Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method

ISBN 10: 0822307928 / ISBN 13: 9780822307921

Published by Duke University Press Books, 1987

About this Item

Ex- library copy with stamps/ stickers.

Seller Inventory # mon0003379514

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication Date: 1987
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822307928
• ISBN 13: 9780822307921
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

The great expositors of Blake and those who have followed in their footsteps have clarified the most minute particulars of Blake's vision. Now, in the place of traditional exegesis, comes a significantly new set of critical problems and interpretive methods. In this volume of essays, the major shift in Blake studies, already under way in practice, is addressed, gauged, analyzed, and debated.

The contributors assembled here, leading exponents of contemporary critical methods as well as close students of Blake, argue the grounds, purposes, and validity of each approach and then apply its method in detailed readings of Blake's works. We see deconstruction, psychoanalytic interpretation, feminist critique, semiotic analysis, Marxist criticism, revisionism, and other methods brought to bear on Blake's texts and into confrontation with one another by those best able to do so.

Through the essays themselves and in the reaction they will certainly provoke, Critical Paths will bring increased theoretical awareness to the study of Blake and will further the ongoing redefinition of Blake's art. At the same time, the collection investigates the general problem of methodology in literary studies by means of a casebook examination of modern critical approaches. Blake criticism and current literary theory here come together; the encounter illuminates and enriches both.

From the Back Cover

"This timely collection of essays ads tot he momentum that has been building in recent years for a fresh start in Blake studies--an impulse both to cleanse the doors of perception of Blake's critics and to sweep out the interpreter's parlor in which his now-familiar body of poetry has come to reside. . . . The most appealing feature of "Critical Paths" is its spirit of exploration--its zest in challenging cherished assumptions, its impatience with questions that have been asked too often, its agile movement between skepticism and affirmation, its air of the workshop rather than the museum or the shrine."--Mary Lynn Johnson