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

Dark Figures in the Desired Country: Blake's Illustrations to The Pilgrim's Progress by Norvig, Gerda S.. Hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780520044715.

Toward the end of his life, William Blake produced a beautiful sequence of 28 watercolor drawings to illustrate Bunyans Pilgrims Progress. These rarely seen drawings show him at the peak of his powers, radically reinterpreting one of the central texts of English literature. Gerda Norvigs 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 Blakes lifelong engagement with Bunyans myth and in relation to the Puritan writers own artistic and critical methods. She shows how deeply Blakes love-hate relationship with Bunyan influenced not only these particular drawings but also Blakes revolutionary theories of art and poetics. With judicious use of psychoanalytical and post-structuralist critical theory, she demonstrates that Blakes pictorial interpretation of The Pilgrims Progress tells a contemporary, self-reflexive tale about interpretation. Blake implicates author, narrator, and reader in a dream-protagonists never-ending search for a proper stance on the relations of self and other.