Exploring the work of William Blake within the context of Methodism – the largest 'dissenting' religious group during his lifetime – this book contributes to ongoing critical debates surrounding Blake's religious affinities by suggesting that, contrary to previous thinking, Blake held sympathies with certain aspects of Methodism.

In this innovative study, Jesse challenges the prevailing view of Blake as an antinomian and describes him as a theological moderate who defended an evangelical faith akin to the Methodism of John Wesley. She arrives at this conclusion by contextualizing Blake’s works not only within Methodism, but in relation to other religious groups he addressed in his art, including the Established Church, deism, and radical religions. Further, she analyzes his works by sorting out the theological “road signs” he directed to each audience. This approach reveals Blake engaging each faction through its most prized beliefs, manipulating its own doctrines through visual and verbal guide-posts designed to communicate specifically with that group. She argues that, once we collate Blake’s messages to his intended audiences—sounding radical to the conservatives and conservative to the radicals—we find him advocating a system that would have been recognized by his contemporaries as Wesleyan in orientation. This thesis also relies on an accurate understanding of eighteenth-century Methodism: Jesse underscores the empirical rationalism pervading Wesley’s theology, highlighting differences between Methodism as practiced and as publicly caricatured. Undergirding this project is Jesse’s call for more rigorous attention to the dramatic character of Blake’s works. She notes that scholars still typically use phrases like “Blake says” or “Blake believes,” followed by some claim made by a Blakean character, without negotiating the complex narrative dynamics that might enable us to understand the rhetorical purposes of that statement, as heard by Blake’s respective audiences. Jesse maintains we must expect to find reflections in Blake’s works of all the theologies he engaged. The question is: what was he doing with them, and why? In order to divine what Blake meant to communicate, we must explore how those he targeted would have perceived his arguments. Jesse concludes that by analyzing the dramatic character of Blake’s works theologically through this wide-angled, audience-oriented approach, we see him orchestrating a grand rapprochement of the extreme theologies of his day into a unified vision that integrates faith and reason.

This book traces specific cases of how evangelical and Methodist discourse practices interacted with major cultural and literary events during the long eighteenth century, from the rise of the novel to the Revolution controversy of the 1790s to the shifting ground for women writers leading up to the Reform era in the 1830s.

The requisite guide to Blake's ideas and symbols

'To see a World in a Grain of Sand 'And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour' William Blake wrote some of the most moving and memorable verse in the English language. Deeply committed to visionary and imaginative experience, yet also fiercely engaged with the turbulent politics of his era, he is now recognised as a major contributor to the Romantic Movement. This edition presents Blake's poems in their literary categories and genres to which they belong: his much-loved lyrics, ballads, comic and satirical verse, descriptive and discursive poems, verse epistles, and, finally, his remarkable 'prophetic' poems, including the whole of his two diffuse epics, Milton and Jerusalem. Blake's poetry is intellectually challenging as well as formally inventive, and this edition has a substantial critical introduction which places his ideas in the contemporary context of the Enlightenment and the artistic reaction against its key assumptions.

Over the last ten years the field of Blake studies has profited from new discoveries about Blake's life and work. This book examines the effect that Blake's mother's recently discovered Moravianism has had on our understanding of his poetry, and gives special attention to Moravianism and Swedenborgianism and their relation to his sexual politics. This is accomplished by a close reading of Blake's poetry, which examines in detail the subjects of religion, sex, and the attempted colonization of Africa by a Swedenborgian utopian group.

This study traces the links between William Blake's ideas and radical Christian cultures in late eighteenth-century England. Drawing on a significant number of historical sources, Robert W. Rix examines how Blake and his contemporaries re-appropriated the sources they read within new cultural and political frameworks. By unravelling their strategies, the book opens up a new perspective on what has often been seen as Blake's individual and idiosyncratic ideas. We are also presented with the first comprehensive study of Blake's reception of Swedenborgianism. At the time Blake took an interest in Emanuel Swedenborg, the mystical and spiritual writings of the theosophist had become a platform for radical and revolutionary politics, as well as numerous heterodox practices, among his followers in England. Rix focuses on Swedenborgianism as a concrete and identifiable sub-culture from which a number of essential themes in Blake's works are reassessed. This book will appeal not only to Blake scholars, but to anyone studying the radical and sub- culture, religious, intellectual and cultural history of this period.

Examines Blake's place within a bourgeois culture in the process of redefining the role and meaning of sexuality.