Winter 2011-12 Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 101 support that claim. It should be read for its clear explanation of the core of Jerusalem and its compelling demonstration of the reasons why Blake shaped his poem the way that he did. The book has some weaknesses: for experienced Blake scholars, the long reprise of the “synchronic” school may be tedious and even argumentative, even though Yoder is at pains to delineate critical differences (which may make it par- ticularly useful for students). The third chapter could benefit from more examples of extended readings. In citing parts of the text that exemplify one or another point, he doesn’t offer expanded interpretations. But these are minor complaints in the context of the very important work that this book repre- sents. After my first reading, I wished that Yoder had gone on to write a comprehensive explication of the poem in sequence and in detail, as Donald Ault has done for The Four Zoas in Narrative Unbound. But on a second reading, I was well satis- fied that Yoder’s explanation of the poem’s unique enterprise, special techniques, and inspiring philosophy offers an indis- pensable introduction to Jerusalem. I n Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety, James Rovira explores historical synchronicities to mine the po- tential for like-mindedness between Blake and Kierkegaard. He introduces a compelling rationale for bringing the two writers together: “neither author is concerned with history as such but rather with the phenomenological profile that histor- ical forces hold for the individual subject” (3). This distinction between “history as such” and the subject’s intersection with history as a “phenomenological” experience is an improve- ment over previous studies of these writers that separate his- tory and subjectivity. Just as this synthesis of history and subjectivity offers a rethinking of Blake and of Kierkegaard, Rovira’s revision of Derridean deconstruction from the hindsight of new histori- cism challenges the assumption of mutual exclusion between the two theoretical positions. More relevant for the study itself, this strategy has the potential to prevent the argument from being limited to mere synchronicity. Yet it is more persua- sive regarding Kierkegaard than for Blake: Rovira negotiates the atemporality of deconstruction via the observation that “Kierkegaardian anxiety is not a textual movement but an emotional one, an individual experience registered in litera- ture but embedded within historical, cultural, social, and per- sonal particularities,” which provides the basis for the study’s focus on Kierkegaard’s “understand[ing] individuality to ex- ist in a continual dialectic with history and society” (4). At- tributing the same impulse to Blake’s texts is less convincing, however. Applying deconstruction, even in tandem with new historicism, in reading Blake’s texts or designs is problematic for reasons Paul de Man first articulated: Blake’s “privileg- ing of writing” makes it “less resistant” to deconstruction, a remark that seems truer to the more complex erasures and re-creations in Blake’s cosmology; incorporating the historical dimension does not resolve but rather evades this fundamen- tal problem.1 The potential for reductiveness is a danger for any compari- son between writers, but it is more so between a philosopher and a writer-artist as multifaceted as Blake. By premising the argument on the assumption that “their works are a record 1. The quotation is from an interview with W. J. T. Mitchell in his essay “Visible Language: Blake’s Wond’rous Art of Writing,” Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986) 91. James Rovira. Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety. London: Continuum, 2010. x + 184 pp. £60.00/$110.00, hardcover; £24.99/$44.95, paperback (2011). Reviewed by Kathryn Freeman 102 Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly Winter 2011-12 of psychological development and struggle,” Rovira’s study sacrifices the idiosyncrasies of Blake’s cosmology, particularly its elasticity, in a rigid paradigm of abstract categories more suitable for analyzing systematic philosophy (3). More prob- lematic than the claim that the binaries—science vs. religion, nature vs. artifice, and democracy vs. monarchy—exist within texts is Rovira’s assertion that Blake and Kierkegaard repre- sent, if not precisely two polarities, two sides of the study’s central binary, “creation and anxiety”: “Blake’s mythology rep- resents the ‘creation’ and Kierkegaard’s philosophy the ‘anxi- ety’ of creation anxiety” (2). The organizational choice of shuttling between the writ- ers via these binaries keeps the argument broad and shal- low. Thus, for instance, the second chapter studies Blake and Kierkegaard vis-à-vis the Socratic tradition, as “both drew from a centuries-old classical model of personality,” a broad claim that prevents the possibility of exploring Blake’s par- ticularly complex relationship not only to the classical but the neoclassical (36). Rovira asserts that Blake condemns nature in “A Vision of the Last Judgment” (48), but it is a text that works against dualities: its concluding remark, “I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Ques- tion a Window concerning a Sight I look thro it & not with it” (E 566), subverts Rovira’s implicit binary of commendation vs. condemnation. Later in the chapter, he offers a far more nuanced reading of Blake’s “ambivalence toward Plato” that suggests the need not only to revise the earlier statement, but to consider the deeper implications of subject-object duality at the heart of the comparison between the two writers (49). When the study does move away from the “x vs. y” formula, it makes room for such complexities as the notion of inward- ness at the end of the third chapter. That the book’s breadth jeopardizes depth is a problem not only based on the multiplicity of binaries, but on the choice to devote large sections of the study to background informa- tion, much of which could have been relegated to endnotes. Similarly, the treatment of criticism in some cases is an undi- gested compilation; at other times it generalizes about critical approaches based on one or two studies. Rovira connects cre- ation anxiety to Blake’s concept of Generation and by exten- sion to gender and sexuality. However, in his discussion of The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion he collaps- es forty years of feminist criticism on Blake to a single 1977 study (75). The treatment of gender and sexuality in these poems founders still more as Rovira makes “a brief excur- sion” into “The Tyger,” a pattern of digression repeated with loosely connected “excursions” into texts by other authors. At the beginning of chapter 4, for example, and at several other points, Frankenstein is brought in to represent narratives of creation anxiety, yet the discussion is so fleeting that it raises many unaddressed questions about how creation anxiety in Shelley’s novel compares to that in Kierkegaard’s philosophical writings or Blake’s poetry and designs. Since addressing these questions would be tangential to the thesis, a better choice might have been to relegate such references to endnotes. Besides the largely unassimilated quarry of historical infor- mation and critical perspectives, and the plethora of undevel- oped topics, a need to control the unwieldiness of the book is evident even at the level of syntax, as exemplified by the sen- tence, “This dichotomy in Blake’s artistic output encouraged in Blake’s mind a dichotomy between Blake the commercial engraver and Blake the visionary artist, the former subject to the power of a spectrous fiend while the latter is emancipated and visionary” (54). In the case of a passage analyzing the two writers with regard to the classical model of personality, so many claims are made in a single sentence that few of them get developed or synthesized with each other: “The process of innocence collapsing into generation—or in other words, the transition from the aesthetic to the ethical, from innocence to experience—lays the groundwork for Blake’s articulation of creation anxiety” (60). With a shift away from the stark contrasts that form its skel- eton, Rovira’s book offers a fresh possibility of viewing each writer through the lens of the other in a number of tantalizing suggestions, such as through the relationship between genera- tion and creation. Rovira’s observation that the creator figure in Blake’s The Four Zoas is Enion rather than Urizen, for in- stance, has intriguing implications for the earlier section on Thel and Oothoon (113). In this regard, the book contributes to a rethinking of the boundaries of theory, particularly as they need to be addressed vis-à-vis the field of European and British romanticism.