Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake

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Cambridge University Press, Apr 13, 1998 - Literary Criticism - 250 pages
Scholars have often drawn attention to William Blake's unusual sensitivity to his social context. In this book, Nicholas Williams situates Blake's thought historically by showing how through the decades of a long and productive career, Blake consistently responded to the ideas, writing, and art of contemporaries. Williams presents detailed readings of several of Blake's major poems alongside Rousseau's Emile, Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, Paine's Rights of Man, Burke's Reflections of the Revolution in France, and Robert Owen's Utopian experiments. In doing so, he offers revealing new insights into key Blake texts and draws attention to their inclusion of notions of social determinism, theories of ideology-critique and utopian traditions. Williams argues that if we are truly to understand ideology as it relates to Blake, we must understand the practical situation in which the ideological Blake found himself. His study is a revealing commentary on the work of one of our most challenging poets.

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Contents

The ideology of instruction in Emile and Songs
32
The discourse of womens liberation in Vindication
71
Edmund Burke and models of history in America
98
The utopian moment in Rights of Man and Milton
141
The utopian city and the public sphere in Robert
170
the function of utopianism at the present
207
Notes
220
Index
248
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