Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness

Examines Blake's place within a bourgeois culture in the process of redefining the role and meaning of sexuality.

Susan Matthews (Author)

9781107449138, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 26 June 2014

286 pages, 25 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.39 kg

'Matthews' book is a fierce, fascinating, and passionate response to the last thirty years in Blake studies; it revisits the debates initiated by the feminists to claim that Blake's opinion of both gender and sexuality can only make sense if firmly placed into their historical linguistic context. Matthews successfully carves out a new area of investigation and convincingly presents a new Blake.' Sibylle Erle, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly

Recent criticism has often overlooked William Blake's relationship to the bourgeois culture of sentimentalism, focusing instead on his association with the radical London underworld of revolutionaries, artisans and plebeian dissenters. By removing Blake from their company and reading him instead through the polite world he knew well, Susan Matthews sets out to give us a new Blake, as well as a new angle onto the conflicted development of a bourgeois culture in the late eighteenth century which was in the process of redefining the role and meaning of sexuality. With imaginative use of personalities, texts and images taken from an original range of archival material, Matthews returns to the Age of Sensibility and finds within its changing landscape answers to some of the crucial questions that remain about an artist and writer whose work continues to challenge scholars and critics today.

Introduction
1. 'Happy copulation': visual enthusiasm and the sexual gaze
2. Fuseli and the 'female dream' of Europe
3. A history of softness: William Hayley and the triumphs of temper
4. The essay on old maids and the learned lady
5. Cowper's fear: nature, population, apocalypse
6. Blake reads Richardson: anthologies, annotation and cultures of reading
7. A 'blank in nature': Blake and cultures of mourning
8. Adultery at the turn of the century.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], History of art & design styles: c 1800 to c 1900 [ACV], History of art & design styles: c 1600 to c 1800 [ACQ], Theory of art [ABA]