Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety

ISBN-13: 9781441178060 / Angielski / Miękka / 2011 / 208 str.

James Rovira

Opis

Apocalyptic nightmares that humanly-created intelligences will one day rise up against their creators haunt the western creative imagination. However, these narratives find their initial expression not in the widely disseminated Frankenstein story but in William Blake's early mythological works. This book looks at why we persistently fear our own creations by examining Blake's illuminated books of the 1790s through the lens of Kierkegaard's theories of personality and of anxiety. It offers a close examination of Kierkegaard's and Blake's similar, and to an extent shared, historical milieux as residents of Denmark's and England's political and economic centers. Each author's residence in a major urban center motivated them to develop a concept of innocence closely identified with the pastoral, and to place their respective and similar concepts of innocence within a larger developmental scheme encompassing an ethical and then a religious consciousness. Rovira identifies contemporarytensions between monarchy and democracy, science and religion, and nature and artificeas the source bothof Kierkegaard's concept of anxiety and Blake's representation of creation anxiety in his early illuminated books.

Spis treści

Introduction
1. Blake and Kierkegaard: Shared Contexts
2. Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Socratic Tradition 
3. Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Classical Model of Personality
4. Innocence, Generation, and the Fall in Blake and Kierkegaard
5. Creation Anxiety and The [First] Book of Urizen
Index