Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake Williams Hardback

Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William BlakeAuthor(s): Nicholas M. Williams\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9780521620505, 978-0521620505\nSynopsis\nScholars have often drawn attention to William Blake's unusual sensitivity to his social context. In this book Nicholas Williams situates Blake's thought historically by showing how through the decades of a long and productive career Blake consistently responded to the ideas, writing, and art of contemporaries. Williams presents detailed readings of several of Blake's major poems alongside Rousseau's Emile, Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Paine's Rights of Man, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Robert Owen's Utopian Experiments. In so doing, he offers revealing new insights into key Blake texts and draws attention to their inclusion of notions of social determinism, theories of ideology-critique, and Utopi.