Since the Romantic period, the critical thinker's enthusiasm has served to substantiate his or her agency in the world. Blake’s Agitation is a thorough and engaging reflection on the dynamic, forward-moving, and active nature of critical thought. Steven Goldsmith investigates the modern notion that there’s a fiery feeling in critical thought, a form of emotion that gives authentic criticism the potential to go beyond interpreting the world. By arousing this critical excitement in readers and practitioners, theoretical writing has the power to alter the course of history, even when the only evidence of its impact is the emotion it arouses. Goldsmith identifies William Blake as a paradigmatic example of a socially critical writer who is moved by enthusiasm and whose work, in turn, inspires enthusiasm in his readers. He traces the particular feeling of engaged, dynamic urgency that characterizes criticism as a mode of action in Blake’s own work, in Blake scholarship, and in recent theoretical writings that identify the heightened affect of critical thought with the potential for genuine historical change. Within each of these horizons, the critical thinker’s enthusiasm serves to substantiate his or her agency in the world, supplying immediate, embodied evidence that criticism is not one thought-form among many but an action of consequence, accessing or even enabling the conditions of new possibility necessary for historical transformation to occur. The resulting picture of the emotional agency of criticism opens up a new angle on Blake’s literary and visual legacy and offers a vivid interrogation of the practical potential of theoretical discourse.

William Blake: Modernity and Disaster explores the work of the Romantic writer, artist, and visionary William Blake as a profoundly creative response to cultural, scientific, and political revolution. In the wake of such anxieties of discovery, including the revolution in the life sciences, Blake’s imagination – often prophetic, apocalyptic, and deconstructive – offers an inside view of such tumultuous and catastrophic change. A hybrid of text and image, Blake’s writings and illuminations offer a disturbing and productive exception to accepted aesthetic, social, and political norms. Accordingly, the essays in this volume, reflecting Blake’s unorthodox perspective, challenge past and present critical approaches in order to explore his oeuvre from multiple perspectives: literary studies, critical theory, intellectual history, science, art history, philosophy, visual culture, and psychoanalysis. Covering the full range of Blake’s output from the shorter prophecies to his final poems, the essays in William Blake: Modernity and Disaster predict the discontents of modernity by reading Blake as a prophetic figure alert to the ends of history. His legacy thus provides a lesson in thinking and living through the present in order to ask what it might mean to envision a different future, or any future at all.

Before etching Jerusalem William Blake wrote about creating 'the grandest poem that this world contains.' Blake's avowed intention in constructing the work was to move readers from a solely rational way of being (called Ulro) to one that is highly imaginative (called Eden/Eternity), with each word chosen to suit 'the mouth of a true Orator.' Rational interpretation is of limited use when reading this multifaceted epic and its non-linear structure presents a perennial challenge for readers. Susanne Sklar engages with the interpretive challenges of Jerusalem by considering it as a piece of visionary theatre —an imaginative performance in which characters, settings, and imagery are not confined by mundane space and time— allowing readers to find coherence within its complexities. With his characters, Blake's readers can participate imaginatively in what Blake calls 'the Divine Body, the Saviour's Kingdom,' a way of being in which all things interconnect: spiritually, ecologically, socially, and erotically. Imaginatively engaging with Jerusalem involves close textual reading and analysis. The first part of this book discusses the notion of visionary theatre, and the theological, literary, and historical antecedents of Jerusalem's imagery, characters, and settings. Particular attention is paid to the theological context of Blake's Jesus ('the Divine Body'), and Jerusalem, the heroine of his poem. This prepares the ground for a scene-by-scene commentary of the entire illuminated work. Jerusalem tells the story of Albion's fall, many rescue attempts, escalating violence and oppression, and a surprising apocalypse —in which all living things, awakening, are transfigured in ferocious forgiveness.

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.

Introduction: "sweet science" -- Blake's mundane egg: epigenesis and milieux -- Equivocal life: Goethe's journals on morphology -- Tender semiosis: reading Goethe with Lucretius and Paul de Man -- Growing old together: Lucretian materialism in Shelley's The triumph of life -- A natural history of violence: allegory and atomism in Shelley's The mask of anarchy -- Coda: old materialism, or romantic Marx