This book lays bare 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, the poet-artist’s work celebrate Blakean attractions and repulsions.
Table of Content
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
About the author
Magnus Ankarsjö, University of Buckingham, UK Lucy Cogan, Queen’s University Belfast, UK Michelle Leigh Gompf, Concord University, West Virginia, USA Joel Gwynne, National Institute of Education, Singapore Christopher Z. Hobson, State University of New York, USA Yoko Ima-Izumi, University of Tsukuba, Japan Kathryn Sullivan Kruger, Benedictine University, Illinois, USA Tommy Mayberry, University of Waterloo, Canada Paige Morgan, University of Washington, USA Sean David Nelson, University of California, USA David Shakespeare, University of Waterloo, Canada Philippa Simpson, Royal Museums Greenwich, UK Susanne Sklar, Carthage College, Wisconsin, USA Ayako Wada, Tottori University, Japan Angus Whitehead, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore?