Narrative Unbound is the first full-scale interpretation of the verbal text of Blake's most complex long poetic prophecy, The Four Zoas. Never engraved or published in the poet/artist's lifetime, the poem remains in a single manuscript, apparently unfinished and heavily revised, and yet is widely celebrated as one of Blake's most powerful narrative works. Ault challenges the view that the poem is intrinsically incomplete and flawed, arguing instead that the famous difficulties of the text are aspects of Blake's ...
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Narrative Unbound is the first full-scale interpretation of the verbal text of Blake's most complex long poetic prophecy, The Four Zoas. Never engraved or published in the poet/artist's lifetime, the poem remains in a single manuscript, apparently unfinished and heavily revised, and yet is widely celebrated as one of Blake's most powerful narrative works. Ault challenges the view that the poem is intrinsically incomplete and flawed, arguing instead that the famous difficulties of the text are aspects of Blake's transformative narrative strategies. By respecting the integrity of Blake's work, taking every written mark on the page as potentially functional, Ault shows how the intricate interweaving of narrative patterns and interruptions are instrumental to conscious reading. The poetic intent is nothing less than a complete renovation of the reading experience, the potential of which is the realization of what Blake has called Four-fold vision. Ault's approach serves as a guide both to reading The Four Zoas and to participating in a radical poetic method.
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Seller's Description:
Near Fine in Near Fine jacket. Large Octavo. 517 pages. Black cloth boards with silver lettering on the spine. Very slight scuffing to the extremities of the boards and the edges of the textblock. Black, white, and red pictorial dust jacket; minor wear to the extremities. Red endpapers. The preliminary pages have a 1cm tear on the bottom righthand corner, and two pages (a page of the table of contents page and the foreword) are missing the bottom righthand corner (only about a 3/4-inch of paper is missing). All text remains legible. Binding is tight and textblock is square. The copy is unmarked. A fascinating, in-depth analysis with several illustrations and charts.
