Front cover image for Blake and the city

Blake and the city

"Though usually classified as a Romantic, Blake subverts and dissolves the binaries on which Romanticism turns: self and other, art and nature, country and city. Rather than reject city outright like many of his contemporaries, Blake embraces it as the intricate workshop of human imagination. Each chapter of this book focuses on a specific text of Blake's that illustrates a particular conception of metaphorical embodiment of the city. These shifting metaphors emphasize the construction of all human environments and the need for imaginative labor to build and interpret them. This study seeks to bridge a gap between "transcendent" and "historicist" readings of Blake while at the same time challenging assumptions that still color our view of the city in the twenty-first century."--Pub. desc
Print Book, English, ©2006
Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg, ©2006
Criticism, interpretation, etc
235 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
9780838756461, 9780838756522, 0838756468, 0838756522
67773739
Introduction: on Blake, the city, and romanticism
Word and image in the urban pastoral: Songs of innocence and of experience
Prophetic labor and creation of space: Lambeth and The four Zoas
The city as body: Milton
The city as text: Jerusalem