Comparative Studies of William Blake
& Other Modern Writers & Thinkers:
A Bibliography for a Study in Ideology

Compiled by Ralph Dumain


Alford, Steven E. Irony and the Logic of the Romantic Imagination. New York: Peter Lang, 1984. [Friedrich Schlegel]

Altizer, Thomas J. J. The New Apocalypse: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake. Michigan State University Press, 1967.

Altizer, Thomas J. J. Satan and Apocalypse: And Other Essays in Political Theology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017. See essays: “The Absolute Heterodoxy of William Blake” and “Nietzsche and Apocalypse.”

Bertholf, Robert J.; Levitt, Annette S.; eds. William Blake and the Moderns. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

Mann, Paul. Review, in Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly, volume 17, issue 4, Spring 1984, pp. 169-172.

Bidney, Martin. Blake and Goethe: Psychology, Ontology, Imagination. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988.

Birenbaum, Harvey. Between Blake and Nietzsche: The Reality of Culture. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1992.

Clark, Lorraine. Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Spectre of Dialectic. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Clark, Steve; Whittaker, Jason; eds. Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture. Basingstoke, UK; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Gardner, Charles. Vision & Vesture: A Study of William Blake in Modern Thought. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Limited, 1916.

Hanke, Amala M[aria]. Spatiotemporal Consciousness in English and German Romanticism: A Comparative Study of Novalis, Blake, Wordsworth and Eichendorff. Frankfurt M. Main; Bern: Peter Lang, 1981.

Hoagwood, Terence Allan. Prophecy and the Philosophy of Mind: Traditions of Blake and Shelley. University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1985.

Huneker, James. Egoists: A Book of Supermen (Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Anatole France, Huysmans, Barrès, Nietzsche, Blake, Ibsen, Stirner, and Ernest Hello; with Portrait of Stendhal; Unpublished Letter of Flaubert; and Original Proof Page of Madame Bovary). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909.

John, Brian. Supreme Fictions: Studies in the Work of William Blake, Thomas Carlyle, W. B. Yeats, and D. H. Lawrence. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974.

Larrissy, Edward. Blake and Modern Literature. Basingstoke, UK; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

LaValley, Albert J. Carlyle and the Idea of the Modern: Studies in Carlyle’s Prophetic Literature and Its Relation to Blake, Nietzsche, Marx, and Others. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968.

Magnus, Bernd; Stewart, Stanley; Mileur, Jean-Pierre. Nietzsche’s Case: Philosophy as/and Literature. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Parker, Fred (Graham Frederick). Devil as Muse: Blake, Byron, and the Adversary. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2011.

Punter, David. Blake, Hegel and Dialectic. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1982.

Rainsford, Dominic. Authorship, Ethics and the Reader: Blake, Dickens, Joyce. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

Robinson, Henry Crabb; Sadler, Thomas, ed. Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson. 2 vols. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1967. (Reprint.)

Rovira, James. Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety. London; New York: Continuum, 2010.

Saurat, Denis. Blake & Modern Thought. London: Constable; New York: The Dial Press, 1929.

Schock, Peter A. Romantic Satanism: Myth and the Historical Moment in Blake, Shelley, and Byron. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Scholz, Joachim J. Blake and Novalis: A Comparison of Romanticism's High Arguments. Frankfurt am Main; Bern; Las Vegas: Lang, 1978.

Slawek, Tadeusz. Outlined Shadow: Phenomenology, Grammatology, Blake. Katowice: Uniwersyteta Sloaski, 1985.

Stevenson, Warren. Divine Analogy: A Study of the Creation Motif in Blake and Coleridge. Salzburg: Inst. f. Engl. Sprache u. Literatur, Univ. Salzburg, 1972.

Essays & Articles in Books

Alexander, Meena. “Falling Fire: Negativity of Knowledge in the Poetry of William Blake,” in Analecta Husserliana, Volume 23, edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1986), pp. 281-288.

Burwick, Frederick. “Blake's Laocoon and Job: Or, on the Boundaries of Painting and Poetry,” in The Romantic Imagination: Literature and Art in England and Germany, edited by Frederick Burwick and Jurgen Klein (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), pp. 125-155.

Lewis, Kevin. “The Impasse of Coleridge and the Way of Blake,” in The Interpretation of Belief: Coleridge, Schleiermacher, and Romanticism, edited by David Jasper (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), pp. 225-234.

Mitchell, W. J. T. “Idolatry: Nietzsche, Blake, and Poussin,” in Idol Anxiety, edited by Josh Ellenbogen and Aaron Tugendhaft (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011),

Neubauer, John. “The Sick Rose as an Aesthetic Idea: Kant, Blake, and the Symbol in Literature,” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture: Proceedings of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. II, edited by Harold E. Pagliaro (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972), pp. 167-79.

Pollard, David. “Self-Annihilation And Self-Overcoming: Blake And Nietzsche,” Exceedingly Nietzsche: Aspects of Contemporary Nietzsche-Interpretation, edited by David Farrell Krell and David Wood (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988), pp. 63-79.

