Download or read book The Traveller in the Evening The Last Works of William Blake written by Morton D. Paley and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-11-08 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has never been a book about Blake's last period, from his meeting with John Linnell in 1818 to his death in 1827, although it includes some of his greatest works. In The Traveller in the Evening, Morton Paley argues that this late phase involves attitudes, themes, and ideas that are either distinctively new or different in emphasis from what preceded them. After an introduction on Blake and his milieu during this period, Paley begins with a chapter on Blake's illustrations to Thornton's edition of Virgil. Paley relates these to Blake's complex view of pastoral, before proceeding to a history of the project, its near-abortion, and its fulfillment as one of Blake's greatest accomplishments as an illustrator. In Yah and His Two Sons the presentation of the divine, except where it is associated with art, is ambiguous where it is not negative. Paley takes up this separate plate in the context of artists's representations of the Laocoon that would have been known to Blake, and also of what Blake would have known of its history from classical antiquity to his own time. Blake's Dante water colours and engravings are the most ambitious accomplishment of the last years of his life, and Paley shows that the problematic nature of some of these pictures, with Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car as a main example, arises from Blake's own divided and sharply polarized attitude toward Dante's Comedy. The closing chapter, called 'Blake's Bible', is on the Bible-related designs and writings of Blake's last years. Paley discusses The Death of Abel (addressed to Lord Byron 'in the Wilderness') as a response to its literary forerunners, especially Gessner's Death of Abel and Byron's Cain. For the Job engravings Paley shows how the border designs and the marginal texts set up a dialogue with the main illustrations unlike anything in Blake's Job water colours on the same subjects. Also included here are Blake's last pictorial work on a Biblical subject, The Genesis manuscript, and Blake's last writing on a Biblical text, his vitriolic comments on Thornton's translations of the Lord's Prayer.
Download or read book A Guide to the Cosmology of William Blake written by Kathryn S. Freeman and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book William Blake written by J. Beer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-08-02 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume on Blake follows the writer's life and combines biography and critical analysis. Covering Blake's early career, his major works and his work as a visual artist, this new study will be a must for all Blake scholars and enthusiasts. Recent discoveries concerning Blake's forebears and their religion make this new study additionally timely.
Download or read book William Blake Selected Poems written by William Blake and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'To see a World in a Grain of Sand 'And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour' William Blake wrote some of the most moving and memorable verse in the English language. Deeply committed to visionary and imaginative experience, yet also fiercely engaged with the turbulent politics of his era, he is now recognised as a major contributor to the Romantic Movement. This edition presents Blake's poems in their literary categories and genres to which they belong: his much-loved lyrics, ballads, comic and satirical verse, descriptive and discursive poems, verse epistles, and, finally, his remarkable 'prophetic' poems, including the whole of his two diffuse epics, Milton and Jerusalem. Blake's poetry is intellectually challenging as well as formally inventive, and this edition has a substantial critical introduction which places his ideas in the contemporary context of the Enlightenment and the artistic reaction against its key assumptions.
Download or read book William Blake s Poetry written by Jonathan Roberts and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2007-02-28 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reader's Guides provide a comprehensive starting point for any advanced student, giving an overview of the context, criticism and influence of key works. Each guide also offers students fresh critical insights and provides a practical introduction to close reading and to analysing literary language and form. They provide up-to-date, authoritative but accessible guides to the most commonly studied classic texts. William Blake is a Romantic poet who remains popular today, in part because his exceptional insight into psychological, political and social issues remains powerfully relevant. The Reader's Guide begins by introducing Blake's major themes including religious, political and social issues and then moves on to reading key works, including Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It offers an invaluable introduction to reading Blake's poetry and includes sections on its contexts, language and style, critical reception and adaptation and influence and finally an annotated guide to further reading.
Download or read book William Blake s Religious Vision written by Jennifer G. Jesse and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative study, Jesse challenges the prevailing view of Blake as an antinomian and describes him as a theological moderate who defended an evangelical faith akin to the Methodism of John Wesley. She arrives at this conclusion by contextualizing Blake's works not only within Methodism, but in relation to other religious groups he addressed in his art, including the Established Church, deism, and radical religions. Further, she analyzes his works by sorting out the theological "road signs" he directed to each audience. This approach reveals Blake engaging each faction through its most prized beliefs, manipulating its own doctrines through visual and verbal guide-posts designed to communicate specifically with that group. She argues that, once we collate Blake's messages to his intended audiences--sounding radical to the conservatives and conservative to the radicals--we find him advocating a system that would have been recognized by his contemporaries as Wesleyan in orientation. This thesis also relies on an accurate understanding of eighteenth-century Methodism: Jesse underscores the empirical rationalism pervading Wesley's theology, highlighting differences between Methodism as practiced and as publicly caricatured. Undergirding this project is Jesse's call for more rigorous attention to the dramatic character of Blake's works. She notes that scholars still typically use phrases like "Blake says" or "Blake believes," followed by some claim made by a Blakean character, without negotiating the complex narrative dynamics that might enable us to understand the rhetorical purposes of that statement, as heard by Blake's respective audiences. Jesse maintains we must expect to find reflections in Blake's works of all the theologies he engaged. The question is: what was he doing with them, and why? In order to divine what Blake meant to communicate, we must explore how those he targeted would have perceived his arguments. Jesse concludes that by analyzing the dramatic character of Blake's works theologically through this wide-angled, audience-oriented approach, we see him orchestrating a grand rapprochement of the extreme theologies of his day into a unified vision that integrates faith and reason.
