William Blake and the Daughters of Albion [Hardcover]

William Blake and the Daughters of Albion offers a challenge to the Blake establishment. By placing some of Blake's early prophetic works in startingly new historical contexts (most provocatively those of female conduct and pornography) a very different image of the radical Blake emerges. The book shows what can be achieved when a challenging methodology, feminist historicism, is brought to bear on a canonical writer and on now canonized interpretations of his work.List of Plates - Acknowledgements - List of Abbreviations - Blake Studies: A Critical Survey - The Sins of the Fathers: Patriarchal Criticism and The Book of Thel - 'Slip-Sliding Away': Some Problems with 'Crying Love' in the 1790s - Blake, the Rights of Man and Political Feminism in the 1790s - 'Go Tell the Human Race that Woman's Love is Sin': Sexual Politics and History in Blake's Europe: A Prophecy - 'Conclusion' - Notes and References - Select Bibliography - Index

'Provocative, readable, significant.' - British Association for Romantic Studies Bulletin & Review

'Helen Bruder's provocative, readable, significant book is an enlivening feminist-historicist study of Blake's early illuminated texts from 1789-1794 (leaving aside the Songs), and presents itself as a 'recontextualisation' of these works in the light of the failure of mainstream Blake criticism to acknowledge the ways in which Blake's writings are enmeshed in the sexual and gendered debates of his day.' - British Association for Romantic Studies Bulletin and Review

HELEN P. BRUDER