Blake's comic brilliance has been variously dismissed as the nervous ramblings of a neglected genius, the tomfool doodles of a distracted youngster, or a crude tool for destabilizing textual authority. But, for the eighteenth century, comedy played a pivotal role in debates on aesthetics, education, spirituality and morality. This exciting new study blends a close reading of Blake's early work with fascinating historical research to demonstrate that the comic was an essential component of Blake's artistic Vision.

Published in 1783, Poetical Sketches was William Blake's first volume of poetry, and his only published work to appear in letterpress. This "little book" has been relegated by some critics to the periphery of the Blake canon. Yet the book's uniqueness and authorship have drawn scholars to it, resulting in often illuminating criticism. Speak Silence continues in this line and represents the first and only collection of essays devoted solely to exploring Poetical Sketches. Mark Greenberg's critical introduction traces the historical tendency both to denigrate and to praise the Sketches. The other chapters in this collection, written by distinguished scholars Susan J. Wolfson, Stuart Peterfreund, Thomas A. Vogler, Vincent DeLuca, Nelson Hilton, and Robert F. Gleckner analyze traditional elements of poetry as they appear in the Sketches. This analysis reveals how fully Blake, as a young poet, absorbed these elements and how deftly he manipulated and transvalued them in his early, ambitious, and revolutionary experiments with language, voice, and rhetorical form. This volume also focuses on the Sketches' politics, originality, and complex connections with Blake's poetic precursors and with other cultural institutions. What is most compelling about Speak Silence is the way in which the chapters are in dialogue with one another. The collection resembles a conversation between its notable contributors, inviting readers to witness the developmental process of particular ideas about Blake's early art - and its relation to his later work - as they solidify, are transformed, or dissolve.

It is not surprising that visitors to Blake’s cosmology – the most elaborate in the history of British text and design – often demand a map in the form of a reference book. The entries in this volume benefit from the wide range of historical information made available in recent decades regarding the relationship between Blake’s text and design and his biographical, political, social, and religious contexts. Of particular importance, the entries take account of the re-interpretations of Blake with respect to race, gender, and empire in scholarship influenced by the groundbreaking theories that have arisen since the first half of the twentieth century. The intricate fluidity of Blake’s anti-Newtonian universe eludes the fixity of definitions and schema. Central to this guide to Blake's work and ideas is Kathryn S. Freeman's acknowledgment of the paradox of providing orientation in Blake’s universe without disrupting its inherent disorientation of the traditions whereby readers still come to it. In this innovative work, Freeman aligns herself with Blake’s demand that we play an active role in challenging our own readerly habits of passivity as we experience his created and corporeal worlds.

While overlooked by extant studies of the Gothic, William Blake’s literary and visual oeuvre embodies the same obsessions and fears that inform the Gothic revival with which he was contemporary.

First published in 1982 this book provides a bibliography of commentary, criticism, and scholarship on the works of William Blake. It covers the period from Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry in 1947 to 1980. The criticism is organised according to eleven classifications in order to help direct the research of students and scholars and each chapter is preceded by an introductory essay in order to guide the reader.

William Blake called himself a "sublime Artist" and acknowledged his own power to create "the Most Sublime Poetry." Words of Eternity reveals the fundamental importance of the term "sublime" in a defining of Blake's poetic achievement. This first full-length study of Blake and the sublime demonstrates that a sophisticated theory of sublimity permeates his writings, serving him as a personal poetics, a framework in which the difficulties and unusual strategies of the works find their rationale. Vincent De Luca combines historically grounded source study with insights from modern critical theories of textuality to identify Blake's two opposing conceptions of sublimity--a sublime of obscurity, terror, and material power and one of determinate, concentrated intellectual design. De Luca examines the interplay between these two modes from differing perspectives--theoretical, stylistic, and thematic. As the perspectives widen, they embrace many of the speculative systems of Blake's time and reveal these systems as various displaced modalities of an underlying sublime discourse. "Words of Eternity is one of the dozen or so most important books ever written about Blake's poetry. De Luca provides a wealth of new insights on every page."--Robert N. Essick, University of California, Riverside "With the context that this book supplies, we take a quantum leap in the sense we can make of Blake's project. De Luca opens our eyes to a Blake, and a sublime, that will never again be the same for us."--Nelson Hilton, University of Georgia Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.