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Numerous claims have been made for a sexual Blake, from post-lapsarian pessimist to free-loving hippie. Queer Blake raises a flag for the weird, perverse, camp and gay directions of the artist´s life and work. The contributors occupy diverse positions, illustrating what fresh interpretations result when heterosexuality is ditched as an ideal.

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List of Figures Notes on the Contributors List of Abbreviations Introduction: ´What is now proved was once, only imagin´d´; H.Bruder & T.Connolly Pansexuality (regained); H. Kidd Blake and the Evolution of Same Sex Subjectivity; C.Z.Hobson Blake and the Queering of Jouissance; R.C.Sha Drawing Lines: Bodies, Sexualities and Performance in The Four Zoas; P.Otto Anal Blake: Bringing Up the Rear in Blakean Criticism; E.Effinger The Body of the Blasphemer; M.Myrone Trannies, Amputees and Disco Queens: Blake and Contemporary Queer Art; J.Whittaker ´Real Acting´: ´Felpham Billy´ and Grayson Perry Try It On; H.Bruder ´Fear not / To unfold your dark visions of torment´: Blake and Emin´s Bad Sex Aesthetic; T.Connolly ´Woes& ... sighs´: Fantasies of Slavery in Visions of the Daughters of Albion; B.Stevens ´The lineaments of desire´: Blake´s Visions of the Daughters of Albion and Romantic Literary Treatments of Rape; C.Jackson-Houlston ´Yet I am an identity / I wish& feel& weep& groan´: Blake´s Sentimentalism as (Peri)Performative; S.Clark ´By a False Wife Brought to the Gates of Death´: Blake, Politics and Transgendered Performances; D.Fallon ´No Boys Work´: Blake, Hayley and the Triumphs of (Intellectual) Paiderastia; M.Crosby ´Hayley on his Toilette´: Blake, Hayley and Homophobia; S.Matthews ´My little Cane Sofa and the Bust of Sappho´: Elizabeth Iremonger and the Female World of Book-Collecting; K.Davies Index

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"Queer Blake is a provocative and often informative collection of essays that considers the spectrum of genders and gendering in Blake´s work and life and in Blake criticism. ... Overall, the quality is high. Where Queer Blake is at its best, to my mind, is in those chapters where the essays are both historical and theoretical-where the writers explore both the center and the circumference of Blake´s representations of disparate sexualities." (Tilar J. Mazzeo, Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly, Vol. 50 (1), Summer, 2016)

"Queer Blake engraves into our critical consciousness the capacious, "roving" ambisexual aesthetics and poetic pan-eroticism that make him a queer icon." - TLS

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HELEN P. BRUDER is an independent scholar and author of William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (1997), ´Blake and Gender Studies´ in Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies (ed. Nicholas M. Williams, 2006) and edited Women Reading William Blake (2007).

TRISTANNE CONNOLLY is Assistant Professor in the English Department at St. Jerome´s University in the University of Waterloo, Canada. She is the author of William Blake and the Body (2002) and articles on various aspects of Blake. She is co-editor, with Steve Clark, of Liberating Medicine 1720-1835 (2009).

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