Reviews

This book needs to be required reading for all who seek a peaceful future for these two long-tormented peoples.

Makdisi has emerged as one of the most incisive and influential surveyors of British literature and empire in the Romantic age.... Moves] seamlessly between discourses of social reform and inventive close readings of literary works, illustrations, and maps to chart the terra incognita-and 'tempus incognitum'-within the borders of England... Makdisi finds new critical possibilities available once one moves away from the East-West binary.

An extraordinarily detailed portrait. . . . Weaves together a tapestry of harrowing narratives in a lucid and measured tone.

[A] highly accomplished study.... Always interesting, politically radical and yet scholarly, this book makes a worthy successor to Said's Culture and Imperialism.

An immensely satisfying book. . . . powerful and necessary.

This is a brief introduction to Blake that novices and seasoned Blakeans alike will enjoy and learn from. … The book is a celebration of Blake rather than a critique. It always expresses the critic’s own admiration and communicates this warmly to the reader. … It draws readers in, showing how puzzles and disjunctions can be productive, and how the play of children, reflections on the passage of time, artistic labor, ideas of eternity, and industrial work practices can be closely related in Blake’s thought. It is a book that will succeed very well in starting readers on a journey.

A lucid, invaluable chronicle of Palestinian daily life in the occupied territories.

[An] invaluable study.

An original and brilliant interpretation of Romanticism which will have a significant impact on the way culture and imperialism are conceptualized. This invaluable contribution has the potential to alter our view of Romanticism, and speaks equally forcefully to scholars working in other fields, such as postcolonial theory, Victorian studies, cultural studies, literary theory, and materialist criticism.

...Makdisi presents the reach and complexity of Blake's vision….

Readers familiar with and sympathetic to critiques of Israel’s history of displacement and coercive control of the non-Jewish population of Palestine can appreciate the author’s approach.

Saree Makdisi's fascinating and necessary book succeeds both in providing a sympathetic revision of Said's Orientalism and in applying its basic thesis with great subtlety to a range of texts from canonical works like Lyrical Ballads and Mansfield Park. Written with verve and a genuine desire to enlighten us all, Making England Western will have a major impact on literary specialists, historians, students of Orientalism, and anyone with a general interest in the politics of culture.

An erudite and intelligent study... At a juncture when the field of Victorian studies is animated by debates about the virtues of historicism, Makdisi's book is an especially edifying read..... Making England Western throws us profitably back onto the variety of crooked paths along which the field has traveled and reminds us that the question of how to think the Victorian period postcolonially remains an open and provocative one.

Reading William Blake is not about careless readings but the most careful, brought to life by Makdisi’s own beautiful and precise critical prose.

Saree Makdisi has written a book that in its central line of argument and its detail is thoroughly original and compelling, deeply learned and detailed, erudite and entertaining. His skillful accounts of key Romantic writers and detailed knowledge of English social history and place create a vivid picture of social life and conditions that few literary analyses can boast. Making England Western could do for understanding the profound impacts of imperializing culture on the home front what Said's Culture and Imperialism did for understanding the role of culture in the imperializing and colonizing imperatives of the period.

This is a book as much about the martial politics that structure liberalism as it is about Zionism and the settler colonial project in Palestine. Makdisi unravels the productive and destructive forces that normalize this project as part of global politics. Hence, the book is as much about us—the inheritors of liberalism sitting in Europe and North America—as it is about Palestine or the Israeli state.

Makdisi‘s timely study offers a powerfully lucid theoretical strategy for placing Romanticism within the frame of imperialism.

A brilliant, impressive body of work.

[An] elegant work of literary theory that also has much to teach historians of race and class.

One of the main strengths of Makdisi’s book - and a key reason as to why its approach is so clear and effective - is that the parameters of the project have been so carefully chosen. Makdisi anchors each of the chapters in a close reading of a poem from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, given that it is both accessible and widely available - and is also by far the most likely text with which any student of Blake will begin' … I will certainly be including Reading William Blake on my reading lists for students.