We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
William Blake’s Milton As Missionary against Empire
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 November 2023
The seventh chapter studies how Blake’s poem Milton (c.1804) reconceives key aspects of epic tradition as it refigures missionary work as a metaphor for promoting freedom from the limitations of imperial discourse. Showing how literal missionary work can assist empire by holding people in states of subjection, Blake more abstractly repudiates the limitations that Equiano addresses concretely. I argue that Blake locates in the tensions between missionary work and empire the resources to oppose imperialism. While some of Blake’s rhetoric resembles that of actual missionaries and imperialists of his day, I suggest that Blake works from within such orthodox discourses to undermine them. The unresolved contradictions in Blake’s Milton – both in his use of the epic genre and in his appeals to religious and imperial rhetoric – heighten the challenge that he poses to the stable circumscriptions of imperial discourse.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
