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William Blake and the Body
College Literature, Spring 2004 by Longacre, Jeffrey
The body is currently a hot topic in literary and cultural studies, and this enhances the timeliness of Connolly's book. William Blake and the Body is not for the uninitiated. Connolly demands considerable prior knowledge of Blake's work and provides little summary or elucidation of the complexities of Blake's strange mythology, but there are other books for this. This book is a must for Blake scholars and would probably also be of interest to Romanticists-particularly the first two chapters, which are rich in general historical background. Also, although she adequately engages the difficult problem of gender in Blake's work, Connolly could have developed some of this scrutiny a little further, but perhaps that subject is too large and needs a book unto itself. Connolly states,"Artistic ideas, then, just like human beings, can be imprisoned by bodies which obscure rather than show forth their eternal forms" (121). With this book, Connolly provides a key to unlocking Blake's body of work in order to better reveal the beauty of his eternal form.
Jeffrey Longacre
University of Tulsa
Copyright West Chester University Spring 2004
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved
