In this collection of essays written over the last decade, Adams moves from an initial statement about his reading of William Blake through a series of critical essays covering such writers as Blake, Yeats, Joyce, and Byron and various theoretical topics, to a final group devoted to education issues. Theory and practice are joined in essays treating specific writers and general problems such as the critical constitution of the literary text, titles, and canons. From what Adams calls a neo-Blakean perspective, the essays deliberately relate matters of criticism and literary theory to questions about education policy. "I have always regarded my critical endeavors as closely related to and informing and informed by my teaching," Adams writes in the preface, where he also defines his use of the term antithetical as "the uncategorical ethical other that is literary." This work manifests the relationship between one of Adams's academic specializations - Blake and his tradition - and his thoughts on the academic instituion.
We see the personality of the critic, his theories, and his practical suggestions for curriculum elaborated in a way that is mutually illuminating across the conventional compartmentalizations of academic experience. Thus Blake's poetry serves less as an object of study than as a resource for thinking about literature and the discipline of literature study. The result is a thought-provoking cohesion of linguistic theory, practical literary and cultural criticism, and liberating educational theory.
- ISBN10 0813009669
- ISBN13 9780813009667
- Publish Date 31 December 1989
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 6 February 2014
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University Press of Florida
- Format Paperback
- Pages 272
- Language English