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

Abstract

Dangerous Enthusiasm considers Blake's prophetic books written during the 1790s in the light of the French Revolution controversy raging at the time. His works are shown to be less the expressions of isolated genius than the products of a complex response to the cultural politics of his contemporaries. William Blake's work presents a stern challenge to historical criticism. Jon Mee's well-received study meets the challenge by investigating contexts outside the domains 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. The study 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 sceptical radicalism of the Enlightenment. Dangerous Enthusiasm presents a more comprehensively politicized picture of Blake than any previous study. Mee...places Blake well and correctly...Dangerous Enthusiasm will do much to take Blake out of the somewhat attenuated discourse of analytic academicism and to put his back in a credible place. ' 'a general, incontestable conclusion that, whatever their personal relations, Blake's political opinions, expressed in both his writings and his engravings, were much more Paineite than has ever been previously appreciated. Here in these pages Paine grows in stature, with the eager Blake at his side,,, [a] splendid volume...'