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Blake’s Word: Learning to Read, Inner Speech, and the Unsayable by Andrew M. Cooper at Abbey's Bookshop,
Blake’s Word: Learning to Read, Inner Speech, and the Unsayable
— —
Andrew M. Cooper

Blake’s Word

Learning to Read, Inner Speech, and the Unsayable

Andrew M. Cooper

$326.95   $261.21

Hardback

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English
Palgrave Macmillan
08 January 2026
Psycholinguistics; Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800; Philosophy; Philosophy of mind; History of ideas
This book explores how William Blake conceived the act of reading as an imaginative activation of Jesus the Word, the anonymous, unsayable potency of language that underlies speech. Through illuminated printing, Blake sought to incarnate this Word by re-educating his late-Enlightened audience in the fundamentals of reading – not through morality tales but at the level of physiology and synaesthesia where seen writing is turned into meaningful mental sounds. By wrongfooting the automaticity of skilled adult parsing, Blake’s grammar and syntax restore a cognitive element of anticipation to semiotic decoding and prophetically open the immediate future to interpretation. Such speaking-forth of the divine unsayability not only critiques 18th-century Deism’s God-given “language of nature,” it also sometimes skirts unreadability. Therefore, as this study demonstrates, Blake strove hard to develop his reading program in relation to a range of well-known philosophers including Plato and Bacon, Berkeley and Hume, Swedenborg and Rousseau, whose ideas on cognition and language his work casts in a new light even today.
By:  
Imprint:   Palgrave Macmillan
Country of Publication:   Switzerland
Dimensions:   Height: 210mm,  Width: 148mm, 
ISBN:   9783031965739
ISBN 10:   3031965736
Pages:   290
Publication Date:  
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  College/higher education ,  Undergraduate ,  Further / Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Andrew M. Cooper retired from the University of Texas at Austin, USA, in 2013. His most recent books are A Bastard Kind of Reasoning: William Blake and Geometry (2023) and William Blake and the Productions of Time (2013).

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