Author : Donald Ault
Publisher : Barrytown Limited
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 48,77 MB
Release : 1999-08
Category :
ISBN : 9781886449756
This first full-scale interpretation of Blake's most complex poetic prophecy, The Four Zoas, argues that the poem's famous difficulty is intrinsic to the poet's transformative narrative strategies. Already highly influential in Blake studies, Ault's book is a line-by-line guide to the poem and an inquiry into a core issue of contemporary poetics: how do altered processes of reading restructure consciousness?
Author : William Blake
Publisher : ReadHowYouWant.com
Page : 78 pages
File Size : 20,16 MB
Release : 2006
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 1425022766
Urizen rose from the bright Feast like a star thro' the evening sky Exulting at the voice that calld him from the Feast of envy First he beheld the body of Man pale, cold, the horrors of death Beneath his feet shot thro' him as he stood in the Human Brain And all its golden porches grew pale with his sickening light No more Exulting for he saw Eternal Death beneath Pale he beheld futurity; pale he beheld the Abyss.
Author : G. A. Rosso
Publisher : Bucknell University Press
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 32,71 MB
Release : 1993
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780838752401
"While William Blake's The Four Zoas may be fascinating to Blake scholars, it presents formidable obstacles to even the most ardent Romanticist, let alone interested critics or the general reader. Blake's Prophetic Workshop attempts to clear some of these obstacles by studying the work from a variety of critical perspectives. It assumes some familiarity with Blake's prophecies, but is cast between the introductory and advanced levels of the two previous books published on the poem." "Although the major reading strategy is close textual analysis, the poem is marked by various cultural and social contexts that need elucidation. Chapters alternate between sketching these contexts and traditions and providing detailed readings within these contexts. The first chapters give a reception history of the work and set it within the tradition of the eighteenth-century "long poem," namely Thomson's Seasons, Pope's An Essay on Man, and Young's Night Thoughts, texts that Blake critiques as Newtonian substitutions of Miltonic prophecy. Chapter three tests these assertions by reading the poem's creation narratives in terms of Anglican-Dissenting apologetics. The final chapters sift the cultural contexts that shape Blake's use of biblical typology and scrutinize several continental philosophies of history, and how they encroach on The Four Zoas, as well as situate the poem in the apocalyptic moment of the 1790s." "While a pluralist approach is followed, author George Anthony Rosso, Jr., subscribes to a fundamentally historical theory that places The Four Zoas in the broad and eclectic tradition of English poetic prophecy. Aware of recent critiques of "the prophetic," Rosso pursues his theory with flexibility and tolerance for other viewpoints." "An appendix provides a useful commentary on the relations between the text and certain designs, drawings, and sketches in the manuscript. Its aim is to show that Blake repeats key images in various frames to provide a sense of context and development, and that the drawings expose what the narrative represses, often in graphic sexual detail. Rosso presents a Blake who is both deadly serious and disarmingly ironic about the relevance of prophecy in the modern world."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author : Christine Gallant
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 22,20 MB
Release : 2015-03-08
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 1400869080
In all of his works Blake struggled with the question of how chaos can be assimilated into imaginative order. Blake's own answer changed in the course of his poetic career. Christine Gallant contends that during the ten year period of composition of Blake's first comprehensive epic, The Four Zoas, Blake's myth expanded from a closed, static system to an open, dynamic process. She further argues that it is only through attention to the changing pattern of Jungian archetypes in the poem that one can discern this profound change. Using the depth psychology of Jung, Professor Gallant presents a comprehensive interpretation of Blake's poetry from his early "Lambeth" prophecies to his mature works, The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem. She offers a Jungian critical approach that respects the work's autonomy, but still suggests how literature is an ongoing imaginative experience in which archetypal symbols affect their literary contexts. What interests the author is the function that the very process of mythmaking had for Blake. Professor Gallant finds that the metaphysical opposition between God and Satan in Blake's earlier work gradually evolves into an interplay of these powers in the later works. The quality of Chaos changes for Blake from something unknown and feared, contrary to Order, to something intimately known and embraced. Originally published in 1979. 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.
