Dark Figures in the Desired Country: Blake's Illustrations to The Pilgrim's Progress
Category: Books,Literature & Fiction,History & Criticism
Dark Figures in the Desired Country: Blake's Illustrations to The Pilgrim's Progress Details
From the Inside Flap "Gerda Norvig has written a book on Blake's Bunyan illustrations that is much more than that: it revises our sense of Blake, of the relationship of illustrator to illustrated text, and the assumptions of Romantic and Romanticist writing. Blake, certainly, will not be the same after Norvig's vigorous analysis, and it is arguable that the same may be true of Romanticism."—Ronald Paulson, author of Figure and Abstraction in Contemporary Painting"Specialists in both Blake studies and English Romanticism will find this book extremely interesting and useful. Norvig carefully analyzes for the first time a set of Blake's most accomplished illustrations, a set that (as she points out) has very rarely been reproduced or exhibited. These designs certainly deserve to be better known, and Norvig's insightful and stimulating interpretation of them makes their importance to Blake's thought and career amply clear. This is certainly a book that all Blake specialists will have to know."—Anne K. Mellor, author of Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters Read more From the Back Cover "Gerda Norvig has written a book on Blake's Bunyan illustrations that is much more than that: it revises our sense of Blake, of the relationship of illustrator to illustrated text, and the assumptions of Romantic and Romanticist writing. Blake, certainly, will not be the same after Norvig's vigorous analysis, and it is arguable that the same may be true of Romanticism."--Ronald Paulson, author of "Figure and Abstraction in Contemporary Painting"Specialists in both Blake studies and English Romanticism will find this book extremely interesting and useful. Norvig carefully analyzes for the first time a set of Blake's most accomplished illustrations, a set that (as she points out) has very rarely been reproduced or exhibited. These designs certainly deserve to be better known, and Norvig's insightful and stimulating interpretation of them makes their importance to Blake's thought and career amply clear. This is certainly a book that all Blake specialists will have to know."--Anne K. Mellor, author of "Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters Read more See all Editorial Reviews
Reviews
Some time ago I reread Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry before having another read through of the poems of William Blake including the longer poems The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem. Despite my appreciation of Frye's book I was struck by the disconnect between many of Frye's well-expressed and coherent ideas and the poems themselves. I noticed also that Frye barely quoted from any of the poems or analyzed any passage specifically. At that point I started to look around for other texts which offered a different viewpoint from Frye to see if my dissatisfaction was justified or not. The more I read the alternative views the more convinced I became that Frye's account was seriously deficient. I do not think he is entirely wrong or that there is nothing of value in his book. However, I strongly recommend that readers interested in Blake's poetry read alternative views.The ones I have found most useful and interesting include the current book listed here as well as the following: The Four Zoas (Photographic Facsimile (Magno & Erdman), Narrative Unbound (Donald Ault), The Dialectic of Vision (Fred Dortort), The Traveler in the Evening (Morton Paley), Rethinking Blake's Textuality (Molly Rothenberg),Blake's Critique of Transcendence (Peter Otto) and some of the articles in Blake's Sublime Allegory (Curran & Wittreich Eds.)It should be noted that this book has excellent production values. The illustrations are clear and crisply rendered. This is also a well written book.