ABSTRACT
Biographies and historical criticism usually proceed according to the objective-realistic assumption that art imitates life: a writer's work reflects his experiences in time and place, history and society. William Blake reverses this relation. In time, Blake elaborated his terse early visions into the gigantic myth of a continual, simultaneous Creation-Fall, a myth whose universality he sought to demonstrate by re-enacting it afresh with each new book he himself fell into creating. Blake realizes his personal vision, ecumenically opening it up for re-performance by posterity outside not only the Church, as he was, but also beyond the local cultural-historical contexts of his own beliefs. Performativity is what occurs when Blake marries his cynical satiric impulse to explode God through the application of an enlightened skepticism toward religion, with his post-Enlightened Romantic task of prophesizing the mystery of the divine through redemptive myth-making of his own invention.
