The essay offers a revisionist reading of William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion in the context of the Renaissance notion of melancholia, and argues that the poem’s main female character, Oothoon, becomes the embodiment of a spiritualized concept of melancholy where imagination is equated with vision and associated with ingenium which corresponds to the Renaissance sapientia.
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3.
Auerbach, Erich (1959) ‘Figura’, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays, trans. Ralph Manheim. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith .
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Bentley, G. E. Jr. (1969) Blake Records. Oxford: Oxford University Press .
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Blake, William (1988) The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman , commentary by Harold Bloom. New York: Doubleday .
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Blake, William (1998) The Illuminated Books of William Blake, vol. 3: The Early Illuminated Books, ed. Morris Eaves , Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi . Princeton: Princeton University Press .
7.
Bloom, Harold (1963) Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. Garden City, NY: Doubleday .
8.
Bloom, Harold and Lionel Trilling (eds) (1973) Romantic Poetry and Prose. New York: Oxford University Press .
9.
Burton, Robert (1948) Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith . New York: Tudor Publishing Co .
10.
Chapman, Wes (1997) ‘Blake, Wollstonecraft, and the Inconsistency of Oothoon’ , Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly31: 4-16 .
11.
Damon, S. Foster (1969) Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols. London: Dawsons of Pall Mall .
12.
Eliade, Mircea (1958) Rites and Symbols of Initiation, trans. W. Trask. London: Harvill Press .
13.
Eliade, Mircea (1981) History of Religious Ideas, vol. I, trans. Willard Trask. Chicago: University of Chicago Press .
14.
Erdman, David (1974) The Illuminated Blake. Garden City, NY: Doubleday .
15.
Foucault, Michel (1976) The Archeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Harper and Row .
16.
Fox, Susan (1977) ‘The Female as Metaphor in William Blake’s Poetry’ , Critical Inquiry3: 507-519 .
17.
Frazer, George (ed.) (1929) Fasti. London: Macmillan .
18.
Freed, R. Eugenie (1999) ‘“In the Darkness of Philisthea”: The Design of Plate 78 of Jerusalem’ , Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly32: 1-21 .
19.
Heffernan, James (1991) ‘Oothoon: Dilemmas of Marginality’ , Studies in Romanticism30: 3-18 .
20.
Hilton, Nelson (1983) Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words. Berkeley: University of California Press .
21.
Klibansky, Raymond , Saxl, Fritz and Panofsky, Erwin (1964) Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art. New York: Basic Books .
22.
Kristeva, Julia (1989) Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press .
23.
Irigaray, Luce (1978) ‘Interview 1’, in ‘Un art différent de sentir’: les femmes, la pornographie, l’éroticisme, ed. Marie Françoise Hans and Gilles Lapouge, pp. 43-58. Paris: Seuil.
24.
Lipking, Lawrence (1988) Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press .
25.
Mellor, Anne (1974) Blake’s Human Form Divine. Berkeley: University of California Press .
26.
Mellor, Anne (1982-3) ‘Blake’s Portrayal of Women’ , Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly16: 148-155 .
27.
Milton, John (1971) The Complete Poetry of John Milton, ed. with notes and trans. John T. Shawcross . Garden City, NY: Doubleday .
28.
Mitchell, J. T. (1978) Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of Illuminated Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press .
29.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1967) The Birth of Tragedy, and The Case on Wagner, trans. with commentary Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books .
30.
Paley, Morton (1983) The Continuing City. William Blake’s Jerusalem. Oxford: Clarendon Press .
31.
Raine, Kathleen (1968) Blake and Traditions, 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press .
Vogler, Thomas (1987) ‘“In vain the Eloquent Tongue”: An Un-Reading of VISIONS of the Daughters of Albion’, in Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method, ed. Dan Miller , Marc Bracher and Donald Ault , pp. 271-309. Durham, NC: Duke University Press .
34.
Williams, Linda (1984) ‘When the Woman Looks’, in Re-Vision, ed. Mary Ann Doane , Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams , pp. 83-93. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America .
35.
Wollstonecraft, Mary (1993 [1792]) Political Writings, ed. Janet Todd . Toronto: University of Toronto Press .
