The Evolution of Blake’s Myth

The Evolution of Blake’s Myth
Author: Sheila Spector
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2020-05-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351108417

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.

Wonders Divine

Wonders Divine
Author: Sheila A. Spector
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2001
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780838754689

Explores Blake's esoteric and religious influences

Blake, Myth, and Enlightenment

Blake, Myth, and Enlightenment
Author: David Fallon
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2017-01-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137390352

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.

Songs of Innocence

Songs of Innocence
Author: William Blake
Publisher:
Total Pages: 35
Release: 1789
Genre: Illumination of books and manuscripts
ISBN:

Glorious Incomprehensible

Glorious Incomprehensible
Author: Sheila A. Spector
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2001
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780838754696

Traces the evolution of hebraic etymologies and mystical grammars as indicators of a profound shift in Blake's subjective consciousness from the earliest prose tracts, worked on before 1790, to the last years of his life, when he was still completing 'Jerusalem'.

Translating Myth

Translating Myth
Author: Ben Pestell
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2016-05-20
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1134862490

Ever since Odysseus heard tales of his own exploits being retold among strangers, audiences and readers have been alive to the complications and questions arising from the translation of myth. How are myths taken and carried over into new languages, new civilizations, or new media? An international group of scholars is gathered in this volume to present diverse but connected case studies which address the artistic and political implications of the changing condition of myth – this most primal and malleable of forms. ‘Translation’ is treated broadly to encompass not only literary translation, but also the transfer of myth across cultures and epochs. In an age when the spiritual world is in crisis, Translating Myth constitutes a timely exploration of myth’s endurance, and represents a consolidation of the status of myth studies as a discipline in its own right.

Historicizing Blake

Historicizing Blake
Author: Steve Clark
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2015-12-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 134923477X

Historicizing Blake puts Blake back into the cultural context of his times. These new essays by both established and younger scholars re-address Blake's contemporary milieu after the neglect of ten years of post-structuralist, reader-orientated, methodology. By employing notions of history wider than the purely 'literary', and featuring an important new essay by the period's foremost subcultural historian, Iain McCalman, Historicizing Blake represents a significant contribution towards the re-historicizing of Romanticism.

A Guide to the Cosmology of William Blake

A Guide to the Cosmology of William Blake
Author: Kathryn S. Freeman
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2016-12-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 131718808X

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.

Spiritual History

Spiritual History
Author: Andrew Lincoln
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 1995
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780198183143

William Blake's The Four Zoas is one of the most challenging poems in the English language, and one of the most profound. It is also one of the least read of the major poetic narratives of the Romantic period. Spiritual History presents a much-needed introduction to the poem, but it will also be of great interest to those already familiar with it. The first full-length study to examine in detail Blake's numerous manuscript revisions of the poem, Spiritual History shows this much misunderstood poem to be the most extraordinary product of the eighteenth-century tradition of philosophical history.

Blake and the Failure of Prophecy

Blake and the Failure of Prophecy
Author: Lucy Cogan
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2021-05-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030676889

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.