This volume brings together research from international scholars focusing attention on the longevity and complexity of Blake`s reception in Japan and elsewhere in the East. It is designed as not only a celebration of his art and poetry in new and unexpected contexts but also to contest the intensely nationalistic and parochial Englishness of his work, and in broader terms, the inevitable passivity with which Romanticism (and other Western intellectual movements) have been received in the Orient.
Author(s): Steve H. Clark, Masashi Suzuki
Publisher: Continuum
Year: 2006
Language: English
Pages: 361
Contents......Page 6
List of Illustrations......Page 9
Notes on Contributors......Page 11
1 Introduction......Page 14
PART I: The Orient in Blake: The Global Eighteenth Century......Page 28
2 Thel in Africa: William Blake and the Post-colonial, Post-Swedenborgian Female Subject......Page 30
3 ‘Typhon, the lower nature’: Blake and Egypt as the Orient......Page 42
4 Rebekah Bliss: Collector of William Blake and Oriental Books......Page 51
5 Blake and the Chinamen......Page 76
6 Colour Printing in the West and the East: William Blake and Ukiyo-e......Page 90
7 Representing Race: The Meaning of Colour and Line in William Blake’s 1790s Bodies......Page 100
8 Africa and Utopia: Refusing a ‘Local Habitation’......Page 117
9 An Empire of Exotic Nature: Blake’s Botanic and Zoomorphic Imagery......Page 134
10 Blake, Hayley and India: On Designs to a Series of Ballads (1802)......Page 147
11 ‘The Authority of the Ancients’: Blake and Wilkins’ Translation of the Bhagvat-Geeta......Page 158
PART II: Blake in the Orient: The Early-Twentieth-Century Japanese Reception......Page 172
12 Blake’s Oriental Heterodoxy: Yanagi’s Perception of Blake......Page 174
13 Self-Annihilation in Milton......Page 185
14 An Ideological Map of (Mis)reading: William Blake and Yanagi Muneyoshi in early-twentieth-century Japan......Page 194
15 The Female Voice in Blake Studies in Japan, 1910s–1930s......Page 208
16 Blake as Inspiration to Yanagi and Jugaku......Page 225
17 Individuality and Expression: The Shirakaba Group’s Reception of Blake’s Visual Art in Japan......Page 229
PART III: Blake in the Orient: Later Responses......Page 248
18 Blake’s Night: Tanizaki’s Shadows......Page 250
19 Ōe Kenzaburo’s Reading of Blake: An Anglophonic Perspective......Page 259
20 Nebuchadnezzar’s Sublime Torments: William Blake, Arthur Boyd and the East......Page 273
21 William Blake in Taiwan......Page 285
22 ‘Walking thro’ Eternity’: Blake’s Psychogeography and other Pedestrian Practices......Page 292
23 Blake’s Question (from the Orient)......Page 301
24 Afterword......Page 314
Bibliography......Page 316
B......Page 350
C......Page 351
E......Page 352
G......Page 353
I......Page 354
M......Page 355
N......Page 356
P......Page 357
S......Page 358
T......Page 359
W......Page 360
Z......Page 361
