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Blakespotting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Mike Goode
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Abstract

This essay argues that our inability to map the circulation of William Blake's proverbs in contemporary Anglo-American culture is critically and politically instructive. Opening historicist literary criticism and reception study out to each other, I contend that mainstream citations of the proverbs today point the historicist critic to the radical political potential that Blake's poetic form possessed (but never successfully unleashed) in the original historical contexts in which Blake wrote. Understanding the proverb form and its centrality to Blake's poetry sheds light on how and why his work resists analysis through familiar literary-historical categories like text, corpus, reader, and reading formation. Recognizing this resistance clarifies in turn how, through its use of proverbs and proverblike sentences, his poetry constituted a heterogeneous regulatory challenge to the regulatory power of systems of laws–common, religious, and divine. (MG)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 121 , Issue 3 , May 2006 , pp. 769 - 786
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2006

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