In a detailed examination of the ways in which Blake's use of biblical tradition gives form and meaning to his early prophetic books, Leslie Tannenbaum shows what Blake meant when he called the Bible the Great Code of Art." Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This book revives questions of religious and political authority in poetic prophecy. It argues that modern prophecy operates within a dynamic of continuity and estrangement that combines immanent and transcendent modes of representation, creating a poetry that revises the very tradition that authorizes it.

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.

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.

This collection of essays by an international team of New Testament scholars focuses on various kinds of christological claim, whether by the historical Jesus, in the Q tradition, John, Paul or the synoptics, and their connection with controversy and community.

This book examines Blake's work in the context of discourses of nation and empire, of the construction of a public sphere, and restores the longevity to his artistic career by placing emphasis on his work in the 1820s. Relevant contexts include technology, sentimentalism, Ireland and Catholic Emancipation, missionary prospectuses and body politics.

This book examines the difficult relationship between individual intellectual freedom and the legal structures which govern human societies in William Blake’s works, showing that this tension carries a political urgency that has not yet been recognised by scholars in the field. In doing so, it offers a new approach to Blake’s corpus that builds on the literary and cultural historical work of recent decades. Blake’s pronouncements about law may often sound biblical in tone; but this book argues that they directly address (and are informed by) eighteenth-century legal debates concerning the origin of the English common law, the autonomy of the judicature, the increasing legislative role of Parliament, and the emergence of the notions of constitutionalism and natural rights. Through a study of his illuminated books, manuscript works, notebook drafts and annotations, this study considers Blake’s understanding that law is both integral to humanity itself and a core component of its potential fulfilment of the ‘Human Form Divine’.

The Apocalypse of John is perhaps the most alluring and dangerous text in any scripture. This study looks at English responses to it in political pamphlets and scholarly exegesis, in poetry and preaching and visual art. Those who set out to find enduring meaning in the book failed. Yet in the post-Christian re-writings of Revelation by Shelley and Blake, John's own dynamic of unveiling comes to life, subverting the structures of power and reading built on the visions of Patmos.

"While William Blake's The Four Zoas may be fascinating to Blake scholars, it presents formidable obstacles to even the most ardent Romanticist, let alone interested critics or the general reader. Blake's Prophetic Workshop attempts to clear some of these obstacles by studying the work from a variety of critical perspectives. It assumes some familiarity with Blake's prophecies, but is cast between the introductory and advanced levels of the two previous books published on the poem." "Although the major reading strategy is close textual analysis, the poem is marked by various cultural and social contexts that need elucidation. Chapters alternate between sketching these contexts and traditions and providing detailed readings within these contexts. The first chapters give a reception history of the work and set it within the tradition of the eighteenth-century "long poem," namely Thomson's Seasons, Pope's An Essay on Man, and Young's Night Thoughts, texts that Blake critiques as Newtonian substitutions of Miltonic prophecy. Chapter three tests these assertions by reading the poem's creation narratives in terms of Anglican-Dissenting apologetics. The final chapters sift the cultural contexts that shape Blake's use of biblical typology and scrutinize several continental philosophies of history, and how they encroach on The Four Zoas, as well as situate the poem in the apocalyptic moment of the 1790s." "While a pluralist approach is followed, author George Anthony Rosso, Jr., subscribes to a fundamentally historical theory that places The Four Zoas in the broad and eclectic tradition of English poetic prophecy. Aware of recent critiques of "the prophetic," Rosso pursues his theory with flexibility and tolerance for other viewpoints." "An appendix provides a useful commentary on the relations between the text and certain designs, drawings, and sketches in the manuscript. Its aim is to show that Blake repeats key images in various frames to provide a sense of context and development, and that the drawings expose what the narrative represses, often in graphic sexual detail. Rosso presents a Blake who is both deadly serious and disarmingly ironic about the relevance of prophecy in the modern world."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

William Blake, overlooked in his time, remains an enigmatic figure to contemporary readers despite his near canonical status. Out of a wounding sense of alienation and dividedness he created a profoundly original symbolic language, in which words and images unite in a unique interpretation of self and society. He was a counterculture prophet whose art still challenges us to think afresh about almost every aspect of experience—social, political, philosophical, religious, erotic, and aesthetic. He believed that we live in the midst of Eternity here and now, and that if we could open our consciousness to the fullness of being, it would be like experiencing a sunrise that never ends. Following Blake’s life from beginning to end, acclaimed biographer Leo Damrosch draws extensively on Blake’s poems, his paintings, and his etchings and engravings to offer this generously illustrated account of Blake the man and his vision of our world. The author’s goal is to inspire the reader with the passion he has for his subject, achieving the imaginative response that Blake himself sought to excite. The book is an invitation to understanding and enjoyment, an invitation to appreciate Blake’s imaginative world and, in so doing, to open the doors of our perception.