The visionary poet and artist William Blake is one of the most vivid figures in British Romantic literature. With chapters written by leading international scholars, The Reception of William Blake in Europe is the first comprehensive and systematic reference guide to Blake's influence across Europe. Exploring Blake's impact on literature, art, music and culture, the book includes bibliographies of major translations of Blake's work in each country covered, as well as a publication history and timeline of the poet's reception on the continent.

'The last man! I may well describe that solitary being's feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me.' Mary Shelley, Journal (May 1824). Best remembered as the author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley wrote The Last Man eight years later, on returning to England from Italy after her husband's death. It is the twenty-first century, and England is a republic governed by a ruling elite, one of whom, Adrian, Earl of Windsor, has introduced a Cumbrian boy to the circle. This outsider, Lionel Verney, narrates the story, a tale of complicated, tragic love, and of the gradual extermination of the human race by plague. The Last Man also functions as an intriguing roman a clef, for the saintly Adrian is a monument to Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his friend Lord Raymond is a portrait of Byron. The novel offers a vision of the future that expresses a reaction against Romanticism, as Shelley demonstrates the failure of the imagination and of art to redeem her doomed characters. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The nature of William Blake's genius and of his art is most completely expressed in his Illuminated books. In order to give full and free expression to his vision Blake invented a method of printing that enabled him to create works in which words and images combine to form pages uniquely rich in content and beautiful in form. It is only through the pages as originally conceived and published by the poet himself that Blake's meaning can be fully experienced.

Although Coleridge's thinking and writing about the fine arts was both considerable and interesting, this has not been the subject of a book before.
Coleridge owed his initiation into art to Sir George Beaumont. In 1803-4 he had frequent opportunities to learn from Beaumont, to study Beaumont's small but elegant collection and to visit private collections. Before leaving for Malta in April 1804, Coleridge wrote "I have learnt as much fr[om] Sir George Beaumont respecting Pictures & Painting and Paint[ers as] I ever learnt on any subject from any man in the same Space of Time."
In Italy in 1806, Coleridge's experience of art deepened, thanks to the American artist Washington Allston, who taught him to see the artistic sights of Rome with a painter's eye. Coleridge also visited Florence and Pisa, and later said of the frescoes in Pisa's Camp Santo: "The impression was greater, I may say, than that any poem ever made upon me."
Back in England, Coleridge visited London exhibitions, country house collections, and even artists' studios. In 1814, both Coleridge and Allston were in Bristol--Coleridge lecturing, Allston exhibiting. Coleridge's "On the Principles of Genial Criticism" began as a defense of Allston's paintings but became a statement about all the arts.
This book, an important contribution to Coleridge's intellectual biography, will make readers aware of a dimension of his thinking that has been largely ignored until now.

There has never been a book about Blake's last period, from his meeting with John Linnell in 1818 to his death in 1827, although it includes some of his greatest works. In The Traveller in the Evening, Morton Paley argues that this late phase involves attitudes, themes, and ideas that are either distinctively new or different in emphasis from what preceded them.
After an introduction on Blake and his milieu during this period, Paley begins with a chapter on Blake's illustrations to Thornton's edition of Virgil. Paley relates these to Blake's complex view of pastoral, before proceeding to a history of the project, its near-abortion, and its fulfillment as Blake's one of greatest accomplishments as an illustrator. In Yah and His Two Sons the presentation of the divine, except where it is associated with art, is ambiguous where it is not negative. Paley takes up this separate plate in the context of artists's representations of the Laocoon that would have been known to Blake, and also of what Blake would have known of its history from classical antiquity to his own time. Blake's Dante water colours and engravings are the most ambitious accomplishment of the last years of his life, and Paley shows that the problematic nature of some of these pictures, with Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car as a main example, arises from Blake's own divided and sharply polarized attitude toward Dante's Comedy.
The closing chapter, called "Blake's Bible," is on the Bible-related designs and writings of Blake's last years. Paley discusses The Death of Abel (addressed to Lord Byron "in the Wilderness") as a response to its literary forerunners, especially Gessner's Death of Abel and Byron's Cain.For the Job engravings Paley shows how the border designs and the marginal texts set up a dialogue with the main illustrations unlike anything in Blake's Job water colours on the same subjects. Also included here are Blake's last pictorial work on a Biblical subject, The Genesis manuscript, and Blake's last writing on a Biblical text, his vitriolic comments on Thornton's translations of the Lord's Prayer.

The interrelationship of apocalypse and millennium is a dominant concern in British Romanticism. The Book of Revelation provides a model of history in which apocalypse is followed by millennium, but the major Romantic poets - Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and Shelley - question and even at times undermine the validity of this notion. In this impressive study, Morton Paley illuminates this central preoccupation and examines the poets' conflicting answers to the question: where is history going?

The interrelationship of apocalypse and millennium is a dominant concern in British Romanticism. The Book of Revelation provides a model of history in which apocalypse is followed by millennium, but the major Romantic poets - Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and Shelley - question and even at times undermine the possibility of a successful secularization of this model. Is history developing towards end time and millennium, or is it cyclical and purposeless? The fear that millennium may not ensue on apocalypse emerges as a major, if often repressed, theme in the great works of the period.