Joyce's Blake: troubling idealism

Thesis

This thesis is a study of William Blake’s position within James Joyce’s work. Quotations from and references to Blake occur across Joyce’s writing and in his early reception, but these have not received comprehensive study. I trace Blake’s role within Joyce’s shifting conceptions of artistic ambition. Joyce’s 1912 lecture on Blake designates him an exemplar of ‘Idealism in English Literature’, and Joyce’s ongoing engagements with what he terms Blake’s ‘anarchic’ idealism emphasise its complexity and its troubling consequences. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Blake circulated as a figure of artistic freedom and an example of unviable vision. Within Joyce’s immediate literary circles, Blake functioned as a representative of contemporary radical aesthetic and moral innovation. I examine the contexts from which and into which Joyce mobilises Blake’s volatile status. During Joyce’s life, the body of Blake’s available work was fragmented and of variable quality. Investigation of Joyce’s interest in Blake requires attention to a contested and unstable textual entity.

Chapter One details the textual specificities and discordant cultural contexts of Joyce’s ongoing engagement with Blake. Chapter Two outlines the importance for Joyce of Blake’s difficulties in negotiating an audience and traces Blake’s role in the early reception of Ulysses. Chapter Three assesses Joyce’s reading of Blake’s anti-naturalism and linguistic experimentation. Chapter Four examines intersections between Blake’s pursuit of sexual liberation and Joyce’s writing life, particularly in Exiles. Chapter Five turns to Joyce’s interest in Blake’s non-orthodox theology and W. B. Yeats’s account of Blake’s ‘religion of art’, and I provide genetic analysis of explicit references to Blake in Finnegans Wake. Ironic citations of Blake accompany a shift from Joyce’s early optimism about his art having a beneficial communal role to a commitment to severe textual difficulty. For Joyce, Blake’s unsettling work and fraught reception situate him as an ambivalent precursor in a formally and personally disruptive art.

Authors: Harder, M

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-nzkvb9koo
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: reception studies; Romanticism; Irish studies; Rossetti; embodiment; ethics; Yeats; Joyce; modernist studies; genetic criticism; Blake; sexuality
• Subjects: Modernism (Aesthetics); Literary form; Modernism (Literature); Romanticism; Poetics; Literature