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William Blake in Context (Literature in Context)
by Sarah HaggartyWilliam 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.
William Blake in the Desolate Market
by G.E. Bentley JrExperience taught William Blake that "Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy." His brilliant achievements as a poet, painter, and engraver brought him public notice, but little income. William Blake in the Desolate Market records how Blake, the most original of all the major English poets, earned his living. G.E. Bentley Jr, the dean of Blake scholars, details the poet's occupations as a commercial engraver, print-seller, teacher, copperplate printer, painter, publisher, and vendor of his own books. In his early career as a commercial engraver, Blake was modestly prosperous, but thereafter his fortunes declined. For his most ambitious commercial designs, he made hundreds of folio designs and scores of engravings, but was paid scarcely more than twenty pounds for two or three years' work. His invention of illuminated printing lost money, and many of his greatest works, such as Jerusalem, were left unsold at his death. He came to believe that his "business is not to gather gold, but to make glorious shapes." William Blake in the Desolate Market is an investigation of Blake's labours to support himself by his arts. The changing prices of his works, his costs and receipts, as well as his patrons and employers are expertly gathered and displayed to show the material side of the artistic career in Britain's Romantic period.
William Blake Now: Why He Matters More Than Ever
by John Higgs'If a thing loves, it is infinite' William BlakeA short, impassioned argument for why the visionary artist William Blake is important in the twenty-first centuryThe 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.
William Blake vs the World
by John Higgs'A glittering stream of revelatory light . . . Fascinating' THE TIMES'Rich, complex and original' TOM HOLLAND'One of the best books on Blake I have ever read' DAVID KEENAN'Absolutely wonderful!' TERRY GILLIAM'An alchemical dream of a book' SALENA GODDEN'Tells us a great deal about all human imagination' ROBIN INCE***Poet, artist, visionary and author of the unofficial English national anthem 'Jerusalem', William Blake is an archetypal misunderstood genius. His life passed without recognition and he worked without reward, 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, and a rare inclusive symbol of English 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 wild detours into unfamiliar territory, John Higgs places the bewildering eccentricities of a most singular artist into 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.
William Blake’s Divine Love: Visions of Oothoon (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)
by Joshua Schouten de JelDespite the fact that William Blake summarises the plot of Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) in just eight lines in the prefatory ‘Argument,’ there are several contentious moments in the poem which continue to cause debate. Critics read Oothoon’s call to Theotormon’s eagles and her offer to catch girls of silver and gold as either evidence of her rape-damaged psyche or confirmation of her selfless love which transcends her socio-sexual state. How do we reconcile the attack of Theotormon’s eagles and the wanton play of the girls with Oothoon’s articulate and highly sophisticated expressions of spiritual truth and free love?In William Blake’s Divine Love: Visions of Oothoon, Joshua Schouten de Jel explores the hermeneutical possibilities of Oothoon’s self-annihilation and the epistemological potential of her visual copulation by establishing an artistic and hagiographical heritage which informs the pictorial representation and poetic pronunciation of Oothoon’s enlightened entelechy. Working with Michelangelo’s The Punishment of Tityus (1532) and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–51), Oothoon’s ecstatic figuration reflects two iconographic traditions which, framed by the linguistic tropes of divine love expressed within a female-centred mystagogy, reveal the soteriological significance of Oothoon’s willing self-sacrifice.
William Blake's Manuscripts: Praxis, Puzzles, and Palimpsests
by Mark Crosby Josephine A. McQuailThis collection of essays examines how close analysis of William Blake’s manuscripts can yield new discoveries about his techniques, his working habits, and his influences. With the introduction of facsimile editions and more particularly, the William Blake Archive, the largest digital repository of Blake materials online, scholars have been able to access Blake’s work in as close its original medium, leading to important insights into Blake’s creative process and mythopoetic system. Recent advancements in digital editing and reproduction has further increased interest in Blake’s manuscripts. This volume brings together both established Blake scholars, including G.E. Bentley Jnr’s final essay on Blake, and upcoming scholars whose research is at the intersection of digital humanities, critical theory, textual scholarship, queer theory, transgender studies, reception history, and bibliographical studies. The chapters seek to cover the breadth of Blake’s manuscripts: poetry, letters, notebook entries, and annotations. Together, these chapters offer an overview of the current state of research in Blake studies on manuscripts at a point when his manuscripts have become increasingly available in digital environments, and gesture to a possible future of Blake scholarship in general.
William Blake's Visions: Art, Hallucinations, Synaesthesia (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine)
by David WorrallThis book is an inquiry into whether what Blake called his ‘visions’ can be attributed to recognizable perceptual phenomena. The conditions identified include visual hallucinations (some derived from migraine aura), and auditory and visual hallucinations derived from several types of synaesthesia. Over a long period of time, Blake has been celebrated as a ‘visionary,’ yet his ‘visions’ have not been discussed. Worrall draws on an understanding of neuroscience to examine both Blake’s visual art and writings, and discusses the lack of evidence pointing towards psychosis or pathological ill-health, thus questioning the rumours pertaining to Blake’s insanity.
