| Once Only Imagined: Proto-Marxist Materialism in the Early Illuminated Manuscripts of William Blake undertakes an examination of two of Blake's early works: Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The thesis argues for a materialist reading of Blake's poetry and prose, and shows ways in which the poet's epistemology, often dismissed as idealist, prefigures that of the later materialist philosopher Karl Marx. |
