Suggesting that William Blake reverses the traditional formulation that a writer's work reflects his experiences in time and place, culture and society, Andrew M. Cooper locates Blake's major Illuminated Books in an ahistorical present inhabiting an impersonal spirit realm beyond the self. Blake, Cooper shows, was a formalist who exploited eighteenth-century scientific and philosophical research on vision, sense and mind for spiritual purposes. Thus Blake used techniques such as irony, dialogism, two-way syntax, and synesthesia to extend and refine the prophetic method Milton forged in Paradise Lost and bring the performativity of traditional oral song and storytelling into print. Cooper argues that New Historicist attempts to place Blake's vision in perspective, as opposed to seeing it for oneself, involve a deeply self-contradictory denial of his performativity as a poet-artist. Rather, Blake's expansion of linear reading into a space of creative, self-conscious collaboration laid the basis for his lifelong critique of dualism in religion and science and anticipates the concerns of twentieth-century Modernism.