This is a GREAT set. I was amazed and well-pleased. Blake is essential for thinkers...and this is just a slight sample of his talent. I'd recommend it for those who love to think and to learn. Very heady--good food!

Tikya!
ari

fracture distal femur& supra condylar fractur

I am reviewing N. F. Blake's "A Grammar of Shakespeare's Language"

This is the best book about Shakespeare's art in quite a long time. It is so because it focuses on the grammatical norms of Shakespeare's English.

This is a book that adds to our understanding of Shakespeare because it describes in great detail the syntax of the English of Shakespeare's plays and poems. This grammar uses terms from traditional grammar like adjective and adverb, and it also uses terms from functional grammar such as "noun head," "do-periphrasis," and "discourse analysis." A familiarity with the grammars of Quirk, Greenbaum, Svartvik and Leech is not essential but will make Blake's grammar easier to read.

Blake uses the Norton Facsimile (second editition), the Allen and Muir edition of Shakepeare's quarto facsimilies, and 19th Century facsimiles as his sources. It is a bold choice to do so because he wants to demonstrate the features of Shakepeare's grammar with a minimum of editorial interference. But then Blake ties his citations to the line numbering from the Oxford edition because he says this edition was more accessable to the ordinary reader. I confess that I do not find the choice convienent. I would have preferred that he cited the sources that he used directly because it would have been easier to verify his conclusions.

It should be stressed that this book limits itself to the syntax and usage found in Shakespeare plays and poems. It is not a comprehensive grammar of Early Modern English. There are features which show up in Early Modern English which do not show up in Shakespeare's writings. For example, on page 208 Blake writes that "In ShE "not" is never abbrivated to "n't"....which sets it apart from PdE where forms like "don't" are common." "N't" is found in Early Modern English. Though it is true that Shakespeare did not use contractions like "won't," his contempory Thomas Middleton did. See "The Family of Love" (1607) act iv, scene iv, line 49. Gudgeon says to Purge "A pile on ye, won't you! had you not been so manable, here are some would have saved you that labour."

The word "don't" does appear in the 1623 folio, but not as a contraction of "do not" but as a contraction of "done it." See Macbeth act 2, scene 2, line 13 (Norton2 p. 744 col. 2)

But these are minor criticisms. This grammar is authoritative. Shakespeare's readers at all levels will find many things to interest them.

Professor Williams has created a timely and insightful commentary on Blake's world. A must read for any fan of Blake's. (from a new fan of Williams')

Never having read any of William Blake's works, I was entranced by this intriguing edition of his satirical fantasy. I was drawn into the story, not only by the text but by the evocative and inspired illustrations and overall rendering of this unfinished piece. Gavin O'Keefe, an illustrator whose work I admire greatly and am familiar with, adds a new dimension to a strange and wonderful text. The overall presentation, decoration and editing makes An Island in the Moon a pleasurable journey into Blake's imaginary world. Well worth the price and a tastefully done small press publication.

