عنوان

Prophetic legislation :

Number

TLets414707

Title Proper

Prophetic legislation :

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Mauger, MatthewMauger, Matthew

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

Queen Mary, University of London

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2005

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Thesis (Ph.D.)

Text preceding or following the note

2005

Text of Note

This dissertation examines the meaning of law in Blake's work. I argue that Blake's poetry intersects with contemporaneous challenges to the traditional model of the ancient constitution, a debate which I present as a conflict between custom and code. Blake's support for the French Revolution's overthrow of the customary systems of the ancien regime is countered by his nervousness about the rights-based discourse advanced by leading radical intellectuals such as Thomas Paine, a belief that the new systems which they proposed merely re-stated those which they sought to replace within an even narrower compass. Law is also a contested ground within radical political discourse of this period; although the dominant proposals advocated the enshrinement of fundamental rights and the codification of law, there was also a tendency towards a more enthusiastic radicalism These millenarian groups, emerging from antinomian heresy, rejected the notion of life being framed within a set of moral laws. I argue that Blake cannot easily be placed in either group; his work exhibits a fidelity to the redemptive potential of law, coupled with a real concern that to define freedoms in legal terms serves to limit rather than to liberate. Blake's work thus engages with a problem of the period: how to understand the new discourses of law. The customary account of the ancient English conunon law is predicated on the idea that it is codified, yet not written down; secular, though grounded in divine principle. These ambivalences are exploited by Blake in his poetic exploration of the law in the 1790s. In his nineteenth-century epics, Blake finds increasing help in dissenting religion's reconstruction of a radicalized Jesus. Through this radical prophetic voice, Blake is able to construct a redemptive legality founded on a deinstitutio-nalized Christianity, a constitutionalism that is also recovered from the conventional customary account.

Queen Mary, University of London

Queen Mary, University of London

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y