William Carlos Williams
by Charles DoyleThis set comprises of 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.
William Clark Russell and the Victorian Nautical Novel: Gender, Genre and the Marketplace (Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace #6)
by Andrew NashWilliam Clark Russell wrote more than forty nautical novels. Immensely popular in their time, his works were admired by contemporary writers, such as Conan Doyle, Stevenson and Meredith, while Swinburne, considered him 'the greatest master of the sea, living or dead'. Based on extensive archival research, Nash explores this remarkable career.
William Cobbett, Romanticism and the Enlightenment: Contexts and Legacy (The Enlightenment World #31)
by James GrandeCobbett was one of the greatest journalists of his day. Following a career in the British army he began writing as the loyalist 'Peter Porcupine' in the United States, defending all things British against the French Revolution and its supporters. This is the first collection on Cobbett and contains essays by scholars from a variety of disciplines.
William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England
by James GrandeWilliam Cobbett, the Press and Rural England offers a thorough re-appraisal of the work of William Cobbett (1763-1835), examining his pioneering journalism, identification with rural England and engagement with contemporary debates. It offers a new interpretation of Cobbett as a Burkean radical, whose work cuts across the 'revolution controversy' of the 1790s and combines Tom Paine's common sense and transatlantic radicalism with Edmund Burke's emphasis on tradition, patriotism and the domestic affections. To Hazlitt, Cobbett came to represent 'a kind of fourthestate in the politics of the country', becoming the virtual embodiment of both rural England and the campaign for parliamentary reform. This study draws on Cobbett's published writings and unpublished correspondence to show how he achieved this status. Individual chapters focus on his writings as Peter Porcupine, publication of parliamentary debates, imprisonment in Newgate, exile on Long Island, role in the Queen Caroline affair, Rural Rides, his prosecution after the Captain Swing riots and his wide-ranging legacies.
William Congreve: The Critical Heritage (Critical Heritage Ser.)
by Howard Erskine-Hill Alexander LindsayThe Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves.
William Cowper: The Task and Selected Other Poems
by James SambrookHaving previously suffered neglect as a result of Pope's dominance of the period, William Cowper (1731-1800) has now become a far more important figure in eighteenth-century literature. Following the successful format of the series, Professor Sambrook's edition consists of a comprehensive, contextual editor's introduction together with substantial annotation on the page. The Task (1785) is the principal text discussed together with a selection of Cowper's other poems which cover a wide range of his subjects, moods and styles.
William Davenant’s The Platonic Lovers (Routledge Revivals)
by Wendell W. BroomFirst published in 1987, this 23rd volume in the Renaissance Imagination series had the objective of establishing the text of William Davenant’s The Platonick Lovers that most closely represents the author’s final vision for his work. Wendell W. Broom Jr documents the history of the publication of The Platonick Lovers and the manner in which the present text was produced. Copies of all relevant editions have been collated and curated to bring together the definitive authorial version of the text.
William Dean Howells and the Ends of Realism (Studies in Major Literary Authors)
by Paul AbelnDespite efforts at revival by John Updike and others, William Dean Howells still remains in the shadows of his close friends Mark Twain and Henry James. This book works against decades of unfavorable comparisons with these literary giants. William Dean Howells and the Ends of Realism helps us to see him as a writer very much aware of his limitations and of his enormous importance in the development of an American literary tradition. A close look at his late works gives us a richer understanding of this powerful moment of transition in American literature, a moment when Howells and his venerable friends were inspiring and anointing a new generation of writers and taking a long, hard look at their own legacies and contributions.
William Empson: The Man and His Work (Routledge Library Editions: Literary Theory #14)
by Roma GillThis volume of commemorative and celebratory essays, first published in 1974, concentrates on William Empson – the critic, the poet and friend. The papers range from the biographical to the academic, but what every one suggests is the impossibility of separating the man from his work and the ‘life’ from the ‘thought’. This book constitutes an important study of Empson, his work and his impact upon people and literary studies of our time.
William Faulkner: An Annotated Bibliography Of Criticism Since 1988
by John BassettThis set comprises of 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.
William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond
by Cleanth BrooksIn this companion volume to William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country, Cleanth Brooks takes an in-depth look at Faulkner's early poetry and prose as well as his five non-Yoknapatawpha novels -- Soldiers Pay, Mosquitoes, Pylon, The Wild Palms, and A Fable. Brooks also offers relevant clarification of some of his earlier interpretations of Faulkner that have been challenged -- most notably in the case of Faulkner that have been challenged -- most notable in the case of Absalom, Absalom!, which he considers Faulkner's greatest novel. Recognizing that the creative and imaginative center of Faulkner's art is Yoknapatawpha County, Brooks examines the merits of each of the works set beyond these boundaries and explores how these writings complement Faulkner as an artist. He sheds light on the literary sources that influenced Faulkner's early work and the technical innovations and general themes Faulkner was to develop in his later writing. The notes and appendixes with which Brooks concludes Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond serve only to amplify this comprehensive study.
