Overview

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.

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9783030676902

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Reviews

Cogan's book does an exceptional job of exploring such tensions across the range of Blake's corpus. None of the caveats above lessens my admiration for its daring and innovative engagement with Blake's treatment of prophecy. (G. A. Rosso, Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly, Vol. 56 (3), 2022-2023)

“Blake is commonly described as a writer of prophecies and prophetic works but, as is evident throughout Cogan's insightful and clearly argued book in many cases critics fail to be clear as to what they actually mean when they invoke this label. What is more, as is evident to any careful reader of Blake's works over the course of his career, his notions of what prophecy meant clearly transformed as the circumstances around him changed.” (Jason Whittaker, zoamorphosis.com, March 12, 2022) “Cogan implicitly presents the phases of Blakean prophecy within his own narrative framework of ‘creation, fall and redemption’ (190): she neatly portrays prophetic failure in Blake’s early career as being redeemed by his fourfold model. The book elegantly navigates the difficult terrain of Blakean prophecy, making Blakean theological and ideological complexities comprehensible without oversimplifying Blake or neglecting his resistance to coherence – a tremendously difficult line to walk and Cogan does so admirably well.” (Jude Mahmoud, Romanticism, Vol. 30 (1), 2024) “Blake is commonly described as a writer of prophecies and prophetic worksbut, as is evident throughout Cogan's insightful and clearly argued book, in many cases critics fail to be clearas to what they actually mean when they invoke this label.” (Jason Whittaker, zoamorphosis.com, March 12, 2022) “Cogan’s book does an exceptional job of exploring such tensions across the range of Blake’s corpus. … daring and innovative engagement with Blake’s treatment of prophecy.” (G. A. Rosso, Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly, Winter, Vol. 56 (3), 2022-2023)

“Cogan’s book does an exceptional job of exploring such tensions across the range of Blake’s corpus. … daring and innovative engagement with Blake’s treatment of prophecy.” (G. A. Rosso, Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly, Winter, Vol. 56 (3), 2022-2023)

Author Information

Lucy Cogan is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature at University College Dublin, Ireland. Her research is focused on the intersection of gender, politics and religion in the writing of the Long Eighteenth Century. She has published a range of articles on William Blake and women’s writing in the period.

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