Synopses & Reviews
Considers Blake's poetry in the light of ideology critique and the traditions of Utopian thought.
Review
"His discussion of Blake and gender, his comparison of the Blakean view of history to Burkean historiography, and his placing of Blake's apocalyptic works and his Jerusalem in critical juxtaposition to The Rights of Man and to Robert Owens's experiments in early socialism allow us to read Blake in a context that is all too often ignored in Blake studies." Joseph W. Childers
Synopsis
Nicholas Williams shows how, through the decades of a long and productive career, Blake consistently responded to the ideas, writing and art of contemporaries, including Rousseau, Paine, Wollstonecraft, and Robert Owen. In a series of detailed comparative readings Williams offers new insights into key Blake texts, and draws attention to their inclusion of notions of social determinism, theories of ideology critique, and Utopian traditions. His study is a revealing and accessible commentary on the work of one of our most challenging poets.
Table of Contents
List of figures; Preface; Acknowledgements; Note on the text and list of abbreviations; 1. Blake, ideology and utopia: strategies for change; 2. The ideology of instruction in Emile and Songs of Innocence and of Experience; 3. The discourse of women's liberation in Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Europe and Visions of the Daughters of Albion; 4. Edmund Burke and models of history in America, The Song of Los and The Four Zoas; 5. The utopian moment in Rights of Man and Milton; 6. The utopian city and the public sphere in Robert Owen and Jerusalem; 7. Conclusion: the function of utopianism at the present time; Notes; Index.