Blake And Lucretius: The Atomistic Materialism Of The Selfhood (The New Antiquity)

This book demonstrates the way in which William Blake aligned his idiosyncratic concept of the Selfhood – the lens through which the despiritualised subject beholds the material world – with the atomistic materialism of the Epicurean school as it was transmitted through the first-century BC Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. By addressing this philosophical debt, this study sets out a threefold re-evaluation of Blake’s work: to clarify the classical stream of Blake’s philosophical heritage through Lucretius; to return Blake to his historical moment, a thirty-year period from 1790 to 1820 which has been described as the second Lucretian moment in England; and to employ a new exegetical model for understanding the phenomenological parameters and epistemological frameworks of Blake’s mythopoeia. Accordingly, it is revealed that Blake was not only aware of classical atomistic cosmogony and sense-based epistemology but that he systematically mapped postlapsarian existence onto an Epicurean framework.

• | Author: Joshua Schouten De Jel
• | Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• | Publication Date: Nov 25, 2022
• | Number of Pages: 276 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 3030888908
• | ISBN-13: 9783030888909