Sexy Blake

This book lays bare the sexy Blake lately obscured in fogs of political correctness and post-feminism. Its contributors uncover, in fact, numerous sexy Blakes, arguing for both chastity and pornography, violence and domination as well as desire and redemption, and also journeying in the realms of conceptual sex and conceptual art. Fierce tussles over the body in, and the body of, Blake's work are the book's life-blood. Contributors differ passionately in their conclusions about the nature of Blake's sexiness. All acknowledge Christopher Hobson's revelation of Blake's insistent tendency to normalize perversity – some with relish, some with alarm. We celebrate the mysteries of Blakean attractions and repulsions, and hope this volume will re-animate the lively sexual debates which once characterized Blake Studies.

Helen P. Bruder wrote William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (1997), 'Blake and Gender Studies', in Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies, ed. N.M. Williams (2006), and has edited Women Reading William Blake (2006), and, with Tristanne Connolly, co-edited Queer Blake (2010) and Blake, Gender and Culture (2012).

Tristanne Connolly is Associate Professor of English at St Jerome's University, Canada. She is the author of William Blake and the Body (2002) and various essays on Blake, Romantic women poets, medicine, sexuality and religion. Of her edited collections, the most recent is Blake 2.0 (with Clark and Whittaker, 2012).

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on the contributors
List of abbreviations
Introduction: 'Bring me my Arrows of desire': Sexy Blake in the Twenty-First Century; Helen Bruder and Tristanne Connolly
PART I: VIOLENCE AND DOMINANCE
1. Subjectivity, Mutuality and Masochism: Ahania in The Book of Ahania and The Four Zoas; Lucy Cogan
2. The Hidden Love Triangle and Adulterous Birth in Blake's The Four Zoas; Ayako Wada
3. Blood in Blake's Poetry of Gender Struggle; Yoko Ima-Izumi
4. Ripped from Complacency: Violence and Feminist Moments in Blake; Michelle Leigh Gompf
PART II: CHASTITY, REDEMPTION AND FEMININE DESIRE
5. In the 'Lilly of Havilah': Sapphism and Chastity in Blake's Jerusalem; Sean David Nelson
6. 'Abstinence sows sand all over': William Lost in Paradise; Magnus Ankarsjö
7. 'The Sight of All These Things': Sexual Vision and Obscurity in Blake's Milton; David Shakespeare
8. Erotic Spirituality in Blake's 'Last Judgement'; Susanne Sklar
9. Blake's Bowers of Bliss: The Gitagovinda, The Four Zoas, and Two Illustrations for L'Allegro; Kathryn Kruger
PART III: CONCEPTUAL SEX, CONCEPTUAL ART
10. Hélyos and Ceylèn [A Poison Tree]; Tommy Mayberry
11. The Hinges on the Doors of Marriage: The Body's Openness to Information in the Art of Stelarc and Blake; Paige Morgan
12. The Sexual Life of Catherine B.: Women Novelists, Blake Scholars and Contemporary Fabulations of Catherine Blake; Angus Whitehead and Joel Gwynne
13. Blake and Porn; Philippa Simpson
PART IV: CODA
14. Normalizing Perversity: Blake and Homosexuality in 2013; Christopher Z. Hobson
15. Commemorating the Vere-street 'Monsters'; Christopher Z. Hobson
Bibliography
Index