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Mark Crosby, laura quinney. William Blake on Self and Soul., The Review of English Studies, Volume 62, Issue 257, November 2011, Pages 823–825, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgr079
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In the past 2 years, a flurry of monographs on Blake have appeared with ambitious claims of explaining his complex use of the terms ‘Selfhood’ and ‘Self-annihilation’. These studies, which adopt a variety of contextual approaches ranging from gift theory, language theory and biblical exegesis, include Laura Quinney's well-written and frequently enlightening William Blake on Self and Soul. Grounded in recent studies on the construction of the modern self, Quinney traces the development of Blake's critique of ‘the subject's experience of its own interiority’ (p. xi). While psychological enquires into Blake flourished during the previous century, Quinney argues that disdain for ‘poststructuralist sloganeer[s]’ such as Foucault has prevented more recent investigations of the literary psychological subject. This critical neglect is problematic for Quinney because she considers that ‘Blake's essential topic is the unhappiness of the subject within its own subjectivity’ (p. 11). That Blake's work, particularly his longer poems such as The Four Zoas, explores the embattled psyche is certainly not a new argument. What is new is Quinney's focus on the ways Blake seeks to remake subjectivity via selectively filleting Gnostic and Neoplatontic traditions, as well as her intriguing claims that Blake's ‘penetrating psychological critique’ (p. xii) of the self's relation to itself demonstrates that ‘he was an atheist’ (p. 26) and was prompted, in part, by his own ‘loneliness and cultural alienation’ (p. 28).
