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Full Description
Starting with William Blake's lost painting The Ancient Britons, this book shows how the visionary artist and poet reworked the Matter of Britain--the corpus of legends presenting an alternative history of Britain--into his own mythology. He thus adds to a tradition of Arthurian epic begun by Layamon in the 13th century and continued by Edmund Spenser in the 16th, in which a Romano-Celtic warlord becomes an icon of the English imagination.
This book shows how Britain became the promised land of a pagan goddess where mythical events are as important as those of history, and how the figure of Arthur is transformed into a British Messiah whose Christian realm is in continuous interaction with the Otherworld of Faerie, an imagined place between the spiritual and the earthly. Arthur as perceived through Blake's vision is the earthly embodiment of the fallen Albion; this exploration of the mythic underpinnings of the English sense of nationhood reveals an imaginative consciousness that links us to "human existence itself."
Contents
Table of Contents
Preface delete 1
Introduction: Imagining Arthur delete 5
Prologue: The Lost Ancient Britons delete 11
One. The Founding of Britain delete 31
Two. The Conversion of Britain delete 47
Three. Dreaming of Sovereignty delete 61
Four. Immortal Imagination delete 84
Five. The Image of a Brave Knight delete 102
Six. The King of Two Worlds delete 115
Seven. The Sun of Britain Sets delete 133
Eight. The British Messiah delete 149
Nine. The Couch of Albion delete 165
Epilogue: Believing Vision delete 178
Appendix: Masterful Images delete 183
Chapter Notes delete 191
Bibliography delete 195
Index delete 199
