A Bastard Kind of Reasoning: William Blake and Geometry

by Andrew M. Cooper

Overview

Ranges widely and deeply across William Blake's oeuvre to show how his post-Newtonian vision of space-time anticipates Einsteinian relativity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781438493220
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	05/01/2023
Series:	SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
Pages:	340
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Now retired, Andrew M. Cooper previously taught in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of William Blake and the Productions of Time and Doubt and Identity in Romantic Poetry.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: Geometry and Blake’s Newton Print

1. “Oh, but you’re just analogizing . . .”

2. Learning to Read in a Force Field: Songs of Innocence, Hartleyan Psychology, and the Physics of R. J. Boscovich

3. The Book of Urizen as a Vortex of Perception

4. A Brief Particular History of the Fourth Dimension of Space, with Special Reference to Milton: A Poem

5. The Neoplatonism of Blake’s Mundane Soul

6. Berkeley: Very Close, but No Cigar

Conclusion: The Unified Space-Time of The Vision of the Last Judgment
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Andrew Cooper's brilliant and unorthodox book incorporates Blake's cosmology into an intellectual history of relativity theory that extends from Plato to Alfred North Whitehead. Amply demonstrating his superb command of Blake's entire body of poetry and prose (along with a good cross-section of his visual art), Cooper offers a valuable new paradigm for making sense of a visionary cosmology that often seems fanciful or obscure even to serious readers." — Noah Heringman, author of Deep Time: A Literary History

From the Publisher