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A Bastard Kind of Reasoning

William Blake and Geometry

Andrew M Cooper author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:State University of New York Press

Published:1st May '23

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

A Bastard Kind of Reasoning cover

What do Einsteinian relativity, eighteenth-century field theory, Neoplatonism, and the overthrow of three-dimensional perspective have in common? The poet and artist William Blake's geometry—the conception of space-time that informs his work across media and genres. In this illuminating, inventive new study, Andrew M. Cooper reveals Blake to be the vehicle of a single imaginative vision in which art, literature, physics, and metaphysics stand united. Romantic-period physics was not, as others have assumed, materialist. Blake's cosmology forms part of his age's deep reevaluation of body and soul, of matter and Heaven, and even probes what it is to understand understanding, reason, and substance. Far from being anti-Newtonian, Blake was prophetically post-Newtonian. His poetry and art realized the revolutionary potential of Enlightened natural philosophy even as that philosophy still needed an Einstein for its physics to snap fully into focus. Blake's mythmaking exploits the imaginative reach of formal abstractions to generate a model of how sensation imparts physical extension to the world. More striking still, Cooper shows how Blake's art of vision leads us today to visualize four-dimensional concepts of space, time, and Man for ourselves.

"Andrew Cooper's brilliant and unorthodox book incorporates Blake's cosmology into an intellectual history of relativity theory that extends from Plato to Alfred North Whitehead. Amply demonstrating his superb command of Blake's entire body of poetry and prose (along with a good cross-section of his visual art), Cooper offers a valuable new paradigm for making sense of a visionary cosmology that often seems fanciful or obscure even to serious readers." — Noah Heringman, author of Deep Time: A Literary History

ISBN: 9781438493220

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 25mm

Weight: 227g

340 pages