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Dickinson knew the Bible well. She was profoundly aware of
Christian theology and she was writing at a time when comparative
religion was extremely popular. This book is the first to consider
Dickinson's religious imagery outside the dynamic of her personal
faith and doubt. It argues that religious myths and symbols, from
the sun-god to the open tomb, are essential to understanding the
similetic movement of Dickinson's poetry - the reach for a
comparable, though not identical, experience in the struggles and
wrongs of Abraham, Jacob and Moses, and the life, death and
resurrection of Christ. Linda Freedman situates the poet within the
context of American typology, interprets her alongside contemporary
and modern theology and makes important connections to Shakespeare
and the British Romantics. Dickinson emerges as a deeply troubled
thinker who needs to be understood within both religious and
Romantic traditions.
This volume tells the story of William Blake's literary reception
in America and suggests that ideas about Blake's poetry and
personality helped shape mythopoeic visions of America from the
Abolitionists to the counterculture. It links high and low culture
and covers poetry, music, theology, and the novel. American writers
have turned to Blake to rediscover the symbolic meaning of their
country in times of cataclysmic change, terror, and hope. Blake
entered American society when slavery was rife and civil war
threatened the fragile experiment of democracy. He found his moment
in the mid twentieth-century counterculture as left-wing Americans
took refuge in the arts at a time of increasingly reactionary
conservatism, vicious racism, pervasive sexism, dangerous nuclear
competition, and an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam, the
fires of Orc raging against the systems of Urizen. Blake's America,
as a symbol of cyclical hope and despair, influenced many Americans
who saw themselves as continuing the task of prophecy and vision.
Blakean forms of bardic song, aphorism, prophecy, and lament became
particularly relevant to a literary tradition which centralised the
relationship between aspiration and experience. His interrogations
of power and privilege, freedom and form resonated with Americans
who repeatedly wrestled with the deep ironies of new world
symbolism and sought to renew a Whitmanesque ideal of democracy
through affection and openness towards alterity.
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