Employing the analytical psychology of Carl Jung, Matthew A. Fike provides a fresh understanding of individuation in Shakespeare. This study of "the visionary mode" - Jung s term for literature that comes through the artist from the collective unconscious - combines a strong grounding in Jungian terminology and theory with myth criticism, biblical literary criticism, and postcolonial theory. Fike draws extensively on the rich discussions in the Collected Works of C. G. Jung to illuminate selected plays such as A Midsummer Night s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Henriad, Othello, and Hamlet in new and surprising ways. Fike s clear and thorough approach to Shakespeare offers exciting, original scholarship that will appeal to students and scholars alike.

"Studies Raphael's images of supernatural phenomena, including apparitions and prophetic visions, within their contemporary artistic and religious contexts. Asks how a fundamentally naturalistic style of painting like that of the Italian Renaissance can accommodate representations of the supernatural without self-contradiction"--Provided by publisher.

In The Visionary Moment, Paul Maltby draws on postmodern theory to examine the metaphysics and ideology of the visionary moment, or "epiphany," in twentieth-century American fiction. Engaging critically with the works of Don DeLillo, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, and William Faulkner, Maltby explains how the literary convention of the visionary moment promotes the myth that there is a superior level of knowledge that can redeem or regenerate the individual. He contends that this common-sense assumption is a paradigm that needs to be confronted and critiqued.

Victor Brombert reassesses in a modern perspective the power and originality of Hugo's work, and provides a new interpretation of Hugo's narrative art as well as a synthesis of his poetic and moral vision. The twenty-eight drawings by Hugo reproduced in this book are further testimony to the visionary nature of Hugo's imagination.

This book examines the difficult relationship between individual intellectual freedom and the legal structures which govern human societies in William Blake’s works, showing that this tension carries a political urgency that has not yet been recognised by scholars in the field. In doing so, it offers a new approach to Blake’s corpus that builds on the literary and cultural historical work of recent decades. Blake’s pronouncements about law may often sound biblical in tone; but this book argues that they directly address (and are informed by) eighteenth-century legal debates concerning the origin of the English common law, the autonomy of the judicature, the increasing legislative role of Parliament, and the emergence of the notions of constitutionalism and natural rights. Through a study of his illuminated books, manuscript works, notebook drafts and annotations, this study considers Blake’s understanding that law is both integral to humanity itself and a core component of its potential fulfilment of the ‘Human Form Divine’.