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Starting with William Blake's lost painting The Ancient Britons, this book shows how the visionary artist and poet reworked the Matter of Britain--the corpus of legends presenting an alternative history of Britain--into his own mythology. He thus adds to a tradition of Arthurian epic begun by Layamon in the 13th century and continued by Edmund Spenser in the 16th, in which a Romano-Celtic warlord becomes an icon of the English imagination.This book shows how Britain became the promised land of a pagan goddess where mythical events are as important as those of history, and how the figure of Arthur is transformed into a British Messiah whose Christian realm is in continuous interaction with the Otherworld of Faerie, an imagined place between the spiritual and the earthly. Arthur as perceived through Blake's vision is the earthly embodiment of the fallen Albion; this exploration of the mythic underpinnings of the English sense of nationhood reveals an imaginative consciousness that links us to "human existence itself."
Jeffrey John Dixon, after studying English literature at Sussex University, travelled widely and now lives and writes in Powys, United Kingdom.
Table of ContentsPreface delete 1Introduction: Imagining Arthur delete 5Prologue: The Lost Ancient Britons delete 11One. The Founding of Britain delete 31Two. The Conversion of Britain delete 47Three. Dreaming of Sovereignty delete 61Four. Immortal Imagination delete 84Five. The Image of a Brave Knight delete 102Six. The King of Two Worlds delete 115Seven. The Sun of Britain Sets delete 133Eight. The British Messiah delete 149Nine. The Couch of Albion delete 165Epilogue: Believing Vision delete 178Appendix: Masterful Images delete 183Chapter Notes delete 191Bibliography delete 195Index delete 199
