William Blake and the Productions of Time - Hardcover

Cooper, Andrew M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1409444414 ISBN 13: 9781409444411

Publisher: Routledge, 2013

Synopsis

Challenging the idea that a writer’s work reflects his experiences in time and place, Andrew M. Cooper locates the action of William Blake’s major illuminated books in the ahistorical present, an impersonal spirit realm beyond the three-dimensional self. Blake, Cooper shows, was a formalist who exploited eighteenth-century scientific and philosophical research on vision, sense, and mind for spiritual purposes. Through irony, dialogism, two-way syntax, and synesthesia, Blake extended and refined the prophetic method Milton forged in Paradise Lost to bring the performativity of traditional oral song and storytelling into print. Cooper argues that historicist attempts to place Blake’s vision in perspective, as opposed to seeing it for oneself, involve a deeply self-contradictory denial of his performativity as a poet-artist. Rather, Blake’s expansion of linear reading into a space of creative, self-conscious collaboration laid the basis for his lifelong critique of dualism in religion and science, and anticipated the non-Euclidean geometrics of twentieth-century Modernism.

About this title

About the Author:

Andrew M. Cooper recently retired as Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, USA.

Review:

"His study examines areas entirely new to me.... brilliant and far-reaching, but also dense and complex. ... At 348 pages, William Blake and the Productions of Time is hefty enough, butcontrary to Samuel Johnson's assessment of ParadiseLost, one might still wish it longer." Blake Quarterly 50 (summer 2016).

"Cooper's engaging performance as a senior scholar ... deftly, easily and meaningfully draws into hisstudy figures such as Eliot and Borges, Herbert and Marvell, the MontyPython players and Walter Benjamin, without concern for chronologicalpositioning: every poet and every author speaks to every other author inCooper's work within a phenomenology of the eternal present." Journal forEighteenth-Century Studies, Sept. 2015

A Yankee Book Peddler US Core Title for 2013 A Baker & Taylor Literary Essentials Title '... fascinating readings ... strikingly fresh interpretations ... Cooper's study is an impressively learned and rewarding read...' Review of English Studies June, 2014

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1409444414
• ISBN 13: 9781409444411
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 362