Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. The Cambridge Companion to William Blake
  • Cited by 16
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
May 2006
Print publication year:
2003
Online ISBN:
9780511999130
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521781477
Collection:
Cambridge Companions to Literature and Classics
Subjects:
Literature, Art, English Literature: General Interest, English Literature 1700-1830, Western Art
Series:
Cambridge Companions to Literature
Information

Book description

Poet, painter, and engraver William Blake died in 1827 in obscure poverty with few admirers. The attention paid today to his remarkable poems, prints, and paintings would have astonished his contemporaries. Admired for his defiant, uncompromising creativity, he has become one of the most anthologized and studied writers in English and one of the most studied and collected British artists. His urge to cast words and images into masterpieces of revelation has left us with complex, forceful, extravagant, some times bizarre works of written and visual art that rank among the greatest challenges to plain understanding ever created. This Companion aims to provide guidance to Blake's work in fresh and readable introductions: biographical, literary, art historical, political, religious, and bibliographical. Together with a chronology, guides to further reading, and glossary of terms, they identify the key points of departure into Blake's multifarious world and work.

Reviews

‘Like other volumes in the Cambridge Companions to Literature series, this collection of essays is designed to be useful for a broad academic audience. It maintains the normally high standards of editing, writing, and scholarship that characterize the series. Eaves provides the introduction, which discusses the difficulties, methods, and rewards of reading Blake’s poetical and pictorial works.’

T. Hoagwood - Texas A&M University

' … the present volume is uniformly excellent … admirable and reliable … we are enlightened, even inspired, by the ample contents of these deeply illuminating and reflective pages.'

Source: Reference Reviews

‘… the seasoned Blake scholar will find here an up-to-date and well-informed vade-mecum of current scholarly trends which can be put to good use in the classroom, and can also serve the purpose of a handy work of reference … succinct, erudite, and often enlightening … keen and stylishly written analysis … provides a veritable hitch-hiker’s guide to the galaxies that are opening up in Blake's writings, a guide which will stand the test of teaching Blake in more than the first decade of the new century.’

Source: BARS Bulletin & Review

'The Companion ensures Blake's continual success in teaching lessons in electric mystical thought, in bringing to mind issues of form, perception and creativity in poetic writing … this is a carefully edited volume offering new and valuable insights into Blake's life and circle as well as into his ways of producing a wide range of innovative techniques in the field of engraving and illustration …'.

Source: Anglia Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie

‘The Cambridge Companion is not for casual reference, but should make a very useful introduction for serious readers.‘

Source: Essays in Criticism

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

Contents

Contents

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.