Imagining Nature: Blake's Environmental Poetics($13.95Value)

Description

Considers William Blake's illuminated poetry in the context of the eighteenth-century model of 'nature's economy, ' a conceptual paradigm that prefigured modern-day ecological insights, describing all earthly entities as integrated parts of a dynamic, interactive system. The author presents Blake's work as an example of 'green Romanticism' "This is an outstanding, provocative, paradigm-shifting book. It questions the view of Northrop Frye, which has generally prevailed in Blake studies for the last half century, that Blake regarded Nature as "miserably cruel, wasteful, purposeless, chaotic and half dead." It proposes instead that Blake envisioned an environmental poetics that celebrates natural cycles, in which every thing that lives is holy. This argument is advanced with commendable clarity, compelling evidence, and dialectical vigor. This is one of those rare and valuable books that leads its readers to question the established tenets of criticism without seeking to score debater's points or resorting to crude iconoclasm." James McKusick, Department of English, University of Maryland, Baltimore County CA Used Book in Good Condition