Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake

Scholars have often drawn attention to William Blake''s unusual sensitivity to his social context. In this book Nicholas Williams situates Blake''s thought historically by showing how through the decades of a long and productive career Blake consistently responded to the ideas writing and art of contemporaries. Williams presents detailed readings of several of Blake''s major poems alongside Rousseau''s Emile Wollstonecraft''s Vindication of the Rights of Women Paine''s Rights of Man Burke''s Reflections of the Revolution in France and Robert Owen''s Utopian experiments. In doing so he offers revealing new insights into key Blake texts and draws attention to their inclusion of notions of social determinism theories of ideology-critique and utopian traditions. Williams argues that if we are truly to understand ideology as it relates to Blake we must understand the practical situation in which the ideological Blake found himself. His study is a revealing commentary on the work of one of our most challenging poets.