Scholars have often drawn attention to William Blake's unusual sensitivity to his social context. In this book Nicholas Williams situates Blake's thought historically by showing how through the decades of a long and productive career Blake consistently responded to the ideas, writing, and art of contemporaries. Williams presents detailed readings of several of Blake's major poems alongside Rousseau's Emile, Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Paine's Rights of Man, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Robert Owen's Utopian Experiments. In so doing, he offers revealing new insights into key Blake texts and draws attention to their inclusion of notions of social determinism, theories of ideology-critique, and Utopian traditions. Williams argues that if we are truly to understand ideology as it relates to Blake, we must understand the practical situation in which the ideological Blake found himself. His study is a revealing commentary on the work of one of our most challenging poets.
| ISBN: | 9780521026840 |
| Publication date: | 2nd November 2006 |
| Author: | Nicholas M Indiana University Williams |
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 272 pages |
| Series: | Cambridge Studies in Romanticism |
| Genres: |
Literary studies: poetry and poets Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 |