|
Featured Papers from Direct Essays
|
|
|
|
|
|
This is a preview of a paper to view the full text you need to signup and login.
|
Blake and the Gothic
|
|
|
Blake’s Gothic Imagery
Roger Easson writes that “the Gothic revival is a crucial element in the creation of Blake’s poetic and pictorial aesthetic” (153), and even a cursory reading of Blake’s major poems enlightens the reader to the dark, restrained images present at the core of Blake’s message of spiritual and physical liberation. When Blake writes of the “mind- forged manacles” in London and the “dark secret love” in The Sick Rose, he presents the reader with inverted images of a free imaginative mind and a joyful love. As Blake shows in his work, the gothic trope is an inversion or a pealing away of the glossy, social veil that hides the horrors of society, a way of thinking and acting that binds, restricts, devalues, and degrades the human spirit. Writing during the rise of the Gothic novel between 1760 and 1820, Blake’s revolutionary vision appropriates gothic imagery, imagery that projects the “rebellion against a constraining neoclassical aesthetic ideal of order and unity” (Kilgour 3).
The structure of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience in itself becomes a gothic trope, creating an inversion between light and dark, good and evil, and social fiction versus social reality.
|
|
|
To link to this page, copy the following code to your site:
|
|
Paper Information
|
|
|
Title: Blake and the Gothic
Words: 989
Rating: None
Pages: 4
submitted by: barbarahall
If you think this paper shouldn't be here then
|
|
|
|
|
Signup & Login
|
|
|
If you don't currently have a login then Signup here
|
|
|
|
|
Pre-Written Papers
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Custom Papers
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
