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In the short story Novella Greca, in her book: Fior di Passione, 1888, the author M. Serao narrates the true story of Calliope Stavro, the heroine (Calliopi Stavrou in Greek), in Leucade - Santa Maura (Lefkada - Agia Mavra in Greek), an island of the Ionian Sea, in 19th century Greece. At that time, the country was just freed from the Turkish occupation, trying to recover from more than 400 years of slavery and subjugation to the Ottoman Empire. Calliope Stavro represents the woman of her time, imprisoned in the s...

In this paper, William Blake’s religious system, the relationship between Natural Religion (Deism) and Art will be discussed. Blake rejected Natural Religion because Deism, which he considered Atheism and the tree of mystery, that is the dichotomy of good and evil, is false religion. ‘Natural religion’s impossible absurdity’ urged him to allege The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Catholicism and Orthodoxy, which proclaim that nature is God’s creation, follow Urizen’s cruel practices. Deism, Druidism is re...

William Blake’s aesthetic vision of the secular world is based on divine inspiration. In the myth of The Ancient Britons, he discusses the three aesthetic categories of the sublime, the beautiful and the ugly. These establish his theory of art, which is based on Jesus the Imagination. The sublime, the beautiful and the ugly are forms indicative of gradations of divine influx in every individual. In this sense, the myth explicitly describes and distinguishes the three aesthetic categories that shape the secular a...

In The Book of Thel (The Book of ????, that is The Book of the Female), Blake’s main preoccupation, in my opinion focuses on the juxtaposition between the aesthetic and the useful, their antithesis and their synthesis to produce and explain the female identity. Knowing that Blake’s thought always moves in oppositional and synthetical structures, the useful versus the aesthetic is nothing more than the restless and perpetual fight of the dualisms of innocence and experience, energy and Urizen, imagination and r...