Overview
William Blake: Modernity and Disaster explores the work of the Romantic writer, artist, and visionary William Blake as a profoundly creative response to cultural, scientific, and political revolution. In the wake of such anxieties of discovery, including the revolution in the life sciences, Blake's imagination often prophetic, apocalyptic, and deconstructive offers an inside view of such tumultuous and catastrophic change. A hybrid of text and image, Blake's writings and illuminations offer a disturbing and productive exception to accepted aesthetic, social, and political norms. Accordingly, the essays in this volume, reflecting Blake's unorthodox perspective, challenge past and present critical approaches in order to explore his oeuvre from multiple perspectives: literary studies, critical theory, intellectual history, science, art history, philosophy, visual culture, and psychoanalysis. Covering the full range of Blake's output from the shorter prophecies to his final poems, the essays in William Blake: Modernity and Disaster predict the discontents of modernity by reading Blake as a prophetic figure alert to the ends of history. His legacy thus provides a lesson in thinking and living through the present in order to ask what it might mean to envision a different future, or any future at all.
Full Product Details
Author: Tilottama Rajan ,
Joel Faflak
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Imprint: University of Toronto Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.90cm
, Height: 2.50cm
, Length: 23.50cm
Weight: 0.640kg
ISBN: 9781487506568
ISBN 10: 1487506562
Pages: 277
Publication Date: 26 August 2020
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Temporarily unavailable
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Reviews
William Blake: Modernity and Disaster is an excellent and extensive collection of essays that will be much used in Blake scholarship and beyond. The volume ranges across many different aspects of Blake's life, work, and writings, and covers an astonishing array of topics: science, the visual, affect, modernity, religion, and many more. This heterogeneity speaks to the richness of Blake's interests and works, which the scholars assembled here illuminate from a myriad of angles. - Alexander Regier, Department of English, Rice University William Blake: Modernity and Disaster offers perspectives on Blake that resist the recuperative strain that has always dominated Blake scholarship, and, in several essays, present Blake's engagement with the sciences in richer, more complex ways than we've seen. - Karen Swann, Professor Emerita, Department of English, Williams College
A number of the essays resituate Blake among the contemporary life sciences, resulting in thought-provoking ways to rethink his texts. -- D. D. Schierenbeck, Immanuel Lutheran College * <em>CHOICE</em> *
A number of the essays resituate Blake among the contemporary life sciences, resulting in thought-provoking ways to rethink his texts. -- D. D. Schierenbeck, Immanuel Lutheran College * <em>CHOICE</em> * It is a book by specialists, for specialists, offering unique and fresh insight into the ways that Blake's work resonates through a broad variety of ideas, theoretical concepts, and comparative illuminations. -- Jon Saklofske, Acadia University * <em>European Romantic Review</em> *
Author Information
Tilottama Rajan is a Canada Research Chair and distinguished university professor at Western University, the former Director of its Centre for Theory and Criticism, and the founder of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism. Joel Faflak is professor of English and Theory at Western University, where he was also the Inaugural Director of the School for Advanced Studies in the Arts and Humanities.
