Blake and the City - Tapa dura

Though usually classified as a Romantic, Blake subverts and dissolves the binaries on which Romanticism turns: self and other, art and nature, country and city. Rather than reject the city outright like many of his contemporaries, Blake embraces it as the intricate workshop of human imagination. Each chapter of this book focuses on a specific text of Blake's that illustrates a particular conception of metaphorical embodiment of the city. These shifting metaphors emphasize the construction of all human environments and the need for imaginative labor to build and interpret them. This study seeks to bridge a gap between "transcendent" and "historicist" readings of Blake while at the same time challenging assumptions that still color our view of the city in the twenty-first century. Jennifer Davis Michael is Associate Professor of English at the University of the South.

Jennifer Davis Michael is Associate Professor of English at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. She received bachelor's degrees there and at Oxford University, and she holds a doctorate from Northwestern University. Her articles have appeared in such journals as Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, European Romantic Review, and Romanticism, as well as in the collection Prophetic Character: Essays on William Blake in Honor of John E. Grant.