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.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The English lawyer Henry Crabb Robinson met the English painter and printmaker William Blake at a dinner party in London in 1825. Over the course of the evening, he became fascinated by Blake’s casual conversation about his relationship with the spirit world. #2 Robinson was initially confused by Blake, but he couldn’t bring himself to dismiss him as a simple madman. He felt there was something important and vital about his worldview, even if it was frustratingly obscure. #3 The story of the clash between the world and William Blake seems straightforward. Blake had lacked the ability to respond to the pressures and challenges of contemporary life and society, and as a result, he spent his life impoverished and misunderstood. #4 In 2018, people went to the grave of William Blake to pay their respects to his memory. The Blake Society had raised money for a flat piece of Portland stone, carved by the stonecutter Lida Cardozo Kindersley, which was set into the grass.

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.

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.

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.

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.