"The Chained Boy": Orc and Blake's idea of revolution.
Item
-
Title
-
"The Chained Boy": Orc and Blake's idea of revolution.
-
Identifier
-
AAI9521278
-
identifier
-
9521278
-
Creator
-
Hobson, Christopher Z.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Joseph Wittreich
-
Date
-
1995
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, English
-
Abstract
-
The Chained Boy is the first full-length study of Orc, Blake's central emblem of social, sexual, and psychic revolt. Through Orc, it traces Blake's changing view of revolution from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell through Jerusalem. It presents three central theses: (1) Orc plays a crucial role in all Blake's prophetic works, rather than just the early prophecies. (2) Blake remained committed to a radical social upheaval--a social "apocalypse" throughout his life; he did not believe in an "internalized" apocalypse or use his work to subvert apocalyptic conceptions. (3) Blake's late religious symbolism always refers in part to collective, social human action.;An introductory chapter addresses the place of political concerns in Blake's work and the social and psychic domains of his symbolism. This chapter also introduces the issue of the French Revolution and its meaning in later radical thought, and outlines a way of responding to revolution that it takes as Blake's.;A second chapter challenges the currently dominant paradigm of Orc's significance, Northrop Frye's "Orc cycle," a reading of Orc that asserts the futility of social action. An exhaustive examination of its evidentiary basis concludes that the "cycle" is Frye's interpretive creation and has no foundation in Blake.;Subsequent chapters examine Orc and Blake's politics in the Lambeth prophecies, The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem. Through Orc, the Lambeth works first espouse Jacobin conceptions, then offer a socially radical criticism of them. In later works, Blake dramatizes the degeneration of the French Revolution, responds ambivalently to the authoritarian implications of Jacobin radicalism and his own apocalyptic tradition, and finally finds adequate poetic terms for a new conception of mass-based, broadly democratic social upheaval. Chapters on Milton and Jerusalem demonstrate the simultaneously religious and social meaning of Blake's late symbolism and provide the first full social reading of these poems, going beyond David V. Erdman's topical explications.;A final chapter examines Blake's fusion of apocalyptic social upheaval with democratic social process; juxtaposes this fusion to contemporary and later ideas of revolution, notably Marxism; and considers the permanent significance of Orc.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
