Download or read book William Blake in a Newtonian World written by Stuart Peterfreund and published by . This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readers of William Blake have long known of his dislike of Bacon, Newton, & Locke-his "unholy trinity" of thinkers who, as much as anyone in England, have come to symbolize the Enlightenment. In William Blake in a Newtonian World, Stuart Peterfreund assesses Blake's relationship with various currents of the counter- Enlightenment, including religious radicalism, Freemasonry, & the growing political power of essentially self-educated radical artisans. After two decades in which cultural historians have demonstrated that Enlightenment thinkers brought to their scientific pursuits a fair amount of cultural baggage, that era no longer seems the unquestioned exaltation of logic & rationality over superstition that it once did. Moreover, the outlines of a counter-Enlightenment tradition have begun to emerge, a tradition attacking the proposition that observation can be value-free & criticizing the cultural subtexts of a science based on such reasoning. In this thought-provoking volume, Peterfreund examines Blake's struggle against Newtonianism & its discontents as played out in both his lyric & his prophetic poetry. VOLUME 2 OF THE OKLAHOMA PROJECT FOR DISCOURSE & THEORY, SERIES FOR SCIENCE & CULTURE. STUART PETERFREUND is Professor & Chair of English at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. From 1995 to 1997 he served as president of the Society for Literature & Science, & he has held fellowships in History of Science at MIT & Harvard. "William Blake in a Newtonian World is a major contribution to Blake studies & to the discussion of science & literature in the Romantic period."--DAVID STEWART, Department of English, West Virginia University.
Download or read book William Blake as Natural Philosopher 1788 1795 written by Joseph Fletcher and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Blake as Natural Philosopher, 1788-1795 takes seriously William Blake’s wish to be read as a natural philosopher, particularly in his early works, and illuminates 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 in his early works, which contend 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 his deepening engagement with late eighteenth-century vitalist life sciences, including studies of the asexual propagation of the marine polyp, marks his metaphysical turn. In contrast to the vast body of scholarship that emphasizes Blake’s early religious and political positions, William Blake as Natural Philosopher draws out the metaphysics underlying his commitments. In so doing, the book demonstrates that pantheism is important because it entails an ethics that respects the interconnected divinity of all material objects – not just humans – which in turn spurns hierarchical power structures. If everything is alive and essentially divine, Blake’s early work implies, then everything is worthy of respect and capable of giving and receiving infinite delight. Therefore, one should imaginatively and joyfully immerse oneself in the community of other beings in which one is already enmeshed. Often in the works discussed in this book, Blake offers negative examples to suggest his moral philosophy; he dramatizes the disastrous individual and social consequences of humans behaving as if God were a transcendent, immaterial, nonhuman demiurge, and as if they were separate from and ontologically superior to the degraded material universe that they see as composed of inert, lifeless atoms. William Blake as Natural Philosopher traces the evolution of eighteenth-century debates over the vitalist qualities of life and the nature of the soul both in the United Kingdom and on the continent, devoting significant attention to the natural philosophy of Newton, Locke, Berkeley, Leibniz, Buffon, La Mettrie, Hume, Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, and many others.
Download or read book William Blake s Religious Vision written by Jennifer Jesse and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-02-14 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 A Diunital Vision written by Ernest Timothy Boaten and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 710 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book William Blake vs the World written by John Higgs and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wild and unexpected journey through culture, science, philosophy and religion to better understand the mercurial genius of William Blake. Poet, artist, and visionary, William Blake is an archetypal misunderstood genius. His life passed without recognition and he worked without reward, often mocked, dismissed and misinterpreted. Yet from his ignoble end in a pauper's grave, Blake now occupies a unique position as an artist who unites and attracts people from all corners of society—a rare inclusive symbol of human identity. Blake famously experienced visions, and it is these that shaped his attitude to politics, sex, religion, society, and art. Thanks to the work of neuroscientists and psychologists, we are now in a better position to understand what was happening inside that remarkable mind and gain a deeper appreciation of his brilliance. His timeless work, we will find, has never been more relevant. In William Blake vs the World we return to a world of riots, revolutions, and radicals; discuss movements from the Levellers of the sixteenth century to the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s; and explore the latest discoveries in neurobiology, quantum physics, and comparative religion. Taking the reader on a wild adventure into unfamiliar territory, John Higgs places the bewildering eccentricities of a most singular artist into fascinating context. And although the journey begins with us trying to understand him, we will ultimately discover that it is Blake who helps us to understand ourselves.
Download or read book A Guide to the Cosmology of William Blake written by Kathryn S. Freeman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 248 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 and the Impossible History of the 1790s written by Saree Makdisi and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern scholars often find it difficult to account for the profound eccentricities in the work of William Blake, dismissing them as either ahistorical or simply meaningless. But with this pioneering study, Saree Makdisi develops a reliable and comprehensive framework for understanding these peculiarities. According to Makdisi, Blake's poetry and drawings should compel us to reconsider the history of the 1790s. Tracing for the first time the many links among economics, politics, and religion in his work, Makdisi shows how Blake questioned and even subverted the commercial, consumerist, and political liberties that his contemporaries championed, all while developing his own radical aesthetic.
