Epics of sensibility: William Blake's Jerusalem and the romantic national epic

Abstract

This thesis situates William Blake's final epic Jerusalem within late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century contexts of epic writing and critical discourse, extending traditional readings of the poem that emphasise Blake's reception of classical and Miltonic models of the epic. A survey of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century minor epics reveals a period in which political and aesthetic values attached to the "epic" form are increasingly contested. The assimilation of popular forms of romance and sentimental literature into these works reflects a generic transformation of the epic that results in a hybrid "epic of sensibility". This thesis examines James Macpherson's Ossian poems and Joseph Cottle's early nineteenth-century Saxon epic Alfred, as examples of this transformation, and illustrates how deeply these authors draw upon the aesthetic and cultural contexts of the eighteenth-century "culture of sensibility" in their works. Jerusalem offers Blake's most elaborate critique of these eighteenth-century ideas, and in the process he draws into conversation with key intellectuals such as the Scottish moral philosopher, David Hume. As evidence of Blake's reaction against, and assimilation of, eighteenth-century philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic discourses, this thesis finds an analogue for Blake's utopian vision of the "New Jerusalem" in Hume's model of "sympathetic" civic society outlined in his Treatise of Human Nature. This thesis focuses particularly on Blake's re-articulation of Hume's theory of "sympathy" for his own vision of the Divine Humanity in eternity. A comparison between Blake and Hume's utopian communities reveals overlapping discourses of medicine, aesthetics, psychology, and political theory, a rich cultural matrix ultimately embodied in the authors' rhetorical constructions of the human body as corporeal metaphors for society and the nation-state.