Force And Mercy:a Study On William Blake’s Construction Of The Universal Empire

William Blake pilgrimaged on a comparatively longer and slower journey toward"canonization" than other maj or British Romantic poets,partly saddened by the fact that readers were thwarted by his mysterious and obscure poetic style.Blake has gradually arrested the attention of the public since the publication of Fearful Symmetry:A Study of William Blake by Northrop Fry,a Canadian critic,in 1947.While the monograph ushered in the study on Blake,its new critical approach seems to have deepened the perception of Blake’ s works as apolitical and irrelevant to current affairs.Blake lived through a period in which the British Empire underwent drastic transformations.Major historical events such as the War of American Independence,French Revolution,and the Industrial Revolution,had exercised far-reaching influence on later generations,all taking place during that period.Just for this reason,the research focusing on the relationship between Blake’s poetic creation and social history begins to flourish,and has become the dominant trend in the study of Blake in recent years.Following the trend,this dissertation,based on such texts as Blake’s poems,essays,commentaries,annotations and letters,takes Blake’s construction of an universal empire as its research object and elaborates how Blake participates in the discussion and construction of political discourse in British empire in an imaginary way,with an effort to expand and deepen the study of Blake on the basis of existing achievements.Blake says that "without contraries[there]is no progression".This idea is not only essential to his poetic creation but also integral to his constructing of the universal empire.In light of this,this dissertation will argue that William Blake attempts to construct an universal empire from four perspectives,political,economic,artistic,and religious,and that two contrary approaches,force and mercy,are employed and go through the whole process,which sometimes are in the state of contradiction to each other and sometimes are in the state of unification with each other.The research is carried out on the basis of meticulous reading and adopts the methods of theoretical interpretation,documentary,analysis,demonstration,and summary with the combination of historical logic and reality criticism.The following conclusion is formed:force and mercy,as two opposing strategies,coexist in Blake’s construction of the universal empire paradoxically.In other words,the construction is not a process of removing force with mercy entirely,but a process of integrating the two.This dissertation consists of an introduction,five chapters and a conclusion.In the introduction,the previous studies on Blake are listed and discussed as to lay the foundation for the proposal of the research subject for this dissertation.At the same time,some relevant concepts and the theories to be used are discussed in detail as to lay a solid theoretical foundation for this dissertation.The first chapter relates the background research of Blake’s construction of the universal empire.Those factors that promoted Blake’s thinking of building a universal empire includes the imperial crisis caused by internal and external troubles during the transformation of the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries,and the imperial anxiety which prevailed among the Romantic poets.At the same time,in this part,the way how Blake presents the imperial crisis in his poetic text by using the metaphor of "disease" and the way to relieve the anxiety with gorgeous imperial imagination are also under discussion.The second chapter elaborates how Blake constructs his universal empire from the political perspective.Firstly,an empire by force is presented by Blake’s writing on tyranny,war,and famine.Secondly,an empire by mercy is conceived by Blake,which is reflected by Urizen’s confession and constructing the city of mercy.Finally,the political construction process is discussed based on the negotiation between force and mercy in detail,while the negotiation between the two is explained from the appeal and restraint of desire,passion,and individual rights separately.The third chapter delves into Blake’s construction of the universal empire from the economic perspective.Blake firstly presents an industrial hell by depicting various mills so as to reveal the production under the force of capitalism.Then,he develops his idea of rehabilitating the economy by restoring the creativity and productivity of labor with the labor of mercy.Lastly,Blake launches the elaboration to the process of righting the economy by transforming both labor and labourer.Specifically speaking,the former revitalizes workers who have been reduced to "inhuman machines",while the latter is the removal of alienated labor and returning to ontology of labor with the aim of realizing the production for peace.The fourth chapter explains Blake’s construction of the universal empire from the artistic perspective.The correlation between the concept of art and culture in the Romantic period is clarified firstly.At the same time,Blake’s thought of salvaging the nation through art is also discussed.Secondly,The art ruled by force,namely,the art controlled by the "Goddess of Memory",and the art ruled by mercy,namely,the art inspired by the "Goddess of Inspiration",are compared and explained.Lastly,Blake discusses how he accomplishes artistic construction by changing the art ruled by force into the art ruled by mercy based on his cultural theory of unity in diversity.The fifth chapter discusses Blake’s construction of the universal empire from the religious perspective.The process of constructing the universal empire spirit by force is discussed based on the analysis of two religious images,namely,"breaking a cocoon into a butterfly" and"removing the polypus" in combination with Druidism.Then,the role of mercy in fostering the spirit of the universal empire is also explained with reference to the religious theory of mission.Blake summarizes the religious construction process as a coin with two sides of force and mercy by tracing back to the traditions of force and mercy in the Bible.In the part of conclusion,the central argument of this dissertation is reaffirmed and the dialectical relationship between force and mercy in the political,economic,artistic and religious construction of Blake’s universal empire is summarized briefly.It also points out that Blake’s construction of the universal empire is not simply a critical inheritance of the pre-modern conception of empire ruled by force,but provides a critical paradigm and an ideal model of empire for the times in which he lived.