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The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves

July 28th, 2009 JackCragwall No comments

The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2003. 326 pp. ISBN-10: 0521781477(Hdbk)/0521786770(Ppbk), $90.00/$27.99

Reviewed by
R. Paul Yoder
University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Each volume in the Cambridge Companion series provides a sort of snapshot of the state of the art concerning its given subject at the time of its publication, and this is certainly the case with the Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Morris Eaves has put together an excellent collection of overview essays on Blake’s contexts and works. After Eaves’ Introduction, the book is divided unevenly into two parts: “Perspectives” and “Blake’s Works.” All essays in both parts include endnotes and suggestions for further reading. The point of the essays is not so much to make new arguments as to synthesize the body of critical knowledge into a useful companionable form, and in this the volume succeeds quite well. The only glaring omission from the collection is a discussion of Blake and gender, a difficult issue for which a summary essay, if not a true synthesis, would be especially useful.

Eaves’s Introduction establishes the metaphor of a journey of exploration for reading Blake. Eaves readily acknowledges the difficulty of Blake’s work and the strangeness of what passes for “meaning” there: “The basic strategy behind this Cambridge Companion is to respond to the difficulties with a variety of critical and historical explanations from several perspectives which seem to offer the most hope of catching Blake in the act of meaning something we can understand” (1). He juxtaposes the “simplifications” often used to make Blake more accessible to the “complications” that must be recognized to enter more fully into Blake’s world and work. Eaves asserts that Blake was “fundamentally resistant” to the “specialization” that underlies the social routines of “rationalization, scientific thinking, professionalization, industrialization, commercialization, institutionalization, modernization” (7). Perhaps Eaves’s most suggestive comment is that the “underlying problem of recognition is at the heart of Blake’s difficulties then [in his own time] and for us now” (9). That is, Blake’s readers in his own time could not quite determine just what he was about, and in our time, readers may not recognize the social context or traditions of thought in which he worked. Moreover, the problem of recognition is also thematic for Blake, for as Eaves puts it, “Blake’s epic plots depict a complex process of masking and subsequent confusion and misery, followed by equally complex unmasking, the identification of negations posing as metaphors, and the restoration of the true (original) links of identification” (11).

The “Perspectives” section of the collection provides a good introduction to Blake and to Blake studies. Aileen Ward’s “factual narrative” (35) seeks to “disentangl[e] as much as possible” Blake’s life from the legend (19). Nevertheless, she is selective about which facts and which legends. She recounts the illiteracy of Blake’s wife and the story of how Blake’s dead brother, Robert, revealed to him the idea of illuminated printing. She mentions the “unconscious homosexuality” of Blake’s patron William Hayley, but not Hayley’s supposed sexual advances toward Mrs. Blake. Whatever the final status of these gray areas, Ward’s summary of Blake’s life is very good, and her paragraphs on Blake’s ideas concerning the Last Judgment and on his illustrations to Dante, “Blake’s most drastic act of reinterpretation” (33), are excellent.

Joseph Viscomi uses the “Printing House in Hell” from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as a guide for describing Blake’s printing process. Drawing from his own earlier work, Viscomi debunks, or at least qualifies, many common misconceptions about Blake’s work. For example, whereas it was once a given that each copy of Blake’s illuminated books was a meticulously unique work of art, Viscomi points out, “Making each impression exactly repeatable … was not really possible when working by hand with an assistant. While each copy produced was a unique work of art, most impressions printed and colored at the same time do not differ very much … Making each impression very different would have required more labor and time” (55-6). Viscomi also reminds us that Blake’s illuminated books represent relatively brief and sporadic periods in the artist’s long productive life: the books were “produced as fine ‘limited editions.’ They were not invented to secure financial independence, and they didn’t … [The books] were mostly underwritten by his commercial work” (60).
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Robert M. Ryan, The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature

December 5th, 1997 admin Comments off

Robert M. Ryan, The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824. Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, 24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xi + 292pp. $59.95. (Hdbk; ISBN: 0-521-57008-5).

Reviewed by
Terence Allan Hoagwood
Texas A&M University

This well-written book is an important contribution to studies of romantic-period literature for an unusual combination of reasons. The Romantic Reformation takes for its topics two that have been widely believed to be important as long as there have been studies of romantic-period literature: the writers’ treatments of religion, and the question of the writers’ religious beliefs (those topics are not the same). This book makes large statements on those topics which are simultaneously very different from received views and very responsibly considered and articulated. In a threatened profession, new books sometimes exhibit a desperate novelty or appeal for interest. Rhetorically overheated books and articles refer to “passion” and “pleasure” more often than formerly. It is still useful to recall the difference between a scholar’s interest in the content of an argument and a careerist’s interest in sales appeal; few of us would want to resurrect uncritically Arnold’s concept of “disinterestedness”—as Jerome McGann has shown, that concept was always polemical and therefore self-contradictory (Social Values and Poetic Acts [Harvard University Press, 1988], 86)—but perhaps all of us do, or can, or should reflect on the difference between scholarly argument and ulterior motives, even in a time of faculty downsizing. In contrast, then, to the sort of book which is actually an ad for its author’s own career, The Romantic Reformation displays throughout an integrity of scholarly purpose and a profound respect for its subject matter, voicing honest doubt, for example, rather than histrionics or dogma. While the achieved clarity of this book’s prose opens the argument to a readership outside the small circle of specialists, the honesty and restraint of its method are exemplary and even, in an age of opportunistic anxiety, moving; so are its advocacy of an open mind, and its consistent and humane sense of the social realities that (outside one’s own career) are at stake.

This is therefore a good and useful book, owing to the integrity of its intentions and methods, and also the achieved clarity of its style; as argument, however, it voices implausible conclusions about the religiousity of Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Mary Shelley, and even Percy Bysshe Shelley; but the implausibility of these conclusions should not diminish appreciation of its originality, trenchancy, and usefulness. The intelligence of its accounts of the different senses of the word “religion,” its deep learning in the historical literature of religion in England (and I suspect that we are here given only the abridged version of Ryan’s long view), and its exposition of the social, political, and economic crises that religion symbolized distinguish this new book profoundly from many of those that have previously treated its topics.

Ryan points out that “it is difficult to distinguish between the political and religious aspects of the cultural transformation experienced by English society at the beginning of the nineteenth century”; the vitality of dissenting communities and of millenarianism gave “eschatological resonance to current events . . . during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras” (3). Other scholars—E. P. Thompson, M. H. Abrams, David V. Erdman, Terence Hoagwood, Ian McCalman, John Mee, and others—have argued that the relationship worked the other way: eschatological vocabularies represented the political significance of the Revolution and the war. But Ryan’s concern is the relationship between those two discursive sets, sociopolitical change and religious myth.

The introduction states the book’s primary thesis: “all the poets [treated in the book] committed themselves resolutely to this work of cultural critique,” wherein “the role of religion” is “a dynamic ideology behind social and political action” (4). Ryan writes that all the writers he discusses “dedicate their talents to the subversion or revision of coercive and obscurantist systems of belief” (5). Revolutionaries and reactionaries alike understood that “to discredit Christianity [as Byron does in Cain, e.g.] was to contribute to the destabilization of the British government” (7). The reformation named in the book’s title refers to the writers’ creative expression of “radical dissatisfaction with the state of public religion in their time” (7); rather than compensatory fantasies about a super-power promising eternal rewards in some other world, Ryan argues, “the Romantic religious agenda was a response to history, to politics, to economics” (8).
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