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 The Cambridge Companion to William Blake written by Morris Eaves and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-23 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poet, painter, and engraver William Blake died in 1827 in obscure poverty with few admirers. The attention paid today to his remarkable poems, prints, and paintings would have astonished his contemporaries. Admired for his defiant, uncompromising creativity, he has become one of the most anthologized and studied writers in English and one of the most studied and collected British artists. His urge to cast words and images into masterpieces of revelation has left us with complex, forceful, extravagant, some times bizarre works of written and visual art that rank among the greatest challenges to plain understanding ever created. This Companion aims to provide guidance to Blake s work in fresh and readable introductions: biographical, literary, art historical, political, religious, and bibliographical. Together with a chronology, guides to further reading, and glossary of terms, they identify the key points of departure into Blake s multifarious world and work.
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 Why Mrs Blake Cried written by Marsha Keith Schuchard and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-05-31 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much has been written about the work of William Blake and some of the religious beliefs that influenced him, but there is a secret history which, until now, has been kept deep beneath the surface in the mystical underground of England in the eighteenth-century. Here, leading Blake scholar Marsha Keith Schuchard reveals an altogether more intriguing and controversial picture of the poet and artist. The discovery of Blake family documents took Schuchard on a journey of detection that led her to a cast of radical characters including Cagliostro, Zinzendorf and the mystic Swedenborg, and to a world of waking visions, sexual-spiritual experimentation, kabbalistic magic, tantric sex and free love. Why Mrs Blake Cried offers a new insight into the work of Blake and takes us on an extraordinary journey through secret societies and ancient rituals.
Download or read book The New Apocalypse written by Thomas J. J. Altizer and published by The Davies Group, Publishers. This book was released on 2000-01 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is the thesis of The New Apocalypse that William Blake is the most original prophet & seer in the history of Christendom, & that an understanding of his revolutionary work demands a new form of theological thinking. Unlike the epic poetry of Dante & Milton, Blake's prophetic poetry both transcends & negates its roots in the Christian tradition: it unveils a Jesus who is the totality of both God & man, & envisions a cosmic history reflecting a movement from Fall to Apocalypse. This study is an attempt to enter the world of Blake's vision, to appropriate from that vision a theological form that will be relevant to our world & to do so on the basis of dialectical understanding of theology. Hegel is chosen as a guide to the dialectical ground & meaning of Blake's vision in the belief that Hegel's dialectical "system" is a far more effective guide to Blake's vsionary world than are the traditional forms of Christian theology & mysticism. Thomas J. J. Altizer is a native of Charleston, West Virginia. He took his PhD at the University of Chicago & is presently Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, The State University of New York at Stony Brook. Altizer can be characterized as the most radical theologian of our age, the only theologian who has constructed a full & comprehensive radical theology.
Download or read book The Book of Job written by and published by Paddington Press, Limited. This book was released on 1976 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a new introduction by Michael Marqusee.
Download or read book Poetical Sketches written by William Blake and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 1783 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Life of William Blake written by Alexander Gilchrist and published by . This book was released on 1907 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book William Blake in Context written by Sarah Haggarty and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Blake, poet and artist, is a figure often understood to have 'created his own system'. Combining close readings and detailed analysis of a range of Blake's work, from lyrical songs to later myth, from writing to visual art, this collection of thirty-eight lively and authoritative essays examines what Blake had in common with his contemporaries, the writers who influenced him, and those he influenced in turn. Chapters from an international team of leading scholars also attend to his wider contexts: material, formal, cultural, and historical, to enrich our understanding of, and engagement with, Blake's work. Accessibly written, incisive, and informed by original research, William Blake in Context enables readers to appreciate Blake anew, from both within and outside of his own idiom.
Download or read book William Blake s Gothic imagination written by Chris Bundock and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-12 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Illustrations of the Book of Job written by William Blake and published by . This book was released on 1906 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Eternity s Sunrise written by Leo Damrosch and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-28 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Book of Urizen written by William Blake and published by . This book was released on 1958 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sacred Modes of Being in a Postsecular World written by Andrew W. Hass and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-09-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we talk meaningfully about the sacred in contexts where conventional religious expression has so often lost its power? Inspired by the influential work of David Jasper, this important volume builds on his thinking to identify sacrality in a world where the old religious and secular debates have exhausted themselves and theology struggles for a new language in their wake. Distinguished writers explore here the idea of the sacred as one that exists, paradoxically, in a space that is both possible and impossible: profoundly theological on the one hand, but also deeply this-worldly and irreligious on the other. This is a sacredness that is simultaneously 'present' and 'absent': one which encompasses - as Jasper himself characterises it - 'the impossible possibility of an absolute vision'. The book teaches us that the sacred assumes a renewed potency when fully engaged with the creativity that happens across religion, literature, philosophy and the arts.
Download or read book William Blake Now written by John Higgs and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2019-09-05 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'If a thing loves, it is infinite' William Blake A short, impassioned argument for why the visionary artist William Blake is important in the twenty-first century The visionary poet and painter William Blake is a constant presence throughout contemporary culture - from videogames to novels, from sporting events to political rallies and from horror films to designer fashion. Although he died nearly 200 years ago, something about his work continues to haunt the twenty-first century. What is it about Blake that has so endured? In this illuminating essay, John Higgs takes us on a whirlwind tour to prove that far from being the mere New Age counterculture figure that many assume him to be, Blake is now more relevant than ever.
Download or read book The Visionary Art of William Blake written by Naomi Billingsley and published by T&T Clark. This book was released on 2021-01-21 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. In drawing upon contemporaneous religious writings and artistic representations of similar subjects, this book presents an historically grounded account of Blake's oeuvre. It offers new interpretations of his individual works while also identifying textual and pictorial sources that previously have been overlooked. It will have strong interdisciplinary appeal: to intellectual historians; scholars and students of religion and literature; art historians; and all those interested in the vivid figural articulation of a uniquely English theological radicalism.
Download or read book The Personal Heresy written by C. S. Lewis and published by HarperOne. This book was released on 2017-02-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A repackaged edition of the revered author’s set of dueling critical essays with fellow scholar E. M. W. Tillyard in which they debate the role of an author’s biography in the critical appraisal of literature. C. S. Lewis—the great British writer, scholar, lay theologian, broadcaster, Christian apologist, and bestselling author of Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Chronicles of Narnia, and many other beloved classics—challenges fellow scholar E. M. W. Tillyard on one of the most intriguing questions involving writers and writing. Is a work of imaginative literature primarily influenced by the author or by the subject matter? Lewis argues that the author’s own personality and biography has little to no impact on the writing, while Tillyard contends the opposite: that the author’s own imagination and story have an indelible influence on a piece of work. Clever, erudite, and enlightening, their debate may not definitively settle the issue, but it does offer invaluable insight and intellectual delight for all dedicated readers.