William Faulkner: A Life through Novels
by Foreword by Philip Weinstein. With the collaboration of Roger Little. Translated by Miriam Watchorn. André Bleikasten André BleikastenWriting to American poet Malcolm Cowley in 1949, William Faulkner expressed his wish to be known only through his books. He would go on to win the Nobel Prize for literature several months later, and when he died famous in 1962, his biographers immediately began to unveil and dissect the unhappy life of "the little man from Mississippi." Despite the many works published about Faulkner, his life and career, it still remains a mystery how a poet of minor symbolist poems rooted in the history of the Deep South became one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. Here, renowned critic André Bleikasten revisits Faulkner’s biography through the author’s literary imagination. Weaving together correspondence and archival research with the graceful literary analysis for which he is known, Bleikasten presents a multi-strand account of Faulkner’s life in writing. By carefully keeping both the biographical and imaginative lives in hand, Bleikasten teases out threads that carry the reader through the major events in Faulkner’s life, emphasizing those circumstances that mattered most to his writing: the weight of his multi-generational family history in the South; the formation of his oppositional temperament provoked by a resistance to Southern bourgeois propriety; his creative and sexual restlessness and uncertainty; his lifelong struggle with finances and alcohol; his paradoxical escape to the bondages of Hollywood; and his final bent toward self-destruction. This is the story of the man who wrote timeless works and lived in and through his novels.
William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words (20/21 #2)
by Richard GoddenIn William Faulkner, Richard Godden traces how the novelist's late fiction echoes the economic and racial traumas of the South's delayed modernization in the mid-twentieth century. As the New Deal rapidly accelerated the long-term shift from tenant farming to modern agriculture, many African Americans were driven from the land and forced to migrate north. At the same time, white landowners exchanged dependency on black labor for dependency on northern capital. Combining powerful close readings of The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses, and A Fable with an examination of southern economic history from the 1930s to the 1950s, Godden shows how the novels' literary complexities--from their narrative structures down to their smallest verbal emphases--reflect and refract the period's economic complexities. By demonstrating the interrelation of literary forms and economic systems, the book describes, in effect, the poetics of an economy. Original in the way it brings together close reading and historical context, William Faulkner offers innovative interpretations of late Faulkner and makes a unique contribution to the understanding of the relation between literature and history.
William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South (Wiley Blackwell Introductions to Literature #45)
by John T. MatthewsConsidered by many to be the most influential US novelist the world has known, William Faulkner's roots and his writing are planted in a single obscure county in the Deep South. A foremost international modernist, Faulkner's subjects and characters, ironically, are more readily associated with the history and sociology of the most backward state in the Union. He experimented endlessly with narrative structure, developing an unorthodox writing style. Yet his main goal was to reveal the truth of "the human heart in conflict with itself," ultimately defining human nature through the lens of his own Southern experience. This comprehensive account of Faulkner's literary career features an exploration of his novels and key short stories, including The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, and many more. Drawing on psychoanalytic, post-structuralist, feminist, and post-colonial theory, it offers an imaginative topography of Faulkner's efforts to reckon with his Southern past, to acknowledge its modernization, and to develop his own modernist method.
William Faulkner: Self-Presentation and Performance
by James G. WatsonIn his life and writings, William Faulkner continually created and "performed" selves. Even in letters, he often played a part--gentleman dandy, soldier, farmer--while in his fictions these and other personae are counterpoised against one another to create a world of controlled chaos, made in Faulkner's own protean image and reflective of his own multiple sense of self.<P><P>In this groundbreaking book, James Watson draws on the entire Faulkner canon, including letters and photographs, to decipher the complicated ways in which Faulkner put himself forth as the artist he felt himself to be through written performances and displays based on the life he actually lived and the ones he imagined living. The topics Watson treats include the overtly performative aspects of The Sound and the Fury, self-presentation and performance in private records of Faulkner's life, the ways in which his complicated marriage and his relationships to male mentors underlie his fictions' recurring motifs of marriages and fatherhood, Faulkner's readings of Melville, Hawthorne, and Thoreau and the problematics of authorial sovereignty, his artist-as-God creation of a fictional cosmos, and the epistolary relationships with women that lie in the correspondence behind Requiem for a Nun.
William Faulkner, American Writer: A Biography
by Frederick R. KarlFrom the book: "This book attempts to integrate the latest in biographical information with Faulkner's own large body of work in fiction and poetry. It will not replace Joseph Blotner's monumental two-volume biography of Faulkner, which is an altogether different kind of book. I have not attempted to duplicate the full range of details of Faulkner's life that Professor Blotner has so ably researched and presented; but I have used the materials of Faulkner's work as biographical data in ways Professor Blotner did not attempt or intend to do. By integrating life and work, I have tried to avoid a chronicle or linear life study, which in other circumstances has its own kind of value. This study is in the deepest sense a biography: not only a presentation of the relevant facts of the subject's life, but an effort to understand and interpret that life psychologically, emotionally, and literarily. It tries to put Faulkner together- if not entirely as an understandable man then as a man who may be understood as America's greatest novelist of the twentieth century."