Overview
- Explores the Epicurean legacy in William Blake’s work
- Shows that Blake was deeply influenced by Lucretian materialism
- Offers new insights into the reception of Lucretius across Europe from the seventeenth century onwards
Part of the book series: The New Antiquity (NANT)
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
Reviews
“Blake and Lucretius: The Atomistic Materialism of the Selfhood belongs both to the new field of Romanticism and Science and to an older current of esoteric source studies in Blake. Schouten de Jel argues that a number of interconnected patterns of imagery by which the poet delineates the fallen world and its deficits, are drawn from Epicurean and Lucretian tradition, much of it as adopted or reshaped in European intellectual history of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. The book is a treasure-trove of scholarship. It both demonstrates the systematicity and consistency of Blake’s imagery and illuminates it, making us see familiar language in a novel and enriching context. Blake’s rocks, watches, revolutions and sunflowers take on a new saliency and a new halo of associations.”
—Laura Quinney, Professor of English, Brandeis University, USAAuthors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Blake and Lucretius
Book Subtitle: The Atomistic Materialism of the Selfhood
Authors: Joshua Schouten de Jel
Series Title: The New Antiquity
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88888-6
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: 978-3-030-88887-9Published: 24 November 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-88890-9Published: 25 November 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-88888-6Published: 23 November 2021
Series ISSN: 2946-3017
Series E-ISSN: 2946-3025
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: X, 266
Topics: Poetry and Poetics, Classical and Antique Literature, Eighteenth-Century Literature, Aesthetics, Epistemology