The Reception of Blake in the Orient

Description

This volume brings together research from international scholars focusing attention on the longevity and complexity of Blake`s reception in Japan and elsewhere in the East. It is designed as not only a celebration of his art and poetry in new and unexpected contexts but also to contest the intensely nationalistic and parochial Englishness of his work, and in broader terms, the inevitable passivity with which Romanticism (and other Western intellectual movements) have been received in the Orient.

Steve Clark is Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo. Masashi Suzuki is Professor in the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University and is ex-President of the Japan Association of English Romanticism

"Blake has, for whatever reasons, been thoroughly taken up by what one of the contributors charitably calls 'the liong and distinguished Japanese tradition of reception.' The poet's 'bright Japan' has proved to be one of his major resting places." - Donald Richie, Japan Times, May 2006 -- Donald Richie mentioned in The Chronicle of Higher Education June 30, 2006 "This welcome collection of essays has multiple aims. Its introduction sets it squarely amid recent attempts not just to look at origins and contexts of Blake's output but also at the way it has been received and deployed in later times and places. Here those times and places are extremely diverse...the essays on display here are varied and impressive..." - Jon Mee, University of Warwick, for Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, November 2007 "This book is based on the Conference 'Blake in the Orient', held at Kyoto University, Japan on 29 and 30 November 2003 and though all the papers read there are not printed here the contributors amount to no less than 25...while the variety of contributors and contents makes it rather difficult to give an instant overview, every effort should be made to review these ambitious attempts to form a bridge between East and West in Blake scholarship. According to editors Steve Clark and Masashi Suzuki, it aims to approach current Post-Colonialist issues, among others, how Blake responded to the ideologies of Imperialism...It seeks to overcome insular celebration of the poet as essentially English and consider how his work is assimilated outside Britain and Europe with Japan for its central focus...In Afterword Elinor Shaffer emphasizes the significance of this volume and the Kyoto Conference on Blake, out of which it emerged, as an exemplary record of encounters between east and West for more than 100 years and as 'a permanent reminder of the unpredictable fertility of a major writer, at home and abroad'...This book, as has been hinted, cannot be considered a strictly coherent whole whose parts are closely connected with each other, but rather it consists of essays very difference in tone as well as in content. Instead of being necessarily a negative aspect, however, this reflects Blake's fertility inspiring, to borrow Shafer's words, 'other minds in other times, other words and other image'. We should admire the editors' efforts to organize so diverse materials into a book..." - Akira Fujimaki, Studies in English Literature, No. 49, 2008 -- Akira Fujimaki