"Gerda Norvig has written a book on Blake's Bunyan illustrations that is much more than that: it revises our sense of Blake, of the relationship of illustrator to illustrated text, and the assumptions of Romantic and Romanticist writing. Blake, certainly, will not be the same after Norvig's vigorous analysis, and it is arguable that the same may be true of Romanticism."--Ronald Paulson, author of "Figure and Abstraction in Contemporary Painting" "Specialists in both Blake studies and English Romanticism will find this book extremely interesting and useful. Norvig carefully analyzes for the first time a set of Blake's most accomplished illustrations, a set that (as she points out) has very rarely been reproduced or exhibited. These designs certainly deserve to be better known, and Norvig's insightful and stimulating interpretation of them makes their importance to Blake's thought and career amply clear. This is certainly a book that all Blake specialists will have to know."--Anne K. Mellor, author of "Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters"

The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan is the most extensive volume of original essays ever published on the seventeenth-century nonconformist preacher and writer, John Bunyan. Its thirty-eight chapters examine Bunyan's life and works, their religious and historical contexts, and the critical reception of his writings, in particular his allegorical narrative, The Pilgrim's Progress. Interdisciplinary and comprehensive, it provides unparalleled scope and expertise, ranging from literary theory to religious history and from theology to post-colonial criticism. The Handbook is structured in four sections. The first, 'Contexts', deals with the historical Bunyan in relation to various aspects of his life, background, and work as a nonconformist: from basic facts of biography to the nature of his church at Bedford, his theology, and the religious and political cultures of seventeenth-century Dissent. Part 2 considers Bunyan's literary output: from his earliest printed tracts to his posthumously published works. Offering discrete chapters on Bunyan's major works - Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), The Pilgrim's Progress, Parts I and II (1678; 1684); The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), and The Holy War (1682) - this section nevertheless covers Bunyan's oeuvre in its entirety: controversial and pastoral, narrative and poetic. Section 3, 'Directions in Criticism', engages with Bunyan in literary critical terms, focusing on his employment of form and language and on theoretical approaches to his writings: from psychoanalytic to post-secular criticism. Section 4, 'Journeys', tackles some of the ways in which Bunyan's works, and especially The Pilgrim's Progress, have travelled throughout the world since the late seventeenth century, assessing Bunyan's place within key literary periods and their distinctive developments: from the eighteenth-century novel to the writing of 'empire'.

William Blake (1757-1827) is considered one of the most singular and brilliant talents that England has ever produced. Celebrated now for the originality of his thinking, painting and verse, he shocked contemporaries by rejecting all forms of organized worship even while adhering to the truth of the Bible. But how did he come to equate Christianity with art? How did he use images and paint to express those radical and prophetic ideas about religion which he came in time to believe? And why did he conceive of Christ himself as an artist: in fact, as the artist, par excellence? These are among the questions which Naomi Billingsley explores in her subtle and wide-ranging new study in art, religion and the history of ideas. Suggesting that Blake expresses through his representations of Jesus a truly distinctive theology of art, and offering detailed readings of Blake's paintings and biblical commentary, she argues that her subject thought of Christ as an artist-archetype. Blake's is thus a distinctively 'Romantic' vision of art in which both the artist and his saviour fundamentally change the way that the world is perceived.

"Papers delivered at the fourth triennial conference of the International John Bunyan Society held at Bedford, 1-5 September 2004"--Acknowledgements.

Graceful Reading offers a new way of understanding Bunyan's theology and his narrative art, examining and reassessing the complex and interdependent relationship between them. Michael Davies begins by proposing that Bunyan's theology is far from obsessed with the forbidding Calvinist doctrine of predestination and its corollary tendency towards painful introspection. Bunyan's is, rather, a comfortable doctrine, in which the believer is encouraged to accept salvation throughthe far more assuring terms of Bunyan's covenant theology - those of faith and grace. The book then reassesses how Bunyan's narrative style is informed by this theology. Works such as Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim's Progress reveal a profound sensitivity to narrative forms and reading practices, as theyaim to inculcate in their readers a self-consciousness about reading itself which is instrumental in the very process of spiritual instruction, in seeing 'things unseen'. This is a study, therefore, which asserts a radically different way of reading of Bunyan's writings, both through the terms of seventeenth-century covenant theology, and through some distinctly 'postmodernist' ideas about narrative practice.

William Blake's series of illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy was his last major project and a summation of his religious and artistic beliefs. Blake intended to engrave this series, but it was unfinished at his death. The series includes seven partially complete engravings and 102 works in various stages of completion--some of the most beautiful pictures of his career. These pictures are not simple illustrations, but constitute a thorough reinterpretation and--in Blake's view--correction of Dante's poem. This book compares the two men's theological and artistic views and analyzes in detail the meaning of Blake's illustrations, for the first time introducing their theological and aesthetic exuberance to a modern audience.

The collection of essays presented in this volume represents some of the best recent critical work on William Blake as poet, prophet, visual artist, and social and political critic of his time. The critical range that is represented includes examples of Marxist, New Historicist, Feminist and Psychoanalytical approaches to Blake. Taken together, the essays consider all areas and moments of Blake's career as poet, from the early lyrics to his later epic poems, and they have been chosen to reveal not only the range of Blake's concerns but also to alert the reader to the rich variety of contemporary criticism that is devoted to him. Although the majority of essays are devoted to Blake as poet, others consider his work as printmaker, illustrator, and visionary artist. However severely individual essays choose to judge him, ultimately all the contributions to this book affirm Blake as one of the great geniuses of English art and letters. William Blake provides a valuable introduction by one of Britain's foremost critics and will be welcomed by students wanting to familiarise themselves with the work of Blake.