"I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's" — so wrote William Blake (1757-1827), a radical Romantic poet-engraver, painter, and printmaker. In this course, we will examine some of Blake's best known early illuminated poems, many of which Blake produced during an exceptionally productive and turbulent period of the 1790s, when he lived in Lambeth, on the south side of the Thames. In addition to close readings and grappling with Blake's visionary mythology, we will keep a foot in what Saree Makdisi, in his study of Blake, aptly calls "the impossible history of the 1790s." Against the caricature of Blake as an ahistorical madman-artist outside of his own time, we will track how Blake's work confronts the economics, politics, religion, and emergent ideas in the arts and sciences of the Romantic era.
Prerequisite: B+ average in ENGL; open to ENGL Honours Students. |
