-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 178527953X
William Blake as Natural Philosopher, 1788-1795 takes seriously William Blake’s wish to be read as a natural philosopher, particularly in his early illuminated works, and reveals the way that poetry and visual art were for Blake an imaginative way of philosophizing. Blake’s poetry and designs reveal a consistent preoccupation with eighteenth-century natural philosophical debates concerning the properties of the physical world, the nature of the soul, and God’s relationship to the material universe. This book traces the history of these debates and examines images and ideas in Blake’s illuminated books that mark the development of the monist pantheism, which contends that every material thing is in its essence God, to the idealism of his later period, which casts the natural world as degenerate and illusory. The book argues that Blake’s philosophical thought was not as monolithic as has been previously characterized, and that pantheism is important to understanding his early works because it entails an ethics that respects the interconnected divinity of all material objects – not just humans – which in turn spurns hierarchical power structures.
Author : Kathleen Raine
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 189 pages
File Size : 28,76 MB
Release : 2013-09-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1136663959
First published in 1979, this is a very welcome reissue of Kathleen Raine's seminal study of William Blake - England’s only prophet. He challenged with extraordinary vigour the premises which now underline much of Western civilization, hitting hard at the ideas of a naive materialist philosophy which, even in his own day, was already eating at the roots of English national life. In his insistence that ‘mental things are alone real’, Blake was ahead of his time. Materialist views are now challenged from various quarters; the depth psychologies of Freud and Jung, the study of Far Easter religion and philosophy, the reappraisal of myth and folk lore, the wealth of psychical research have all prepared the way for an understanding of Blake’s thought. We are ready to acknowledge that in attacking ‘the sickness of Albion’ Blake penetrated to the inner worlds of man and explored them in a way that is quite unique. Dr Raine, who has made a long study of Blake’s sources, presents him as a lonely powerful genius who stands within the spiritual tradition of Sophia Perennis, ‘the Everlasting Gospel’. From the standpoint of this great human Norm, our immediate past described by W.B. Yeats as ‘the three provincial centuries’, is a tragic deviation; catastrophic, as Blake believed, in its spiritual and material consequences. Only now do we possess the necessary knowledge to understand William Blake and the ever-growing number of people who turn to him surely justifies his faith in the eternal truths he strove to communicate.
Author : Titus Lucretius Carus
Publisher : Barnes & Noble
Page : 223 pages
File Size : 14,83 MB
Release : 2005-01-01
Category : Didactic poetry, Latin
ISBN : 9780760768341
A Roman poet and philosopher of the first century, Lucretius sought to dispel what he considered the chief cause of unhappiness: fear of death and fear of the wrath of the gods. His great didactic poem in six parts, "De Rerum Natura" (On the Nature of Things), theorizes that natural causes are the forces behind earthly phenomena and dismisses the concept of divine intervention. Derived from the philosophical materialism of the Greeks, Lucretius' work remains the primary source for contemporary knowledge of Epicurean thought. A staple of introductory philosophy courses, this volume is also a masterpiece of Latin verse. Translation by W. E. Leonard.
Author : Lucretius
Publisher : CreateSpace
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 43,12 MB
Release : 2015-04-24
Category :
ISBN : 9781511865593
"Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another's great tribulation; not because any man's troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive you are free of them yourself is pleasant." On The Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura) stands with Virgil's Aeneid as one of the vital and enduring achievements of Latin literature. Lost for more than a thousand years, its return to circulation in 1417 reintroduced subversive ideas about the nature and meaning of existence and helped shape the modern world.
Author : Norman Nathan
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 164 pages
File Size : 23,56 MB
Release : 2015-07-24
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 3111400255