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• Title: Saree Makdisi. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790'S (Book Review)
• Author : Studies in Romanticism
• Release Date : January 22, 2004
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 182 KB

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Saree Makdisi. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790's. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp. xviii+392. $22.00 paper. Saree Makdisi repeatedly quotes a remark in Blake's letter of 12 April 1827 to George Cumberland ("But since the French Revolution Englishmen are all intermeasurable by one another: certainly a happy state of agreement, in which I for one do not agree"), and quite correctly sees its implication that the whole modern political and ideological orientation we think of as "liberal democracy" is manifestly not something Blake would have been able to accept wholesale, or perhaps at all. Unfortunately, as presented in this study, the imagined survival or continual evolution of this orientation, referred to rather obsessively throughout the book as "the hegemonic radical position," depends not a little on its abstraction, and indeed Makdisi treats it from the beginning as roughly equivalent to "individualism" in the liberal tradition, against which Blake, he insists, reacted in anger: "Blake was unwilling to accept the hegemonic radical notion that the individual could have ontological priority outside human history and could hence be taken for granted as the transcendental and transhistorical basis for liberty" (11). The well-taken skepticism here about the ideological basis of "individuality" in a hegemonic market economy (which also haunts the difference between the neo-classical and the romantic Blake) is shadowed by a contradiction, to which the author is less sensitive than he should be, which is that his vision of the orientation tends to be quite as "transcendental and transhistorical" as the idea he has Blake objecting to. This is doubly unfortunate in a study which claims to "contextualize" Blake as never before (the book is heavily advertised to this effect). How can one historicize if the history of England from Blake to Blair is one long hegemonic blur?

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