William Blake's Divine Love

Visions of Oothoon
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-032-70619-1
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 290 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 577 g

Reihe: Routledge Studies in Romanticism

Despite the fact that William Blake summarises the plot of Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) in just eight lines in the prefatory ‘Argument,’ there are several contentious moments in the poem which continue to cause debate. Critics read Oothoon’s call to Theotormon’s eagles and her offer to catch girls of silver and gold as either evidence of her rape-damaged psyche or confirmation of her selfless love which transcends her socio-sexual state. How do we reconcile the attack of Theotormon’s eagles and the wanton play of the girls with Oothoon’s articulate and highly sophisticated expressions of spiritual truth and free love?

In William Blake’s Divine Love: Visions of Oothoon, Joshua Schouten de Jel explores the hermeneutical possibilities of Oothoon’s self-annihilation and the epistemological potential of her visual copulation by establishing an artistic and hagiographical heritage which informs the pictorial representation and poetic pronunciation of Oothoon’s enlightened entelechy. Working with Michelangelo’s The Punishment of Tityus (1532) and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–51), Oothoon’s ecstatic figuration reflects two iconographic traditions which, framed by the linguistic tropes of divine love expressed within a female-centred mystagogy, reveal the soteriological significance of Oothoon’s willing self-sacrifice.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Schouten de Jel, Joshua

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: ‘The nakedness of women is the work of God’

Chapter 3: The Tityus Tradition after Michelangelo

Chapter 4: Divine Love: The Transverberation

Chapter 5: L’Estasi di Santa Teresa

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Joshua Schouten de Jel is a doctoral graduate from the University of Plymouth, UK. He is the author of articles on William Blake, Mary Shelley, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and is also the author of Blake and Lucretius: The Atomistic Materialism of the Selfhood (Palgrave, 2021).