Overview

Narrative Unbound is the first full-scale interpretation of the verbal text of Blake's most complex long poetic prophecy, The Four Zoas. Never engraved or published in the poet/artist's lifetime, the poem remains in a single manuscript, apparently unfinished and heavily revised, and yet is widely celebrated as one of Blake's most powerful narrative works. Ault challenges the view that the poem is intrinsically incomplete and flawed, arguing instead that the famous difficulties of the text are aspects of Blake's transformative narrative strategies. By respecting the integrity of Blake's work, taking every written mark on the page as potentially functional, Ault shows how the intricate interweaving of narrative patterns and interruptions are instrumental to conscious reading. The poetic intent is nothing less than a complete renovation of the reading experience, the potential of which is the realization of what Blake has called Four-fold vision. Ault's approach serves as a guide both to reading The Four Zoas and to participating in a radical poetic method.

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9780882680118

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Donald Ault served on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, where he acted as Associate Editor of The Blake Newsletter. His Visionary Physics: Blake's Response to Newton has been the major study of Blake's attack on the scientific world-view. Prof. Ault is co-editor of Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method (Duke University Press).

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