Magnus Ankarsjö

William Blake was an English poet, painter, and visual artist early within the Romantic movement. Although both his textual and pictorial works have generally been regarded as complex and open to interpretation, the author argues that sexuality is perhaps the most notable component worthy of discussion when reading Blake. This book covers sex in Blake's works and Blake's personal views about sex, and offers a more general overview of sex in literature from the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. It includes a brief discussion of some of the more dated criticism of Blake and the matter of sex. The book then goes on to discuss, more specifically and in greater detail, the issue of sex in several of the longer and more complex of Blake's notable works, including The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem. A chapter is dedicated to each work, examining Blake's development of sexual issues. It concludes with notable examples of the omnipresent nature of sex in nearly all of Blake's art and poetry.

Over the last ten years the field of Blake studies has profited from new discoveries about Blake's life and work. This book examines the effect that Blake's mother's recently discovered Moravianism has had on our understanding of his poetry, and gives special attention to Moravianism and Swedenborgianism and their relation to his sexual politics. This is accomplished by a close reading of Blake's poetry, which examines in detail the subjects of religion, sex, and the attempted colonization of Africa by a Swedenborgian utopian group.

The closing years of the eighteenth century were the particular domain of literary radicals whose work challenged ideas on gender and sexuality. During this transitional period, the poetry of William Blake reflected the changing mores of society as well as his own developing notions of gender. This work presents an in-depth exploration of gender issues in Blake's three epic poems, The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem. The opening chapter discusses basic concepts such as notions of apocalypse, utopia and gender, all essential to the author's reading of Blake. Background regarding the literary atmosphere of the time, which included influence from the tradition of dissent, English Jacobinism and early feminism, is also included, effectively setting the context for Blake's work. The book then examines the poems in chronological order. It concentrates particularly on male and female activity within each work (refuting the common assumption that Blake was anti-feminist) while exploring the symbolism of the poetry. Blake's repeated theme of the struggle between the sexes receives special emphasis, as does the progress of his gender vision through the three poems.