This book demonstrates the way in which William Blake aligned his idiosyncratic concept of the Selfhood – the lens through which the despiritualised subject beholds the material world – with the atomistic materialism of the Epicurean school as it was transmitted through the first-century BC Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. By addressing this philosophical debt, this study sets out a threefold re-evaluation of Blake’s work: to clarify the classical stream of Blake’s philosophical heritage through Lucretius; to return Blake to his historical moment, a thirty-year period from 1790 to 1820 which has been described as the second Lucretian moment in England; and to employ a new exegetical model for understanding the phenomenological parameters and epistemological frameworks of Blake’s mythopoeia. Accordingly, it is revealed that Blake was not only aware of classical atomistic cosmogony and sense-based epistemology but that he systematically mapped postlapsarian existence onto an Epicurean framework.
Produkteigenschaften
- Artikelnummer: 9783030888879
- Medium: Buch
- ISBN: 978-3-030-88887-9
- Verlag: Springer International Publishing
- Erscheinungstermin: 24.11.2021
- Sprache(n): Englisch
- Auflage: 1. Auflage 2021
- Serie: The New Antiquity
- Produktform: Gebunden, HC runder Rücken kaschiert
- Gewicht: 473 g
- Seiten: 266
- Format (B x H x T): 153 x 216 x 20 mm
- Ausgabetyp: Kein, Unbekannt