Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Blake’s Compasses: Materialist Criticism and Romanticism as a Structure of Feeling

Blake’s Compasses: Materialist Criticism and Romanticism as a Structure of Feeling <p>abstract:</p><p>The present article focuses on a potential methodological problem of materialist literary criticism: How can a materialist critique adequately describe and analyze the aspects of a work of art that seem least material—interiority, subjectivity, ambivalence, ineffability, and so on? The central question is whether Raymond Williams’s concept of a “structure of feeling” can adequately bridge this apparent gap between materiality and interiority. The case study used to explore this question is attitudes toward quantification in William Blake. Blake’s work displays contradictory responses to quantification, and, above all, to one of quantification’s symbols: compasses. These contradictory responses, it is argued, are in fact the sublimation of Blake’s ambivalent attitudes to the material conditions that determine his thought and art: nascent industrial capitalism.</p> http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Interdisciplinary Literary Studies Penn State University Press

Blake’s Compasses: Materialist Criticism and Romanticism as a Structure of Feeling

Lee-Six, Edward
Interdisciplinary Literary Studies , Volume 24 (1) – Mar 2, 2022
Download PDF
26 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/penn-state-university-press/blake-s-compasses-materialist-criticism-and-romanticism-as-a-structure-YWB2ZXq7kO
Publisher
Penn State University Press
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University.
ISSN
2161-427X

Abstract

<p>abstract:</p><p>The present article focuses on a potential methodological problem of materialist literary criticism: How can a materialist critique adequately describe and analyze the aspects of a work of art that seem least material—interiority, subjectivity, ambivalence, ineffability, and so on? The central question is whether Raymond Williams’s concept of a “structure of feeling” can adequately bridge this apparent gap between materiality and interiority. The case study used to explore this question is attitudes toward quantification in William Blake. Blake’s work displays contradictory responses to quantification, and, above all, to one of quantification’s symbols: compasses. These contradictory responses, it is argued, are in fact the sublimation of Blake’s ambivalent attitudes to the material conditions that determine his thought and art: nascent industrial capitalism.</p>

Journal

Interdisciplinary Literary Studies – Penn State University Press

Published: Mar 2, 2022

There are no references for this article.