Blake, Albion and the French Revolution

Blake's Albion

An essay by Dr David Fallon has been published in Home and Nation in British Literature from the English to the French Revolutions, a Cambridge University Press collection edited by A.D. Cousins and Geoffrey Payne. In 'Homelands: Blake, Albion, and the French Revolution', David shows the significance in Blake's writing of the Enlightenment discourse of national manners and the emerging notions of nationalism and the militarised nation-state that arose during the British wars with revolutionary France. Blake's poetry reveals a complex relationship to nationalism as he attempts to articulate a form of distinctly British patriotism without endorsing the 'official' martial British nationalism of the time. He argues that Blake, like a number of radical contemporaries, regarded the violence of the French Revolution and the aggressive response of Britain arising from deeply engrained national cultures.