Author : Stuart Curran
Publisher : [Madison] : University of Wisconsin Press
Page : 446 pages
File Size : 20,71 MB
Release : 1973
Category : Poetry
ISBN :
William Blake seemed fully resigned to remain a prophet without honor in his own country. In presenting this collection of fourteen original essays, the editors hope to assist in altering our perspective of Blake and his work, by offering a multitude of interpretations from which we can construct a critical basis at once stable and varied. The essays are dominated by concerns, somewhat neglected in past Blake criticism, which find fullest expression in Blake's largest visionary and poetic structures. Particular attention focuses on Blake's form of epic-prophecy, on its traditions, its structure, aesthetics, and metaphysics. A related concern is the emphatic relationship Blake sought to establish with his audience, a question as old as art itself, but generally thought of minor import to the self-conscious, independent literature of the Romantic period. -- From publisher's description.
Author : Northrop Frye
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 489 pages
File Size : 37,53 MB
Release : 2013-04-04
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1400847478
This brilliant outline of Blake's thought and commentary on his poetry comes on the crest of the current interest in Blake, and carries us further towards an understanding of his work than any previous study. Here is a dear and complete solution to the riddles of the longer poems, the so-called "Prophecies," and a demonstration of Blake's insight that will amaze the modern reader. The first section of the book shows how Blake arrived at a theory of knowledge that was also, for him, a theory of religion, of human life and of art, and how this rigorously defined system of ideas found expression in the complicated but consistent symbolism of his poetry. The second and third parts, after indicating the relation of Blake to English literature and the intellectual atmosphere of his own time, explain the meaning of Blake's poems and the significance of their characters.
Author : Amanda Jo Goldstein
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 339 pages
File Size : 10,35 MB
Release : 2017-07-10
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 022645858X
Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information. But it was not always so. In Sweet Science, Amanda Jo Goldstein returns to the beginnings of the division of labor between literature and science to recover a tradition of Romantic life writing for which poetry was a privileged technique of empirical inquiry. Goldstein puts apparently literary projects, such as William Blake’s poetry of embryogenesis, Goethe’s journals On Morphology, and Percy Shelley’s “poetry of life,” back into conversation with the openly poetic life sciences of Erasmus Darwin, J. G. Herder, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Such poetic sciences, Goldstein argues, share in reviving Lucretius’s De rerum natura to advance a view of biological life as neither self-organized nor autonomous, but rather dependent on the collaborative and symbolic processes that give it viable and recognizable form. They summon De rerum natura for a logic of life resistant to the vitalist stress on self-authorizing power and to make a monumental case for poetry’s role in the perception and communication of empirical realities. The first dedicated study of this mortal and materialist dimension of Romantic biopoetics, Sweet Science opens a through-line between Enlightenment materialisms of nature and Marx’s coming historical materialism.
Author : C. Hobson
Publisher : Springer
Page : 267 pages
File Size : 18,33 MB
Release : 2016-04-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1137047054
Against the backdrop of Britain's underground 18th and early-19th century homosexual culture, mob persecutions, and executions of homosexuals, Hobson shows how Blake's hatred of sexual and religious hypocrisy and state repression, and his revolutionary social vision, led him gradually to accept homosexuality as an integral part of human sexuality. In the process, Blake rejected the antihomosexual bias of British radical tradition, revised his idealization of aggressive male heterosexuality and his male-centered view of gender, and refined his conception of the cooperative commonwealth.
Author : Leo Damrosch
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 377 pages
File Size : 35,19 MB
Release : 2015-10-28
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0300216297
William Blake, overlooked in his time, remains an enigmatic figure to contemporary readers despite his near canonical status. Out of a wounding sense of alienation and dividedness he created a profoundly original symbolic language, in which words and images unite in a unique interpretation of self and society. He was a counterculture prophet whose art still challenges us to think afresh about almost every aspect of experience—social, political, philosophical, religious, erotic, and aesthetic. He believed that we live in the midst of Eternity here and now, and that if we could open our consciousness to the fullness of being, it would be like experiencing a sunrise that never ends. Following Blake’s life from beginning to end, acclaimed biographer Leo Damrosch draws extensively on Blake’s poems, his paintings, and his etchings and engravings to offer this generously illustrated account of Blake the man and his vision of our world. The author’s goal is to inspire the reader with the passion he has for his subject, achieving the imaginative response that Blake himself sought to excite. The book is an invitation to understanding and enjoyment, an invitation to appreciate Blake’s imaginative world and, in so doing, to open the doors of our perception.
Author : Chris Bundock
Publisher : Manchester University Press
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 15,85 MB
Release : 2018-04-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1526121964
While overlooked by extant studies of the Gothic, William Blake’s literary and visual oeuvre embodies the same obsessions and fears that inform the Gothic revival with which he was contemporary.
