Dark Figures in the Desired Country: Blake's Illustrations to The Pilgrim's Progress [Hardcover]

Gerda S. Norvig (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0520044711 | ISBN-13: 978-0520044715 | Publication Date: April 22, 1993

Toward the end of his life, William Blake produced a beautiful sequence of 28 watercolor drawings to illustrate Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. These rarely seen drawings show him at the peak of his powers, radically reinterpreting one of the central texts of English literature. Gerda Norvig's book, with its stunning color reproductions, offers the first detailed study of these important works of art.
Norvig sets the watercolors in the context of Blake's lifelong engagement with Bunyan's myth and in relation to the Puritan writer's own artistic and critical methods. She shows how deeply Blake's love-hate relationship with Bunyan influenced not only these particular drawings but also Blake's revolutionary theories of art and poetics. With judicious use of psychoanalytical and post-structuralist critical theory, she demonstrates that Blake's pictorial interpretation of The Pilgrim's Progress tells a contemporary, self-reflexive tale about interpretation. Blake implicates author, narrator, and reader in a dream-protagonist's never-ending search for a proper stance on the relations of self and other.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

"Gerda Norvig has written a book on Blake's Bunyan illustrations that is much more than that: it revises our sense of Blake, of the relationship of illustrator to illustrated text, and the assumptions of Romantic and Romanticist writing. Blake, certainly, will not be the same after Norvig's vigorous analysis, and it is arguable that the same may be true of Romanticism."--Ronald Paulson, author of Figure and Abstraction in Contemporary Painting

"Specialists in both Blake studies and English Romanticism will find this book extremely interesting and useful. Norvig carefully analyzes for the first time a set of Blake's most accomplished illustrations, a set that (as she points out) has very rarely been reproduced or exhibited. These designs certainly deserve to be better known, and Norvig's insightful and stimulating interpretation of them makes their importance to Blake's thought and career amply clear. This is certainly a book that all Blake specialists will have to know."--Anne K. Mellor, author of Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters

From the Back Cover

"Gerda Norvig has written a book on Blake's Bunyan illustrations that is much more than that: it revises our sense of Blake, of the relationship of illustrator to illustrated text, and the assumptions of Romantic and Romanticist writing. Blake, certainly, will not be the same after Norvig's vigorous analysis, and it is arguable that the same may be true of Romanticism." (Ronald Paulson, author of Figure and Abstraction in Contemporary Painting)

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press (April 22, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520044711
• ISBN-13: 978-0520044715
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,890,120 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars essential Blakean analysis, August 3, 2011

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marcabru - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Dark Figures in the Desired Country: Blake's Illustrations to The Pilgrim's Progress (Hardcover)

Some time ago I reread Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry before having another read through of the poems of William Blake including the longer poems The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem. Despite my appreciation of Frye's book I was struck by the disconnect between many of Frye's well-expressed and coherent ideas and the poems themselves. I noticed also that Frye barely quoted from any of the poems or analyzed any passage specifically. At that point I started to look around for other texts which offered a different viewpoint from Frye to see if my dissatisfaction was justified or not. The more I read the alternative views the more convinced I became that Frye's account was seriously deficient. I do not think he is entirely wrong or that there is nothing of value in his book. However, I strongly recommend that readers interested in Blake's poetry read alternative views.

The ones I have found most useful and interesting include the current book listed here as well as the following: The Four Zoas (Photographic Facsimile (Magno & Erdman), Narrative Unbound (Donald Ault), The Dialectic of Vision (Fred Dortort), Dark Figures in the Desired Country (Gerda Norvig), The Traveler in the Evening (Morton Paley), Rethinking Blake's Textuality (Molly Rothenberg),Blake's Critique of Transcendence (Peter Otto) and some of the articles in Blake's Sublime Allegory (Curran & Wittreich Eds.)

It should also be noted that this book has excellent production values. The illustrations are clear and crisply rendered. This is also a well written book.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars He'll Never Be the Same, April 28, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Dark Figures in the Desired Country: Blake's Illustrations to The Pilgrim's Progress (Hardcover)

This is the book that prompted one reviewer to gush, "After Dr. Norvig's vigorous analysis, Blake will never be the same again."

Regardless of the humor or accuracy of that statement, this book is an absolute steal. Stunning color reproductions accompany the erudite scholarly explanation of how Blake used the visual medium to interpret Bunyan's work.