William Blake's Comic Vision Book

In the eighteenth century, comedy played a pivotal role in debates on aesthetics, education, spirituality and morality. However, despite William Blake's full-bloodied engagement with the world of eighteenth-century ideas, the abundance of wit and humour in his work and his own claim that he 'loved laughing', literary criticism traditionally paints a sombre portrait of a man for whom laughter was, at best, a crude tool for attacking the dominant ideology and, at worst, a defensive psychological twitch. This groundbreaking study blends a close reading of Blake's early work, including An Island in the Moon, and The Songs of Innocence and of Experience with fascinating historical research to demonstrate that comedy was an essential component of Blake's artistic Vision. Appealing to both specialist and casual reader alike, William Blake's Comic Vision shows how Blake's comic genius mixed biblical profundity, fairground hilarity, Pythonesque absurdity and Shakespearean warmth in some fascinating ways and some unexpected placed.Read More