Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s

by Jon Mee

William Blake's work presents a stern challenge to historical criticism. Jon Mee's new study meets that challenge by investigating contexts outside the domain of standard literary histories. He traces the distinctive rhetoric of the illuminated books to the French Revolution controversy of the 1790s and Blake's fusion of the diverse currents of radicalism abroad in that decade. Dangerous Enthusiasm presents a more comprehensively politicized picture of Blake than any previous study. It is supported by a wealth of original research which will be of interest to historians and literary critics alike. Blake emerges from these pages as a "bricoleur" who fused the language of London's popular dissenting culture with the more skeptical radicalism of the Enlightenment. His prophetic books are shown to be less the expressions of isolated genius than the products of a complex response to the cultural politics of his contemporaries.

Genres: Romanticism, History

268 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Mark Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Locates Blake firmly with his nonconformist contemporaries,in the 1790's onward,showing how his later 'Prophecies' drew from a range of radical millennarians ( such as Richard Brothers).

Shows how Blake's response to the French and American revolutions, in poems such as 'Europe' 'America' and his own reworkings of mythography (such as the'Great Albion',the fallen 'Giant' ,and 'Orc') was situated in the cultural politics of his time,by using 'bricolage' to reinterpret traditional Biblical texts and stories to challenge its cultural hegemony.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good study re-emphasizing for the world of Blake scholarship Blake's affinity with the culture of English radicalism in the 1790s (Mee was not the first, however, to make this association). Historically informative about this culture as well as convincing in its location of Blake within it. Suffers from a flattened and under nuanced understanding of Christianity historically so tends to miss Blake's affinities for some Christian traditions even while he attacks others.

[Uri · Rating 2 out of 5]

too academic for my taste