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Blake in the New Millennium
- Eighteenth-Century Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 36, Number 2, Winter 2003
- pp. 294-299
- 10.1353/ecs.2003.0018
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Eighteenth-Century Studies 36.2 (2003) 294-299
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Blake in the New Millennium
Judith C. Mueller
G. E. Bentley, Jr. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). Pp. xxvii + 532. $39.95 cloth.Christopher Z. Hobson. Blake and Homosexuality (New York: Palgrave, 2000). Pp. xxii + 249. $55.00 cloth.
Sheila A. Spector. "Wonders Divine": The Development of Blake's Kabbalistic Myth (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001). Pp. 213. $59.50.
Sheila A. Spector. "Glorious Incomprehensible": The Development of Blake's Kabbalistic Language (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001). Pp. 202. $59.50. [End Page 294]
Nicholas M. Williams. Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Pp. xviii + 250. $65.00.
Late in Blake's life, during a period of increasing isolation and struggle against poverty, an entry in A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland praised him "as an eccentric but very ingenious artist" and directed its readers to some of his works. Blake probably knew nothing of this rare acclaim, and the interest might have surprised him (Bentley 348). Surely, the current scholarly and popular interest would suprise him as well. The publication last year of what is likely to remain the definitive Blake biography for years to come makes this a good moment to reflect on some recent Blake scholarship.
In a study that lives up to its considerable ambitions, Nicholas M. Williams situates Blake in the tradition of writing known as ideology critique. His book contributes to several fields—Blake studies, ideology and utopian studies, and several areas of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century intellectual history. One of Williams's ambitions is to reconcile the warring factions in Blake criticism—the social critics after Erdman and the aesthetic, universalizing critics who follow Frye. The notions of ideology (the socially bound) and utopia (which seeks to transcend that bondage) provide excellent matter to do just that.
As both theorist and reader, Williams meets the demands of this rich topic. The introductory first chapter offers one of the most creative and incisive readings of Blake's haunting poem, "The Mental Traveler," I have seen. Only rarely thereafter does Williams's interpretive acumen falter. His ease with theory and his clarity in presenting it are no less impressive. Even the uninitiate might find this book accessible. Only the absence of a bibliography blocks the reader's pleasure and understanding when tracking down a reference in a footnote becomes unnecessarily difficult.
Williams's first chapter sets the groundwork for his analysis, making a compelling case that Blake had formed a universalizing proto-concept of ideology apparent in basic aspects of his thought. Williams shows in Blake perhaps an even more pervasive ideology than Marx had imagined. He places Blake in the company of Althusser and Marcuse rather than Marx and Engels, for the poet offers no escape through class-consciousness; manacles of the mind bind Lords and chimney sweepers alike. Subsequent chapters show that Blake's practice of ideology critique situates him within a larger shift in eighteenth-century thought.
Williams describes his book as "a chronological tour through Blake's development of his concept of ideology and the thematic treatment of issues pertinent to the topic" (6). Each chapter pairs some work of Blake's with that of a contemporary figure, centering on a particular theme: education in Songs and Rousseau's Emile; women's liberation in Europe, Visions of the Daughters of Albion and Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women; "models of history" in America, The Song of Los, The Four Zoas and Burke; historical crisis in Milton and Paine's The Rights of Man; and finally, the "utopian city" in Jerusalem and Robert Owen's utopian efforts. Williams intends to provide analogues, not sources, for Blake's thought. Most chapters apply twentieth-century theories of ideology and utopia to Blake and his contemporaries, and this usually proves fruitful. Throughout, Williams succeeds in making the familiar strange and fresh. With the help of categories supplied by Karl Mannheim, for...