Overview

This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students and readers a comprehensive selection of the work of William Blake (1757-1827). Accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, this authoritative edition enables students to explore Blake's poetry, illuminated poetry, and prose alongside selections from his letters, manuscripts, notebook, advertising pamphlets, marginalia, and works he printed in conventional letterpress. The edition arranges Blake's works in chronological order, according to the date when they were first printed or, in the case of unpublished works, the years in which they were composed. With the help of editorial headnotes and annotations, this arrangement brings to the foreground Blake's material and intellectual labours as a poet, painter, prophet, and non-academic philosopher; the networks of acquaintances, friends, patrons, and enemies who helped support or provoke this work; and the tumultuous historical events he responded to, which included the beginning of modern feminism, the agricultural and industrial revolutions, the American and French Revolutions, William Pitt's so-called 'Reign of Terror' in Britain, an attempted revolution in Ireland (1798), a successful slave rebellion in Haiti (1791-1804), and the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Some editions attempt to sanitize Blake, by hiding from view the most startling elements of his thought; but in this edition Blake's sexual, political, religious, and poetic heterodoxy comes into full view.At the same time, this edition foregrounds the dynamics of Blake's composite art, with equal weight given to its verbal and visual dimensions; makes visible the chief lines of force that structure his oeuvre; and highlights his developing thought on sapphism, sodomy, the body, relations between the sexes, the roots of violence, and the politics of imagination. This is a Blake whose dialogue with his own time anticipates much later developments, including modern depth psychologies; analyses of the social and psychological dynamics of war and peace; interest in the body, sexuality, and gender; and experiments in the relation between actual and virtual realitiesDLa Blake who is provocative, unsettling, exhilarating, and somehow our contemporary.Explanatory notes and commentary are included, to enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of Blake, and a Chronology.

Full Product Details

Author:   Peter Otto (Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, University of Melbourne)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press
Imprint:   Oxford University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 13.80cm , Height: 4.50cm , Length: 21.50cm
Weight:   0.001kg
ISBN:  

9780192868053

ISBN 10:   0192868055
Pages:   864
Publication Date:   16 August 2022
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction Chronology From Poetical Sketches (1783) [An Island in the Moon] (c.1785) From Annotations to Lavater's Aphorisms on Man (1788) All Religions Are One (1788) There Is No Natural Religion (1788) From Annotations to Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell (1784; notes c.1789) Songs of Innocence (1789) The Book of Thel (1789) From Annotations to Swedenborg's Divine Love and Divine Wisdom (1788; notes c.1790) From Annotations to Swedenborg's Divine Providence (1790; notes c.1790) The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) From The Notebook (c.1791-93) Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) America a Prophecy (1793) To the Public [Prospectus] (1793) From The Notebook (c.1793) For Children: The Gates of Paradise (1793) Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) Europe a Prophecy (1794) The First Book of Urizen (1794) The Song of Los (1795) The Book of Ahania (1795) The Book of Los (1795) From Vala or The Four Zoas (1797-c.1807) From The Notebook (c.1797-99) From Annotations to Watson's An Apology for the Bible (1797; notes 1798) From Annotations to Bacon's Essays (1798; notes c.1798) From Annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1798; notes c.1798-1809) Letters [1799-1800] From Annotations to Boyd's Translation of the Inferno (1785; notes c.1800) Letters [1802-3] Memorandum in Refutation of the . . . Complaint of John Scolfield (August 1803] Letters [1803-4] From The Notebook (c.1803-04) Milton a Poem (c.1804-1811) [The Pickering Manuscript] (c.1805-07) From The Notebook (c.1807-09) Blake's Exhibition (1809) From Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804-c.1820) From [A Vision of the Last Judgment] (1810) From [A Public Address to the Chalcographic Society] (c.1810) Europe, Title page (late revisions, c.1815-20) From Annotations to Spurzheim's Observations (1817; notes c.1818) Letters [1818] The Everlasting Gospel (c.1818) For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise (1820) Annotations to Berkeley's Siris (1744; notes c.1820) From Annotations to Wordsworth's Preface to The Excursion (1814; notes 1826) From Annotations to Wordsworth's Poems (1815; notes 1826) From Annotations to Thornton's The Lord's Prayer (1827) Letter [1827] On Homers Poetry and On Virgil (c.1820) The Ghost of Abel (1822) [Jehovah]& his two Sons Satan & Adam [The Laocoön] (c.1826-27) List of Abbreviations Notes Index of Titles and First Lines

Reviews

The latest edition of Blakes selected works rich with both textual and explanatory annotations and 120 black-and-white images. * Wayne C. Ripley, An Illustrated Quarterly * Peter Otto's William Blake (Oxford, 2018) presents the latest edition of Blake's selected works. Part of the 21st-Centu-ry Oxford Authors series, the book runs over 800 pages, and is rich with both textual and explanatory annotations and 120 black-and-white images. The works are arranged chronologically rather than generically, even to the point of offering Songs of Innocence alone and again with Songs of Experience. * Wayne C. Ripley, Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly *

Author Information

Peter Otto is Professor of Literature at the University of Melbourne and a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He teaches and researches in the literatures and cultures of modernity, from Romanticism to the new media of today. His recent publications include Entertaining the Supernatural: Animal Magnetism, Spiritualism, Secular Magic and Psychical Science, an online collection of primary texts (2007); Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality (OUP 2011); and 'Innovations in Encompassing Large Scenes', an online exhibition housed in the Romantic Circles Gallery of Visual Culture (2013). He has published two books on William Blake, both with Oxford University Press, numerous articles on Blake, Romanticism, and Gothic Fictions, and is currently completing a monograph on 'William Blake and the History of Imagination: Poetry, Prophecy, and Secularization'.

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