Knight of the Living Dead: William Blake and the Problem of Ontology by Kathleen Lundeen (Susquehanna University Press) William Blake's agility as an intermedia artist is indisputable. Though his individual works have often been classified according to the dominant medium in which they have been executed, his unrestricted movements among the arts of sketching, watercolor, printmaking, and poetry demonstrate his disregard of the conventional aesthetic parameters that are thought to separate one medium from another. Though Blake is just as unapologetic in trespassing the boundaries between here and the hereafter, most who celebrate the principle of free?play in his art squirm at his professed practice of the same principle in his life. His alleged sightings of spirits have by and large embarrassed his admirers, many of whom have chosen to look the other way. Blake's liberal experiments in mediumship, nevertheless, raise an intriguing question: is there a correlation between his textual and his spiritualistic practices? This study offers an answer.
In Knight of the Living Dead, Lundeen investigates Blake's work in the context of his spiritualistic practices, and shows how he attempts to create a discourse that circumvents the binary of natural and arbitrary signs. Her examination of his word?image art demonstrates that, in Blake's view, what we recognize as word or image depends upon our epistemological orientation, just as what we term "matter" or "spirit" is determined by our state of perception. It further shows how Blake critiques textual theory in both his songs and prophecies by stabilizing the two sets of parameters that are used to define and classify signs: the general and particular, and the literal and figurative. Moreover, she argues, Blake provides an epistemological alternative to empiricism and rationalism in his poetry and art. Through verbal and visual experiments he defies the logic that is rooted in sense perception and reason, and he attempts through those experiments to return textuality to a divinely literal condition. By treating spiritualism as an aesthetic practice and art as an otherworldly communication, he undermines the institutionalized boundaries in art and life, and presents a formidable challenge to the whole matter/spirit dualism upon which Western culture is based.
An Excerpt from Knight of the Living Dead: We see just how closely affiliated the verbal and spiritual realms were to Blake in his memorable comment to Crabb Robinson: "I write . . . when commanded by the spirits and the moment I have written I see the words fly abot [sic] the room in all directions?It is then published & the Spirits can read." It is common enough for an artist to claim that his work is aided by spiritual intervention of one sort or another, but to suggest that one's art is directed toward otherworldly beings leaves earthly readers in a predicament. How are we to respond to art for which we have been deemed by the artist ontologically unfit? Blake's lifelong problem of getting his work published might in part be due to his choice of readership. Writing for spirits may demonstrate one's artistic range, but it is somewhat imprudent from a business standpoint ....
Though I will not presume to reconstruct Blake's interpretive community, it might be closer to home than we realize. Heaven, to Blake, was a mode of perception=`tho it appears Without it is Within / In your Imagination"?and archangels, those who sympathized with his artistic endeavors .... [In a letter] he writes, "You O Dear Flaxman are a Sublime Archangel My Friend & Companion from Eternity." Such a rhetorical gesture mitigates the mysticism of his remarks about spiritual beings, but those remarks cannot be dismissed as mere hyperbole. The celestial referents in his writing are neither wholly literal nor wholly figurative. His language cannot be situated on the familiar tropological axis since his perception does not synchronize with a dualistic metaphysics. To Blake, the archangel Flaxman was as otherworldly as the archangel Gabriel was tangible since he regarded matter and spirit, not as polar realities but as different states of perception.

A fascinating and erudite study of the various principles and strategies of logic that Blake used to examine love, his poetry's most frequent theme. In reading Blake's poems, one may thoughtlessly elide Blake's different types of logic by regarding them (as many of us were taught in undergraduate survey courses) as uniformly dialectical, but Cox shows how Blake's use of logic evolved as Blake matured as a poet. (In this, Cox shares something in common with Peter Thorslev, who has revealed "Some Dangers of Dialectical Thinking" that were known to Blake -- and his critics. See Thorslev's essay in _Romantic and Victorian: Studies in Memory of William H. Marshall_.) Tracing this development of Blake's thought, Cox illuminates Blake's poems, particularly the late poems, in new and important ways. Rising to his subject, Cox proves to be a scrupulous logician himself and a handsome prose stylist. Cox may be familiar to some, as I came to know him, for his other noteworthy work on Blake, which can be found in the journal _Criticism_, Don Ault's collection _Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method_, and Syndy Conger's collection _Sensibility in Transformation_. _Love and Logic_ deserves serious attention by Blake scholars, literary historians, and readers with an interest in Blake's poetics.

It's great to read Blake is his own typeset. And the book is essential Blake.

Donald Ault is an inspiring and unique mind. No boundaries, for they are always re-examined, as he does here with a response and re-thinking of his own arguments towards William Blake and his responses to the Newtonian Universe. Donald Ault is a mind stretched as it should be--lobes in literature, lobes in Disney, lobes in Coca-Cola. His books do not yet show his utter vastness, but I hope one day his thoughts on Donald Duck will come to the bibliography.

This book should be made of glass rather than paper. I read through this book and saw the lives, the greed, the desperation, and the joy of people long since dead. "Night of the Silent Drums" brings the history of the bloody 1733 St. Jan, Dansk Vestindia slave revolt to the present. The Virgin Islands' drought that year was the only thing dry about this book. And it succeeds without couching our preconceived notions of slavery or slaves, plantations or masters, by telling the truth as well as the facts. This work is gratefully and substantially more than ink on paper. When you pick up this one you will become more of a witness than a reader