William Blake’s Visual Sublime: The “Eternal Labours”

Abstract

This essay examines Blake’s visual aesthetics in the light of recent theories of the sublime. The latter, by seeing the sublime as a dynamic process located within creative activity itself, rather than as an experience that transcends the human, shed new light on Blake’s practice and theory. In particular, they make it possible to view the high degree of medium reflexivity in the illuminated books, as well as the artist’s original conception of linearism, as apt illustrations of such a sublime process. This essay shows how these well‐known features of Blake’s art reveal his heightened awareness of the incommensurability between material representation and the forms of his imagination, and of the necessity to sustain artistic production nevertheless. Such an experience of the terrifying and energetic struggle towards an ever‐elusive formal perfection, we argue, is a forceful expression of the sublime dynamics of visual creation.

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