Blake. Wordsworth. Religion.

Description

The history of responses to the works of William Wordsworth and William Blake can be divided into those who have tried to enact their poetry, and those who have tried to categorize it. This book argues that not only are both valid, but the conflict between them is staged in the poetry of both Blake and Wordsworth.

Jonathan Roberts is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool, UK.

Focusing on the work of Blake and Wordsworth, Jonathan Roberts's fine study takes us on a hermeneutical journey that underscores the complex nature of religious experience. As it correlates a wide range of interpretive approaches (autobiographical, historical, theological and the like), this is a book that will find a large and diverse readership not only among students of literature but among all those interested in what it means to read a poem or a set of poems as the expression of a 'religious' sensibility. -- Michael Lieb, Professor of English Emeritus and Research Professor of Humanities Emeritus, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA This short study is generous-minded, highly intelligent and readable, and calculated to send the reader back with renewed interest to the Blake and Wordsworth texts which it has selected -- Modern Language Review, Vol. 107 Part 1 In this stimulating and enjoyable book, Jonathan Roberts...effects something of a reconciliation between traditionally isolated methods of hermeneutics... In Roberts' presentation of the methods, he achieves with the discussion of religion and literary criticism what he believes Blake and Wordsworth to have achieved with their poetry: namely, a more complex and holistic, a more cooperative and dialectical approach to religious experiences and to the texts which purport them. -- Chris Kugler * Transpositions *