Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness

Susan Matthews examines Blake's place within a bourgeois culture in the process of redefining the role and meaning of sexuality. Chapters focus on Fuseli and female sexuality, William Hayley and bluestocking culture, William Cowper and the sexuality of the natural world, and Richardson and the representation of rape.

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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.