Julia M. Wright. Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. ISBN 0821415190. Price : US$44.95.

The “politics of alienation” of Wright’s title identifies what the study sees as the crucial critical strategy common to the Blake texts it considers. Wright’s argument responds to Jon Mee’s observation that David Erdman’s influential historicist work on Blake tended to see the historical and, consequently, the material-political dimension of Blake’s work attending to the text’s representation of historical events at the cost of the formal characteristics of the poetry. Specifically, Wright observes the political impact of the formal characteristics of Blake’s work in terms of a “performative force” constituting “one of the sites of resistance to the established terms of the political debate” in its “handling of genre and media” (xxiv). In this way, Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation positions the often perplexing formal nature of Blake’s writing as an informed and ideologically savvy intervention into some of the most pressing political issues of the period. While it is “the politics of alienation” that marks Blake’s critique of the existing social order, it is the social-communal countervision developed in Blake’s later illuminated books, Milton and Jerusalem, where the alienation effect necessary to render visible the ideological nature of the nation as such, comes into conflict with the effort these texts make to assert their own utopian nationalism. This is not to say that Blake merely goes wrong in wanting to have it his way both ways, but rather that the medical model of a viral/vital discourse within which Wright situates the terms of political resistance and nationalism inscribed not only in Blake’s final two illuminated books but also in the radical political discourse of Wollstonecraft and Godwin as well as the conservative positions of Burke and Jeffrey (specifically in his condemnation of Moore) as equally inadequate to address the emergent hybridity within the period. The universal harmony of Jerusalem’s apocalyptic conclusion is bought at the price of difference insofar as Blake “characterizes the continuance of such differences as disease, infection, pestilence, cancerous growths, roots invading the earth, poison, intoxicating liquids, and pollution while locating his own text as the revitalizing doppelgänger of those destructive propagative mechanisms, different in its social effects but not in its mode of operation” (167). For Blake, no less than Burke, the best hope for the British nation is to fight against the invasive bodies that have diseased and corrupted all that is essentially British. Again, this is not to say that Jerusalem simply falls short of having achieved the ideal/impossible utopian plan for perfect social order and absolute individual freedom. For Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation the conflicting tendencies of Blake’s poetic vision permit the positing of the questions that allow us to rethink the political stakes in Blake’s work, in particular, and British Romanticism in general: “[H]ow far do the structures of power that informed Romantic-era formulations of social order inform Romantic theories of poetic form, and vice versa?” (172). Do the revolutionary visions of Romanticism ever exceed the discursive terms and social forms of the power that they presume to oppose? If not, then what does Romanticism’s critical vision offer contemporary thought? Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation goes a long way towards providing an answer to this question in its first four chapters. While for Wright, Blake’s utopian nationalism in Milton and Jerusalem fails to present a view of nation—or in Los’s terms a “system”—that does not enslave individuality in the service of its communal vision, the quality of the critical strategies Blake erects against the existing order in the Poetical Sketches, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America, and Europe, …