Download or read book William Blake and the Moderns written by Robert J. Bertholf and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1983-06-30 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Bertholf and Annette Levitt have assembled thirteen essays that establish Blake as a "central voice molding modern literature and thought." The essays in this volume examine Blake's influence on modern poetry, the modern novel, and modern thought from various critical approaches. This collection maps out the lines of direct literary influences and indirect intellectual affinities that make up the tradition of enacted form. Through the use of various aspects of Blake's form and ideas, this book reasserts the idea of continuity, the drive for wholeness, and the arrival of new poetic forms. Blake is considered one of the major and most modern of Romantics. This collection positions him as a precursor of the modern, using his vision and poetry as a base for discussing a central issue in literary theory today—influence and the literary tradition—just how is the legacy of a literary artist passed on, and how is it resurrected in the works of subsequent generations.
Download or read book William Blake Vs the World written by John Higgs and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2022-05-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Fascinating' The Times 'Blakeian in its singularity' New Statesman 'A wonderful adventure' Irish Times 'Rich, complex and original' Tom Holland 'A crisp, ambitious and thoroughly contemporary introduction' Times Literary Supplement Poet, artist, visionary and author of the unofficial English national anthem 'Jerusalem', William Blake is an archetypal misunderstood genius. In this radical new biography, we return to a world of riots, revolutions and radicals, discuss movements from the Levellers of the sixteenth century to the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s, and explore the latest discoveries in neurobiology, quantum physics and comparative religion to look afresh at Blake's life and work - and, crucially, his mind. Taking the reader on wild detours into unfamiliar territory, John Higgs places the bewildering eccentricities of a most singular artist into context and shows us how Blake can help us better understand ourselves.
Download or read book Blake written by and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illustrated quarterly.
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 William Blake The Poems written by Nicholas Marsh and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-06-13 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Blake was ignored in his own time. Now, however, his Songs of Innocence and Experience and 'prophetic books' are widely admired and studied. The second edition of this successful introductory text: - Leads the reader into the Songs and 'prophetic books' via detailed analysis of individual poems and extracts, and now features additional insightful analyses - Provides useful sections on 'Methods of Analysis' and 'Suggested Work' to aid independent study - Offers expanded historical and cultural context, and an extended sample of critical views that includes discussion of the work of recent critics - Provides up-to-date suggestions for further reading William Blake: The Poems is ideal for students who are encountering the work of this major English poet for the first time. Nicholas Marsh encourages you to enjoy and explore the power and beauty of Blake's poems for yourself.
Download or read book William Blake on Self and Soul written by Laura Quinney and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-15 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Blake and Kierkegaard written by James Rovira and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2010-04-26 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study applies Kierkegaardian anxiety to Blake's creation myths to explain how Romantic era creation narratives are a reaction to Enlightenment models of personality.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Literature and Science written by Pamela Gossin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2002-08-30 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science and literature have always been strange bedfellows. Like puzzle pieces, they fit because they're different. Some of the greatest works of world literature have been inspired by the marvels of the scientific world. Scientists have written works of the imagination. Even formal scientific writings have been known to employ rhetoric. There is a tendency to think of literature—and the humanities in general—as having little to do with science. Yet scholars have conducted fruitful studies of the history and philosophy of science. With the rise of technology, scholars have also applied scientific analysis to the study of literature and the creative process. The intersection of scientific and humanistic inquiry is finally being mapped. This volume includes more than 650 A-Z entries on topics and themes in science and literature, significant writers, key scientists, seminal works, and important theories and methodologies. This reference defines the rapidly emerging interdisciplinary field of literature and science. An introductory essay traces the history of the field, its growing reputation, and the current state of research. Broad in scope, the volume covers world literature from its beginnings to the present day and illuminates the role of science in literature and literary studies. A wide range of experts contributed entries to this volume, each of which concludes with a brief bibliography. The entire volume closes with a list of works for further reading.
Download or read book The Work of the Sun written by T. Underwood and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-11 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the end of the Eighteenth century, British writers began to celebrate work in a strangely indirect way. Instead of describing diligence as an attribute of character, poets and novelists increasingly identified work with impersonal 'energies' akin to natural force. Chemists traced mental and muscular work back to its source in sunlight, giving rise to the claim (beloved by Nineteenth-century journalists) that 'all the labour done under the sun is really done by it'. The Work of The Sun traces the emergence of this model of work, exploring its sources in middle-class consciousness and its implications for British literature and science.
Download or read book Life written by Denise Gigante and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gigante offers a way to read ostensibly difficult poetry and reflects on the natural-philosophical idea of organic form and the discipline of literary studies.
