Overview
Explores Blake’s prophetic mode as a dynamic response to momentous political change
Draws on Ricoeur’s hermeneutics to provide a fresh theoretical framework to analyse Blake’s writing and revisions
Charts Blake’s evolving attitude to prophecy and vision over the course of his life
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (7 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
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.
Reviews
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Blake and the Failure of Prophecy
Authors: Lucy Cogan
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67688-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-67687-2Published: 25 May 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-67690-2Published: 26 May 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-67688-9Published: 24 May 2021
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 225
Number of Illustrations: 9 b/w illustrations
Topics: Poetry and Poetics, Eighteenth-Century Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, European Literature