William Blake's Religious Vision

William Blake's Religious Vision
Author: Jennifer Jesse
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2013-02-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0739177915

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In this innovative study, Jesse challenges the prevailing view of Blake as an antinomian and describes him as a theological moderate who defended an evangelical faith akin to the Methodism of John Wesley. She arrives at this conclusion by contextualizing Blake’s works not only within Methodism, but in relation to other religious groups he addressed in his art, including the Established Church, deism, and radical religions. Further, she analyzes his works by sorting out the theological “road signs” he directed to each audience. This approach reveals Blake engaging each faction through its most prized beliefs, manipulating its own doctrines through visual and verbal guide-posts designed to communicate specifically with that group. She argues that, once we collate Blake’s messages to his intended audiences—sounding radical to the conservatives and conservative to the radicals—we find him advocating a system that would have been recognized by his contemporaries as Wesleyan in orientation. This thesis also relies on an accurate understanding of eighteenth-century Methodism: Jesse underscores the empirical rationalism pervading Wesley’s theology, highlighting differences between Methodism as practiced and as publicly caricatured. Undergirding this project is Jesse’s call for more rigorous attention to the dramatic character of Blake’s works. She notes that scholars still typically use phrases like “Blake says” or “Blake believes,” followed by some claim made by a Blakean character, without negotiating the complex narrative dynamics that might enable us to understand the rhetorical purposes of that statement, as heard by Blake’s respective audiences. Jesse maintains we must expect to find reflections in Blake’s works of all the theologies he engaged. The question is: what was he doing with them, and why? In order to divine what Blake meant to communicate, we must explore how those he targeted would have perceived his arguments. Jesse concludes that by analyzing the dramatic character of Blake’s works theologically through this wide-angled, audience-oriented approach, we see him orchestrating a grand rapprochement of the extreme theologies of his day into a unified vision that integrates faith and reason.

Radical Theology and the Death of God

Radical Theology and the Death of God
Author: Thomas J. J. Altizer
Publisher:
Total Pages: 230
Release: 1966
Genre: Death of God theology
ISBN:

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Joint author, William Hamilton, is an alumnus of Evanston Township High School, class of 1940.

The Visionary Art of William Blake

The Visionary Art of William Blake
Author: Naomi Billingsley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2018-05-10
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1838609660

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William Blake (1757-1827) is considered one of the most singular and brilliant talents that England has ever produced. Celebrated now for the originality of his thinking, painting and verse, he shocked contemporaries by rejecting all forms of organized worship even while adhering to the truth of the Bible. But how did he come to equate Christianity with art? How did he use images and paint to express those radical and prophetic ideas about religion which he came in time to believe? And why did he conceive of Christ himself as an artist: in fact, as the artist, par excellence? These are among the questions which Naomi Billingsley explores in her subtle and wide-ranging new study in art, religion and the history of ideas. Suggesting that Blake expresses through his representations of Jesus a truly distinctive theology of art, and offering detailed readings of Blake's paintings and biblical commentary, she argues that her subject thought of Christ as an artist-archetype. Blake's is thus a distinctively 'Romantic' vision of art in which both the artist and his saviour fundamentally change the way that the world is perceived.

The Apocalyptic Trinity

The Apocalyptic Trinity
Author: T. Altizer
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2012-12-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1137276223

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This book is a major step forward in radical theology via a sustained and creative challenge to conventional and orthodox thinking on the Trinity. Altizer presents a radical rethinking of the apocalyptic trinity and recovers the apocalyptic Jesus of Hegel, Blake, and Nietzsche.

William Blake and the Myth of America

William Blake and the Myth of America
Author: Linda Freedman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2018-07-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 019254277X

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This volume tells the story of William Blake's literary reception in America and suggests that ideas about Blake's poetry and personality helped shape mythopoeic visions of America from the Abolitionists to the counterculture. It links high and low culture and covers poetry, music, theology, and the novel. American writers have turned to Blake to rediscover the symbolic meaning of their country in times of cataclysmic change, terror, and hope. Blake entered American society when slavery was rife and civil war threatened the fragile experiment of democracy. He found his moment in the mid twentieth-century counterculture as left-wing Americans took refuge in the arts at a time of increasingly reactionary conservatism, vicious racism, pervasive sexism, dangerous nuclear competition, and an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam, the fires of Orc raging against the systems of Urizen. Blake's America, as a symbol of cyclical hope and despair, influenced many Americans who saw themselves as continuing the task of prophecy and vision. Blakean forms of bardic song, aphorism, prophecy, and lament became particularly relevant to a literary tradition which centralised the relationship between aspiration and experience. His interrogations of power and privilege, freedom and form resonated with Americans who repeatedly wrestled with the deep ironies of new world symbolism and sought to renew a Whitmanesque ideal of democracy through affection and openness towards alterity.

The Social Vision of William Blake

The Social Vision of William Blake
Author: Michael Ferber
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2014-07-14
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1400857643

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This fresh look at the social and political themes of Blake's poetry shows that he was a phenomenologist of liberation," who contested the dominant ideology of his time and who still speaks passionately to our fears and hopes. Originally published in 1985. 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.

William Blake and the Moderns

William Blake and the Moderns
Author: Robert J. Bertholf
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 1983-06-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780791496640

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Robert Bertholf and Annette Levitt have assembled thirteen essays that establish Blake as a "central voice molding modern literature and thought." The essays in this volume examine Blake's influence on modern poetry, the modern novel, and modern thought from various critical approaches. This collection maps out the lines of direct literary influences and indirect intellectual affinities that make up the tradition of enacted form. Through the use of various aspects of Blake's form and ideas, this book reasserts the idea of continuity, the drive for wholeness, and the arrival of new poetic forms. Blake is considered one of the major and most modern of Romantics. This collection positions him as a precursor of the modern, using his vision and poetry as a base for discussing a central issue in literary theory today—influence and the literary tradition—just how is the legacy of a literary artist passed on, and how is it resurrected in the works of subsequent generations.

The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature

The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature
Author: C. A. Patrides
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 468
Release: 1984
Genre: Apocalypse in literature
ISBN: 9780719017308

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This remarkable collection of original essays by a distinguished group of American and English scholars explores attitudes toward apocalyptic thought and the Book of Revelation as they were reflected, over many centuries, in theological discourse, political activity, and artistic and literary endeavors.