Abstract
The term ‘conversion narrative’ lacks proper definition and can be understood
more broadly than is often the case, underlining its fictive nature. I show this by reading William Blake’s Milton a Poem as a conversion narrative, exploring how Blake weaves a wider discourse of conversion around the conversion of his protagonist Milton that forms the narrative backbone of the book. This wider discourse shows us glimpses of Paul’s conversion and conversion in Jakob Boehme’s writings. The result is a work that challenges the idea of a conversion narrative as focussing on the author’s past experience, showing how its ultimate focus is, instead, on the reader.
more broadly than is often the case, underlining its fictive nature. I show this by reading William Blake’s Milton a Poem as a conversion narrative, exploring how Blake weaves a wider discourse of conversion around the conversion of his protagonist Milton that forms the narrative backbone of the book. This wider discourse shows us glimpses of Paul’s conversion and conversion in Jakob Boehme’s writings. The result is a work that challenges the idea of a conversion narrative as focussing on the author’s past experience, showing how its ultimate focus is, instead, on the reader.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Literature and Theology |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-16 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| ISSN | 0269-1205 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 30 Dec 2014 |
Keywords
- Faculty of Theology