Focusing on the tension in Blake's poetry between doubt and belief, this book offers a new account of the way Blake's major prophecies work and of the strategies they employ. Offering a radically new reading of Milton and Jerusalem, Otto argues that the autonomous, world-forming imagination is subject to visionary deconstruction. He demonstrates that rather than subordinating existence to perception, the poems attempt to induce their readers to action.

Blake's Critique of Transcendence is the first full-length book to examine in any detail or consistency the relation between Blake's text and the visual designs in The Four Zoas, one of the most important works in Blake's oeuvre.

Multiplying Worlds argues that modern forms of virtual reality first appear in the urban/commercial milieu of London in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century (1780-1830). It develops a revisionary account of relations between romanticism and popular entertainments, 'high' and 'low' literature, and verbal and visual virtual realities during this period. The argument is divided into three parts. The first, 'From the Actual to the Virtual', focuses on developments during the period from 1780 to 1795, as represented by Robert Barker's Panorama, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, and James...