Blake, Myth, and Enlightenment (eBook)

This book provides compelling new readings of William Blake's poetry and art, including the first sustained account of his visionary paintings of Pitt and Nelson. It focuses on the recurrent motif of apotheosis, both as a figure of political authority to be demystified but also as an image of utopian possibility. It reevaluates Blake's relationship to Enlightenment thought, myth, religion, and politics, from The French Revolution to Jerusalem and The Laocoön. The book combines careful attention to cultural and historical contexts with close readings of the texts and designs, providing an innovative account of Blake's creative transformations of Enlightenment, classical, and Christian thought.

David Fallon is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sunderland, UK. From 2009-12 he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford. He has published on Blake and on eighteenth-century and Romantic-period booksellers, and co-edited Romanticism and Revolution: A Reader (2011) with Jon Mee. 

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This book provides compelling new readings of William Blake's poetry and art, including the first sustained account of his visionary paintings of Pitt and Nelson. It focuses on the recurrent motif of apotheosis, both as a figure of political authority to be demystified but also as an image of utopian possibility. It reevaluates Blake's relationship to Enlightenment thought, myth, religion, and politics, from The French Revolution to Jerusalem and The Laocoon. The book combines careful attention to cultural and historical contexts with close readings of the texts and designs, providing an innovative account of Blake's creative transformations of Enlightenment, classical, and Christian thought.