Journal Article


The Blakean imagination and the land in Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem

Abstract

This essay argues that Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem challenges what Mark Shucksmith terms the “visioning of rural areas by hegemonic middle-class culture” (163), which still dominates the way many British people see the countryside and is rooted in nostalgia for a neat and pretty rural idyll, cleansed of untidy (bio)diversity. The second major line of argument is that the shadow of William Blake hangs heavily over the play, and that Rooster both embodies and employs the Blakean imagination in ways that challenge dominant “hegemonic” ideas about the rural. The untidy and disruptive Rooster, and the wood that bears his name, represent a very different kind of mindscape and a very different kind of (living) landscape. Simply by his presence in the wood he symbolizes an alternative way of being in the land. It is true that Rooster’s is an imperfect echo of the mythopoetic Blakean world-view, but it is nevertheless unmistakeably Blakean, so the prologue to Jerusalem, part of the preface to Blake’s Milton: A Poem in Two Books (1808), is central to a proper understanding of the play. Rooster’s verbal combativeness and mythopoetic visions penetrate the hypocrisy behind the veneer of respectability in Flintock, and the justifications for prevailing human relationships with the land.

Attached files

Authors

White, Simon

Oxford Brookes departments

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences\Department of English and Modern Languages

Dates

Year of publication: 2019
Date of RADAR deposit: 2019-06-19


Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License


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