Publisher's Synopsis
The six essays in this book represent the range of approaches now at the forefront of Blake criticism. Joseph Viscomi draws together Blake's aesthetic and material achievement by analysing his engraving techniques and the compositional history of The marriage of Heaven and Hell. Anne K Mellor and David Bindman assess his relation to post-Enlightenment perceptions of race and gender; and Tilottama Rajan considers Blake's illuminated books as a composite achievement arising from but not reconciling his fragmented vision of myth, history, and language. Morris Eaves's essay in response reveals the assumptions about language and about Romanticism that frame these investigations. In a far-reaching conclusion, W.J.T. Mitchell places Blake, and particularly Blake's Newton, in relation to critical and historical categories of order and disorder. There are eighteen colour plates and thirty black-and-white illustrations representing several important Blake collections.
