Rethinking Blake's Textuality

In this reassessment of Blake's textuality, Molly Anne Rothenberg seeks to bridge the gaps between critics who read Blake's poems as fixed "works" with one meaning and those who read them as indeterminate "texts". Rothenberg explores the connections and inferences among Blake's unusual textual practice, his subversion of authority, and his conception of subjectivity. Arguing against scholars who characterise Blake as a liberatory humanist, Rothenberg uses 18th-century documents with which Blake was familiar, including Alexander Geddes' "Prospectus of a New Translation of the Holy Bible", Thomas Gray's "The Bard", and Kant's philosophical writings, to show how Blake's rejection of the transcendental produces a critique of the very conceptions of subjectivity, liberty and truth that have been presumed by the tradition of Enlightenment humanism, from Kant to the present. Concentrating on Blake's epic poem "Jerusalem", Rothenberg argues that Blake has the appearance of falling on the side of the post-structuralist critics because he was concerned with the same epistemological crises with which they are concerned.
However, her use of 18th-century documents reveals not abstract, theoretical reasons for dealing with these crises, but rather the real anxiety that had been growing since the English Civil War about the sources of authority. Seen from this perspective, Blake's poem speaks from his own historical moment while offering significant instruction on the formulations and limitations of phenomenology, deconstructive and Marxist post-structuralism, and radical feminism. By addressing debates within Blake criticism as well as within contemporary literary theory generally, Rothenberg presents a poet who is primarily concerned with human freedom - the freedom to read and interpret independently and the corresponding freedom from a potentially totalitarian authority. "Rethinking Blake's Textuality" offers students of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and post-structuralism a clear understanding of the purposes of Blake's textual practice, the intellectual context within which it developed, and its value for our time.