Quinney, Laura. “Subjectivity and Despair in Blake and Kierkegaard,” in Romanticism and Philosophy: Thinking with Literature, edited by Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Thomas Constantinesco (New York; London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 179-193.

Journal Articles

Clark, David L. “’The Innocence of Becoming Restored’: Blake, Nietzsche, and the Disclosure of Difference,” Studies in Romanticism (SIR), vol. 29 no. 1, Spring 1990, pp. 91-113.

Donnellan, Brendan. ”Blake and Nietzsche,” Nietzsche Studien: Internationales Jahrbuch fur die Nietzsche-Forschung (Nietzsches), vol. 14, 1985, pp. 269-280.

Dorrbecker, Detlef W. “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter and Blake’s Night Thoughts,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, vol. 11, 1977, pp. 124-25.

Majdiak, Daniel; Wilkie, Brian. “Blake and Freud: Poetry and Depth Psychology,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 6, July 1972, pp. 87-98.

Pollard, David. “Self-annihilation and Self-overcoming: Blake and Nietzsche,” in Exceedingly Nietzsche: Aspects of Contemporary Nietzsche-Interpretation, edited by David Farrell Krell and David Wood (London; New York: Routledge, 1988), Chapter 4, pp. 63-79.

Trawick, Leonard M. “William Blake’s German Connection,” Colby Library Quarterly, vol. 13, 1977, pp. 229-45.

Dissertations

(DAI  = Dissertation Abstracts International)

Esterhammer, Angela. Vision and the Limits of Language: The Poetics of Blake and Holderlin. 1990. (DAI, vol. 51, no. 1, July 1990, p. 157A.)

Humma, John B. From Transcendental to Descendental: The Romantic Thought of Blake, Nietzsche, Lawrence. 1970. (DAI, vol. 30, 1970, p. 4454A.)

Meyer, Eric D. Narratives of Development: Romanticism, Modernity, and Imperial History: A Study of the Romantic Epic in Goethe, Byron, Blake, and Wordsworth. University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1991. (DAI, vol. 52, no. 5, Nov. 1991, p. 1752A, DAI No. DA9126431.)

Skelton, Susan. Blake, Novalis, and Nerval: The Poetics of the Apocalypse: A Study of Blake’s Milton, Novalis’ Hymnen an die Nacht and Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and Nerval’s Aurelia. 1974. (DAI, vol. 34, 1974, p. 7247A.)

Taft, Richard. The Relationship Between Art and Philosophy: An Examination of Hegel, Blake, Nietzsche and Heidegger. PhD dissertation, Duquesne University, 1984.

Wilkes, John E., III. Aeolian Visitations and the Harp Defrauded: Essays on Donne, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Flaubert, Heine and James Wright. 1974. (DAI, vol. 35, 1974, p. 1129A.)

Note

Endless possibilities for comparative studies of Blake and other writers, thinkers, and bodies of thought exist, many of which have been explored—Blake and the Gnostics, antinomians, Milton, Newton, Locke, other English Romantic poets, and various other literary figures all the way up to Allen Ginsberg and beyond, and other thinkers and philosophical approaches, poststructuralism being one contemporary trend. I began collecting these references in the 1990s, beginning with figures I was interested in comparing, but also with suspicion as to the validity of affinities claimed. I was particularly interested in comparisons not only with English writers and philosophers, but with others in other national traditions. (Caveat: not every writer within a nation or linguistic sphere belongs to the same tradition. Blake himself did not partake of the same class, occupation, education, or intellectual lineage as the other English Romantics.) My interest began with German Romantics such as Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis and philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, with considerable skepticism about any posited kinship with Blake. More generally, one could relate Blake to a range of modern figures, or modernity and the ideological and cultural trends within it, also strategically represented here. An intuitive feel for my interests might be gleaned from the references above. Frankly, in terms of general social and ideological orientation rather than more specialized foci of intellectual competence, I rate Blake higher than any of the other figures appearing in this bibliography. Related topics to receive bibliographies of their own are:

Blake & Hegel
Blake & Marxism
English & German Romanticism & Philosophy

As a partial bibliographical fulfillment regarding the sociopolitical aspects of Blake, see my 1997 bibliography William Blake—Social and Political Aspects: Bibliography Based on the Collection of Ralph Dumain. See William Blake Study Guide for more links on this site and others.

I have supplemented my original list of books with additional books in the Library of Congress. The articles in books, journal articles, and theses and dissertations reflect my research as of August 1998.

— RD, 29 January & 9 February 2019


M. Szenczi on Imagination & Nature according to Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Bacon, & Kant

Blake and Feuerbach: An Odd Couple?
by R. Dumain

William Blake on Fixing Error

Love and Intellect II: For Blake, Against Nietzsche: Outline of Program

Anna Balakian on misbegotten intertextuality

Audience/Reading Public, Professionalization/Specialization of Writers, Literary Forms, Division of Labor

William Blake—Social and Political Aspects: Bibliography Based on the Collection of Ralph Dumain

William Blake Study Guide

Anti-Nietzsche Bibliography

English & German Romanticism & Philosophy: A Bibliography


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Uploaded 29 January 2019
Last update 28 January 2020
Previous update 25 January 2020

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