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Starting with William Blake's lost painting The Ancient Britons, this book shows how the visionary artist and poet reworked the Matter of Britain--the corpus of legends presenting an alternative history of Britain--into his own mythology. He thus adds to a tradition of Arthurian epic begun by Layamon in the 13th century and continued by Edmund Spenser in the 16th, in which a Romano-Celtic warlord becomes an icon of the English imagination.
This book shows how Britain became the promised land of a pagan goddess where mythical events are as important as those of history, and how the figure of Arthur is transformed into a British Messiah whose Christian realm is in continuous interaction with the Otherworld of Faerie, an imagined place between the spiritual and the earthly. Arthur as perceived through Blake's vision is the earthly embodiment of the fallen Albion; this exploration of the mythic underpinnings of the English sense of nationhood reveals an imaginative consciousness that links us to "human existence itself."
List of contents
Table of ContentsPreface delete�BR>
Introduction: Imagining Arthur delete�BR>
Prologue: The Lost Ancient Britons delete�
One.ç¸he Founding of Britain delete�
Two.ç¸he Conversion of Britain delete�
Three.緿reaming of Sovereignty delete�
Four.縄mmortal Imagination delete�
Five.ç¸he Image of a Brave Knight delete�2
Six.ç¸he King of Two Worlds delete�5
Seven.ç¸he Sun of Britain Sets delete�3
Eight.ç¸he British Messiah delete�9
Nine.ç¸he Couch of Albion delete�5
Epilogue: Believing Vision delete�8
Appendix: Masterful Images delete�3
Chapter Notes delete�1
Bibliography delete�5
Index delete�9
About the author
Jeffrey John Dixon, after studying English literature at Sussex University, travelled widely and now lives and writes in Powys, United Kingdom.
