ABSTRACT
One of Blake's many roles in contemporary popular culture is as the author of a nationalist hymn. Long the anthem of the Women's Institute, the lyric 'Jerusalem' has recently been claimed in competing political contexts. Moreover any attempt to re-insert Jerusalem into the nationalist language of the early years of the nineteenth century is fraught with difficulty. The chapter sets out to suggest both the continuities between Blake's writings and contemporary discourses of nationalism and ways in which nationalist languages, particularly within the poetry, are distorted, changed in meaning and finally rejected. The British antiquities have become part of feminized, middle-class polite culture. To these, Blake opposes biblical myth, seen more as a part of an oppositional British culture, a culture which included the figures of Richard Brothers, the self-styled 'Prince of the Hebrews' who planned to establish a kingdom with its seat in Jerusalem, and Joseph Bichero who predicted the restoration of the Jews to Jerusalem.
