Ideology And Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake

by Nicholas M. Williams

• ISBN13: 9780521026840
• ISBN10: 0521026849
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-11-02
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

List of figures	x
Preface	xi
Acknowledgements	xvi
Note on the text and list of abbreviations	xvii
1 Blake, ideology and utopia: strategies for change	1	(31)
2 The ideology of instruction in Emile and Songs of Innocence and of Experience	32	(39)
3 The discourse of women's liberation in Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Europe and Visions of the Daughters of Albion	71	(27)
4 Edmund Burke and models of history in America, The Song of Los, and The Four Zoas	98	(43)
5 The utopian moment in Rights of Man and Milton	141	(29)
6 The utopian city and the public sphere in Robert Owen and Jerusalem	170	(37)
7 Conclusion: the function of utopianism at the present time	207	(13)
Notes	220	(28)
Index	248