Overview

This book examines William Blake as a ‘mystic’ and the movements and authors that contributed to this definition during and after his lifetime, with a particular focus on his influence on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Celtic Modernist writers. The author W. B. Yeats was one of the first to present this view of Blake in depth, although his concept of the mystic prioritised the lone male practitioner and the occult. This study argues that the mystic and the esoteric in a community context impacted both Blake’s, and Yeats’, critical and cultural reception. It also offers the first extended literary examination of the Romantic prophet Dorothy Gott’s work alongside Blake’s, and the first analysis of Blake’s influence on Celtic Modernist writers George Russell and Fiona Macleod. This book will be of interest to scholars interested in representations of gender and spirituality in Romantic and Modernist literature and art, and in authors so far neglected in Blake studies.

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9783032038173

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Jodie Marley is a researcher and writer whose work focuses on Romanticism, reception, mysticism, and gender. Her research bridges the Romantic and Modernist periods, with a particular focus on Irish Modernism. She is a 2025 visiting research fellow at the University of Glasgow’s Archives and Special Collections and won a British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) Stephen Copley Award to fund her research in December 2024. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Nottingham in 2023. She has forthcoming book chapters in The Routledge Companion to William Blake (ed. Freeman) and Seán O’Casey in Context (ed. Moran). She has previously been published in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, VALA, and Good Horoscope. Two of her talks for the Global Blake initiative are publicly available. In 2019 she co-curated the Romantic Facts and Fantasies exhibition at Lakeside Arts, Nottingham, and helped organise the 2019 BARS conference.

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