Blake, sexuality and bourgeois politeness
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Blake, sexuality and bourgeois politeness
（Cambridge studies in romanticism, 88）
Cambridge University Press, 2014
- : pbk
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Note
First published: 2011
Includes bibliographical references (p. 247-264) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
- 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.
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