Overview

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.

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9781107449138

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.., Susan Matthews examines Blake's poetry and art in relation to the sentimental, largely middle-class discourses of sex and gender in circulation at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. --Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century

'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 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

Author Information

Susan Matthews is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Roehampton University.

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