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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.
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The Last Man (Paperback)
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; Edited by Morton D. Paley
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R350
R252
Discovery Miles 2 520
Save R98 (28%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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'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.
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