Words of Eternity :Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime ( Princeton Legacy Library )

Publication subTitle :Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime

Publication series :Princeton Legacy Library

Author: De Luca Vincent Arthur;;;  

Publisher: Princeton University Press‎

Publication year: 2014

E-ISBN: 9781400861781

P-ISBN(Paperback): 9780691068749

Subject: I Literature;I06 Literature, Literature Appreciation

Keyword: 文学

Language: ENG

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Description

William Blake called himself a "sublime Artist" and acknowledged his own power to create "the Most Sublime Poetry." Words of Eternity reveals the fundamental importance of the term "sublime" in a defining of Blake's poetic achievement. This first full-length study of Blake and the sublime demonstrates that a sophisticated theory of sublimity permeates his writings, serving him as a personal poetics, a framework in which the difficulties and unusual strategies of the works find their rationale. Vincent De Luca combines historically grounded source study with insights from modern critical theories of textuality to identify Blake's two opposing conceptions of sublimity--a sublime of obscurity, terror, and material power and one of determinate, concentrated intellectual design. De Luca examines the interplay between these two modes from differing perspectives--theoretical, stylistic, and thematic. As the perspectives widen, they embrace many of the speculative systems of Blake's time and reveal these systems as various displaced modalities of an underlying sublime discourse. "Words of Eternity is one of the dozen or so most important books ever written about Blake's poetry. De Luca provides a wealth of new insights on every page."--Robert N. Essick, University of California, Riverside "With the context that this book supplies, we take a quantum leap in the sense we can make of Blake's project. De Luca opens our eyes to a Blake, and a sublime, that will never again be the same

Chapter

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Texts and Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Blake's Concept of the Sublime

Sublime Wonder: The Moment of Astonishment

"The Most Sublime Poetry": Corporeal Limits and Mental Infinities

The Sublime of Reading: Barriers and Disclosures

Singular and Particular Detail: The Sublime of the Signifier

The Poet's Work: His Sublime and His Pathos

II. Style: Sublime Effects

2. The Bardic Style: Sublime Extension

Continuity and Discontinuity

The Bardic Voice: Uttering the "Artificial Infinite"

Syntax: Catalog and Parataxis

Tropes: Metamorphosis and Rhetorical Substitution

3. The Iconic Style: Sublime Concentration

Negotiating the Vortex: A Whirl of Words

Hieroglyphic Form: The Sublime of the Bible

The Visible Text: A Wall of Words

Divine Names: Iconic Microcosms

Iconic Troping: Identification and Catachresis

4. Narrative Sequences: Modes of Organization

Sudden Centers: Openings and Liminal Effects

Interpolation, or the Text as Palimpsest: The Example of Vala

III. Worldview: Imagery of Sublime Settings

5. The Setting of Nature and the Ruins of Time

The Sublime Scene and the Search for Origins

Natural Catastrophe and the Birth of Corporeal Magnitudes

Architectural Ruins: Traces of the Ancient Man

6. The Setting of the Divided Nations: The Antiquarian Sublime

Syncretic Mythography: History as Sublime Trauma

Blake's Adaptations of the Syncretic Enterprise

The Sublime of the North: Repudiation and Restoration

7. The Settings of Signs: Language and the Recovery of Origins

The Primal Language and the Catastrophe of Babel

The Hermetic and Kabbalistic Background

Blake's Human Text

Epilogue Blake's Sublime in the Romantic Context

Index

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