ABSTRACT
The present article focuses on a potential methodological problem of materialist literary criticism: How can a materialist critique adequately describe and analyze the aspects of a work of art that seem least material—interiority, subjectivity, ambivalence, ineffability, and so on? The central question is whether Raymond Williams’s concept of a “structure of feeling” can adequately bridge this apparent gap between materiality and interiority. The case study used to explore this question is attitudes toward quantification in William Blake. Blake’s work displays contradictory responses to quantification, and, above all, to one of quantification’s symbols: compasses. These contradictory responses, it is argued, are in fact the sublimation of Blake’s ambivalent attitudes to the material conditions that determine his thought and art: nascent industrial capitalism.
