Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) is William Blake's best-known work, containing such familiar poems as 'London', 'Sick Rose' and 'The Tyger'. Evolving over the author's lifetime, the collection was printed by Blake himself on his own press.
This Reader's Guide:
• explains the unique development of Songs as an illuminated book
• considers the earliest reactions to the text during Blake's lifetime, and his gathering posthumous reputation in the nineteenth century
• explores modern critical approaches and recent debates
• discusses key topics that have been of abiding interest to critics, including the relationship between text and image in Blake's 'composite art'.
Insightful and stimulating, this introductory guide is an invaluable resource for anyone who is seeking to navigate their way through the mass of criticism surrounding Blake's most widely-studied work.
| Acknowledgements |
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viii | |
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ix | |
| Introduction: `Piping down the valleys wild' |
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1 | (5) |
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Chapter One Producing Songs: `In a Book that All May Read' |
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6 | (17) |
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Chapter Two Blake's Contemporaries on Songs: Simplicity, Madness, Genius, and Swedenborgianism |
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23 | (19) |
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Chapter Three Reviving Blake in the 1820s and 1830s: Obituaries, Biographies, and the First New Editions |
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42 | (14) |
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Chapter Four Enshrining Blake in the 1860s and 1870s: Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, and Counter-Attack |
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56 | (25) |
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Chapter Five Blake and the Moderns: Symbolism and Scholarship |
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81 | (23) |
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Chapter Six The Post-War Foundations: System, Myth, and History |
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104 | (20) |
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Chapter Seven Freedom and Repression in the 1960s and 1970s: Form, Ideology, and Gender |
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124 | (21) |
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Chapter Eight Blake's Composite Art in the 1980s and 1990s: Textuality and the Materiality of the Book |
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145 | (18) |
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Chapter Nine Worlding Blake Today: `Past, Present and Future Sees' |
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163 | (18) |
| Notes |
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181 | (3) |
| Bibliography |
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184 | (13) |
| Index |
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197 | |
Sarah Haggarty is University Lecturer in English and Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge, UK.
Jon Mee is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York, UK.
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