Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Blake Trust / Princeton University Press. Edited with an introduction by Andrew Lincoln.
Part of the pleasure of this lovely volume results from Andrew Lincoln’s intelligent introduction and commentary. Irene Taylor, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly.
Spiritual History
Blake’s understanding of his own, violent age, shaped by enlightenment history and the bible.
Lincoln’s subtle and illuminating study…deserves to become the starting point-point for future critical debate on The Four Zoas. Steve Clarke, Times Literary Supplement.
Walter Scott and Modernity
Scott’s engagement with modern dilemmas.
This is a major, sophisticated book which looks at Scott in relation to that ‘modernity’ which is usually claimed to have its roots in the Enlightenment and whose possible supersession by way of the ‘postmodern’ dominates contemporary cultural debate. Claire Lamont, University of Newcastle.
Scott is becoming more widely recognized as a figure of central importance in British Romanticism as well as in the history of the novel and as a generative figure in the development of Scottish literature. Lincoln’s persuasive and incisive book clarifies the political and philosophical as well as literary terms of that achievement. Ian Duncan, University of California, Berkeley.
How did a people learning to think of themselves as ‘civilised’ reconcile themselves to war? How did they manage the problems of conscience posed by the terrible effects of warfare? And how did those who tried absolutely to oppose war justify their attempt? These questions relate primarily to moral issues rather than to problems of strategy, fire-power, logistics, or the many other factors that might occupy a historian of war. In this study, such questions are posed in relation to an expanding reading public, some of whom went to war, but most of whom stayed at home.
It was a readership that included growing numbers of women, and that was increasingly influenced by the social and moral concerns of the middling sort. It was often addressed by writers concerned with moral and material improvement –with the improvement of readers, of the poor and, increasingly, of those who lived in distant lands that had come under the power and influence of Britain. War had to be justified in ways compatible with peaceful social ideals, just as morals and manners had to be reformed in the light of those ideals. This book looks at how writers attempted to shape their readers’ attitudes towards war and peace.
Published by Cambridge University Press, 2023