Download or read book William Blake and the Visionary Law written by Matthew Mauger and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-10-15 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the difficult relationship between individual intellectual freedom and the legal structures which govern human societies in William Blake’s works, showing that this tension carries a political urgency that has not yet been recognised by scholars in the field. In doing so, it offers a new approach to Blake’s corpus that builds on the literary and cultural historical work of recent decades. Blake’s pronouncements about law may often sound biblical in tone; but this book argues that they directly address (and are informed by) eighteenth-century legal debates concerning the origin of the English common law, the autonomy of the judicature, the increasing legislative role of Parliament, and the emergence of the notions of constitutionalism and natural rights. Through a study of his illuminated books, manuscript works, notebook drafts and annotations, this study considers Blake’s understanding that law is both integral to humanity itself and a core component of its potential fulfilment of the ‘Human Form Divine’.
Download or read book Divine Images written by Jason Whittaker and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although relatively obscure during his lifetime, William Blake has become one of the most popular English artists and writers, through poems such as “The Tyger” and “Jerusalem,” and images including The Ancient of Days. Less well-known is Blake’s radical religious and political temperament and that his visionary art was created to express a personal mythology that sought to recreate an entirely new approach to philosophy and art. This book examines both Blake’s visual and poetic work over his long career, from early engravings and poems to his final illustrations to Dante and the Book of Job. Divine Images further explores Blake’s immense popular appeal and influence after his death, offering an inspirational look at a pioneering figure.
Download or read book The Evolution of Blake s Myth written by Sheila A. Spector and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-04 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Blake Nation and Empire written by D. Worrall and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-09-24 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Blake's work in the context of discourses of nation and empire, of the construction of a public sphere, and restores the longevity to his artistic career by placing emphasis on his work in the 1820s. Relevant contexts include technology, sentimentalism, Ireland and Catholic Emancipation, missionary prospectuses and body politics.
Download or read book Blake and the Failure of Prophecy written by Lucy Cogan and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-24 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph reorients discussion of Blake’s prophetic mode, revealing it to be not a system in any formal sense, but a dynamic, human response to an era of momentous historical change when the future Blake had foreseen and the reality he was faced with could not be reconciled. At every stage, Blake’s writing confronts the central problem of all politically minded literature: how texts can become action. Yet he presents us with no single or, indeed, conclusive answer to this question and in this sense it can be said that he fails. Blake, however, never stopped searching for a way that prophecy might be made to live up to its promise in the present. The twentieth-century hermeneuticist Paul Ricoeur shared with Blake a preoccupation with the relationship between time, text and action. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics thus provide a fresh theoretical framework through which to analyse Blake’s attempts to fulfil his prophetic purpose.
Download or read book Blake Myth and Enlightenment written by David Fallon and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-01-09 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides compelling new readings of William Blake’s poetry and art, including the first sustained account of his visionary paintings of Pitt and Nelson. It focuses on the recurrent motif of apotheosis, both as a figure of political authority to be demystified but also as an image of utopian possibility. It reevaluates Blake’s relationship to Enlightenment thought, myth, religion, and politics, from The French Revolution to Jerusalem and The Laocoön. The book combines careful attention to cultural and historical contexts with close readings of the texts and designs, providing an innovative account of Blake’s creative transformations of Enlightenment, classical, and Christian thought.
Download or read book The Romantic Poets written by Uttara Natarajan and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This welcome addition to the Blackwell Guides to Criticism series provides students with an invaluable survey of the critical reception of the Romantic poets. Guides readers through the wealth of critical material available on the Romantic poets and directs them to the most influential readings Presents key critical texts on each of the major Romantic poets – Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats – as well as on poets of more marginal canonical standing Cross-referencing between the different sections highlights continuities and counterpoints
Download or read book A Blake Dictionary written by S. Foster Damon and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2013-05-14 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Blake, poet, artist, and mystic, created a vast multidimensional universe through his verse and art. Spun from a fabric of symbolism and populated by a host of complex characters, BlakeÕs comprehensive world has provided endless inspiration to subsequent generations. For the reader of Blake, background knowledge of his symbolism is a necessity. In this volume, first published in 1965, S. Foster Damon, father of modern Blake studies and a professor at Brown University until his death, has assembled all references to particular symbols or aspects of BlakeÕs work and life, so that readers can see the entire spectrum of BlakeÕs thought on a variety of topics.
Download or read book Blake 2 0 written by Steve Clark and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-01-24 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blake said of his works, 'Tho' I call them Mine I know they are not Mine'. So who owns Blake? Blake has always been more than words on a page. This volume takes Blake 2.0 as an interactive concept, examining digital dissemination of his works and reinvention by artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers across a variety of twentieth-century media.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of English Poetry written by Michael O'Neill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-29 with total page 1117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literary-historical account of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon writings to the present.
Download or read book Job 38 42 written by David J. A. Clines and published by Thomas Nelson. This book was released on 2011-11-21 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complete the Old Testament series of the Word Biblical Commentary with Dr. David Clines’ monumental study of Job. Volume 18B is devoted entirely to the response of the Lord from the tempest to Job, together with the replies of Job (Job 38–42), presenting the Lord's own explanation of his manifold purposes in creation and bringing to an unexpected conclusion Job's dramatic quest for justice. Difficult portions of the Hebrew text are thoroughly handled, but the commentary is written for the non-technical reader and scholar alike. Clines uncovers the driving force of the argument and the drama of the book. The Explanation sections at the end of each chapter brilliantly summarize the views of the speakers and offer thoughtful reflections on their theological value. The volume concludes with a unique 250-page bibliography of virtually everything that has been written about the Book of Job, including its influence on art, music and literature. Features include: Complete new translation and verse by verse commentary on the Book of Job, in constant dialogue with other commentators Extensive scholarly notes on the Hebrew text of the book and its many obscure terms Unparalleled bibliography gives sweeping coverage of all aspects of the Book of Job from scholarly books to art, literature, and music
