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Reading William Blake PDF

224 Pages·1992·21.575 MB·English
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Reading William Blake Stephen C. Behrendt READING WILLIAM BLAKE Also by Stephen C. Behrendt HISTORY AND MYTH: ESSAYS ON ENGLISH ROMANTIC LITERATURE (editor) THE MOMENT OF EXPLOSION: BLAKE AND THE ILLUSTRATION OF MILTON SHELLEY AND HIS AUDIENCES P.B. SHELLEY, ZASTROZZI AND ST. IRVYNE (editor) APPROACHES TO TE AC HING SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN (editor) Reading William Blake STEPHEN C. BEHRENDT Professor of English University of Nebraska, Lincolrz M MACMILLAN © Stephen C. Behrendt 1992 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1992978-0-333-52484-8 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or und er the terrns of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1 P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and dvil claims for damages. First published 1992 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LT D Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world Edited and typeset by Grahame & Grahame Editorial Brighton British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Behrendt, Stephen Reading William Blake I. Title 821 ISBN 978-1-349-38959-9 ISBN 978-0-230-38016-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230380165 for Joseph Wittreich This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface viii List of Plates x Key to Abbreviations xi A Note on Copies xii 1 Introduction: Reading Blake's Texts 1 The Illuminated Page 12 An Example: Five Plates from America 25 2 Songs of Innocence and of Experience 36 The Songs in Context 42 The Songs and the Reader 51 3 Three Early IIIuminated Works 73 The Book of Thel 74 Visions of the Daughters of Albion 84 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 93 4 Lambeth Prophecies I: History of the World 101 Reconstituting History 105 Metamorphosis and Encyclopedic AIIusion 113 5 Lambeth Prophecies II: History of the Universe 125 Inversion, Reversal, and the Ways of Seeing 126 Myth, Metamorphosis and the Nature of Reality 143 6 Epic Art: Milton and Jerusalem 152 Milton and Epic Art 153 Jerusalem and the Eternal Community 165 Notes 174 Index 191 VB Preface This book explores the dynamics of the reading process involved in reading William Blake's illuminated poems. Those poems include on the same pages verbal texts and visual texts that often seem to be at odds with one another or even, at times, to be entirely unrelated. Because reading verbal texts and visual texts involves different aesthtic assumptions and operations, the texts of Blake's iIluminated pages simultaneously make different demands on their readers, which further complicates the reading activity. I have not attempted here to offer a comprehensive reading of Blake's poetry. Rather, I have explored some of the demands that Blake's illuminated texts place upon us as part of the process of reading and comprehension. I have tried to outline some of the ways in which the intellectual and imaginative transaction proceeds between author and reader via the medium of the iIIurninated text as physical artifact. That text comprises a fertile intersection among frequently differing <and in no case identical) systems of reference applied to the text by author and readers, each of whom brings to the reading activity different degrees of cultural conditioning. I wish to thank the University of Nebraska Research Council for funding that enabled me to conduct research at some of the most important Blake collections, as weIl as for the summer fellow ship that enabled me to devote the summer of 1990 to the final stages of this study. I thank, too, the National Endowmnent for the Humanities for a Travel Grant that facilitated my return to England to conduct additional research as the project neared its conclusion. I am grateful for the advice and assistance I have received at numerous institutions whose Blake collections have figured in my research for this book. Arnong these, I extend special thanks to the staffs 01 the Tate Gallery (and to Martin Butlin especially), the Fitzwilliam Museum (and Jane Munro), the British Museum, the Library of Congress and the Huntington Library. To those colleagues and friends who graciously read and com mented on parts of the manuscript, and especially to Marcia Pointon, I extend my thanks as weil. To Patricia FIanagan Behrendt I owe a particular debt of gratitude, both for her insightful readings of the viii Preface ix manuscript in its various stages and for her unfailing support and enthusiasm. Studying with Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., at the University of Wisconsin some twenty years ago, I came to what is proving to be a life-Iong interest in Blake and in the lively and complex milieu of his times. To this superbly gifted scholar, stimulating colleague and good friend, I dedicate this book. STEPHEN C. BEHRENDT

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