Jack Lindsay: Writer, Romantic, Revolutionary is a new monograph by Ann Cranny-Francis that offers an in-depth analysis of the work of prolific writer, activist and publisher, Jack Lindsay (1900-1990). It maps the development of his ideas across the twentieth century by reference to the five British writers about whom he published major studies: William Blake, John Bunyan, Charles Dickens, George Meredith and William Morris. :
In his second major study of William Blake, Jack Lindsay replaces the poetics focus of his earlier study (1927) with the Marxist analysis developed over the intervening fifty years. Lindsay identifies three major phases in Blake’s work: early experimental works that address specific political events or social injustices; works that analyse revolutionary situations and events; and works that explore the alienation that characterises his society. He again identifies Blake’s rejection of Abstraction because it not only reduces people to things but also devalues everything in life that is not quantifiable, including senses, emotions, spirituality. Blake’s response, Lindsay argues, is a dialectics of interconnection that includes the use of Imagination to reconstitute the interconnectedness of being (with others, nature, within the self) suppressed by bourgeois capitalism.
Anne Cranny-Francis is Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Technology Sydney
Jack Lindsay is available at the Palgrave website and other booksellers. (Open Access.)