Download or read book Witness Against the Beast written by E. P. Thompson and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2017-05-23 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witness Against the Beast is a groundbreaking interdisciplinary study in which the renowned social historian E.P. Thompson contends that most of the assumptions scholars have made about William Blake are misleading and unfounded. Brilliantly reexamining Blake's cultural milieu and intellectual background, Thompson detects in Blake's poetry a repeated call to resist the usury and commercialism of the “Antichrist” embodied by contemporary society—to “witness against the beast.”