Blake, sexuality and bourgeois politeness / Susan Matthews.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 247-264) and index.

Introduction: the birth of sexuality -- 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 TheTriumphs 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. Wollstonecraft and the adulterous woman.

"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"--