Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Palgrave Macmillan

Blake, Myth, and Enlightenment

The Politics of Apotheosis

  • Book
  • © 2017

Overview

Authors:
  1. David Fallon

    1. University of Sunderland, Sunderland, United Kingdom

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

  • Questions the common (mis)apprehension/representation of Blake as simply anti-Enlightenment
  • Approaches Blake’s appropriation of, and engagement with, myth in political terms
  • Looks at a broad range of Blake’s work, from the 1780s-1800s

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this book

Log in via an institution
eBook USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

Licence this eBook for your library

Institutional subscriptions

Table of contents (10 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xii
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction: ‘A Saint Amongst the Infidels & a Heretic with the Orthodox’

    • David Fallon
    Pages 1-30

  3. ‘The Deep Indelible Stain’: Apotheosis in the Eighteenth Century

    • David Fallon
    Pages 31-61

  4. ‘Spirits of Fire’: Ambiguous Figures in The French Revolution

    • David Fallon
    Pages 63-87

  5. ‘Breathing! Awakening!’: Contesting and Transforming Apotheosis in America a Prophecy

    • David Fallon
    Pages 89-121

  6. ‘The Night of Holy Shadows’: Europe and Loyalist Reaction

    • David Fallon
    Pages 123-161

  7. ‘Serpentine Dissimulation’: Apotheosis in Urizen, Ahania, and The Song of Los

    • David Fallon
    Pages 163-191

  8. ‘The Name of the Wicked Shall Rot’: Blake’s Oriental Apotheoses of Nelson and Pitt

    • David Fallon
    Pages 193-224

  9. Transforming Apotheosis in The Four Zoas and Milton

    • David Fallon
    Pages 225-250

  10. ‘Ever Expanding in the Bosom of God’: Deification and Apotheosis in Jerusalem

    • David Fallon
    Pages 251-283

  11. Conclusion

    • David Fallon
    Pages 285-297

  12. Back Matter

    Pages 299-343
    Download chapter PDF
Back to top

Keywords

About this book

This book provides compelling new readings of William Blake’s poetry and art, including the first sustained account of his visionary paintings of Pitt and Nelson. It focuses on the recurrent motif of apotheosis, both as a figure of political authority to be demystified but also as an image of utopian possibility. It reevaluates Blake’s relationship to Enlightenment thought, myth, religion, and politics, from The French Revolution to Jerusalem and The Laocoön. The book combines careful attention to cultural and historical contexts with close readings of the texts and designs, providing an innovative account of Blake’s creative transformations of Enlightenment, classical, and Christian thought.

Authors and Affiliations

  • University of Sunderland, Sunderland, United Kingdom

    David Fallon

About the author

David Fallon is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sunderland, UK. From 2009-12 he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford. He has published on Blake and on eighteenth-century and Romantic-period booksellers, and co-edited Romanticism and Revolution: A Reader (2011) with Jon Mee. 

Bibliographic Information

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Back to top

Search

Navigation