Queer Blake

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.

“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

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).