Blake in Context<\/em>, a collection of essays forthcoming from CUP, and is currently at work on an article about Blake\u2019s manuscripts and notebooks stemming from her own contribution to this. She is also working on a monograph about eighteenth-century religious writing and the temporality of action, supported by fellowships from CRASSH (Cambridge\u2019s Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences; 2016-17) and the Leverhulme Trust (2018).\u00a0Her work on Blake, Newton, and geometry is affiliated to this larger project.<\/p>\nRegarding the topic of her talk, Sarah writes:<\/p>\n
“This paper looks anew at Blake\u2019s famous colour-print Newton<\/em> (1795; 1805) in light of the culture, history, and philosophy of geometry. Blake may well have understood more about geometry, and indeed Newton, than has previously been recognised, informed by his training and daily practice as a graphic artist, his possible exposure to Euclidean proof at the hands of Thomas Taylor, and his reading of George Berkeley\u2019s Siris<\/em>. A knowing critique of geometry is certainly implied by Blake\u2019s objections to Newtonian ideas of space, time, and motion, which implicate Isaac Newton not merely as an exemplar of rational materialism, doubt, and experiment, but also, centrally and specifically, as a geometer: a manipulator of mathematical instruments, in thrall to the diagrammatic image. In a cluster of telling instances, Blake juxtaposes attacks on Newton with an articulation of his own practical aesthetics of line-drawing. Anchoring his antagonism might be a persuasion that the linear forms, the diagrams, that would seem to guarantee the certainty and truth of Newton\u2019s ideas are, in Blake\u2019s eyes, fatally detached from their construction; Newton as geometer can only ever measure and mime, never draw or create. Blake\u2019s opposition of the artist\u2019s living, moving outlines to the stillborn diagrams of geometry speaks to wider debates within and between mathematics and the visual arts (during Blake\u2019s lifetime, before, and since) about the place of construction, and also drawing, which it may or may not entail, in confirming, or alternatively enacting, geometrical truth. Discussion of these contexts in my paper is partly Romantic-period specific, but not wholly so; in addition to Kant, Coleridge, and Turner, the paper invokes classical Greek and long-eighteenth-century-period textbooks and treatises, numerous reflections on line-drawing by artists and artisans, and modern philosophies of practice and duration. It even tries to wrest Newton from the clutches of eighteenth-century Newtonianism, and Blake\u2019s caricature, closing by examining Newton\u2019s own notes upon learning to draw.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The next meeting of the\u00a0London-Paris Romanticism Seminar\u00a0will be held on Friday 19 January 2018 in the Bloomsbury Room (ground floor), Senate House, University of London, starting at 5.30. As our distinguished guest speaker, we are delighted to welcome Sarah Haggarty of the University of Cambridge, who will\u00a0present a paper entitled Blake’s Newton and Romantic Geometry.\u00a0This […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=719"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":727,"href":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719\/revisions\/727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"haggarty](\"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/haggarty-advert.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"Sarah.Haggarty\"](\"http:\/\/londonparisromantic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/Sarah.Haggarty.jpg\")
Sarah Haggarty <\/strong><\/a>is a University Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Queens’ College. She has written about theories of gift-giving and exchange, phenomenologies of timing and tempo, and the writing, art, and reception of William Blake. In addition to three books previously published (authored, co-authored, and edited), she is the editor of Blake in Context<\/em>, a collection of essays forthcoming from CUP, and is currently at work on an article about Blake\u2019s manuscripts and notebooks stemming from her own contribution to this. She is also working on a monograph about eighteenth-century religious writing and the temporality of action, supported by fellowships from CRASSH (Cambridge\u2019s Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences; 2016-17) and the Leverhulme Trust (2018).\u00a0Her work on Blake, Newton, and geometry is affiliated to this larger project.<\/p>\n