Against the backdrop of Britain’s underground 18th and early-19th century homosexual culture, mob persecutions, and executions of homosexuals, Hobson shows how Blake's hatred of sexual and religious hypocrisy and state repression, and his revolutionary social vision, led him gradually to accept homosexuality as an integral part of human sexuality. In the process, Blake rejected the antihomosexual bias of British radical tradition, revised his idealization of aggressive male heterosexuality and his male-centered view of gender, and refined his conception of the cooperative commonwealth.

Christopher Z. Hobson is Associate Professor of English Language Studies at the State University of New York, College at Old Westbury.

"In this careful and important study, Hobson argues that the critical record has distorted Blake's treatment of homosexuality..."--Judith C. Mueller, Eighteenth-Century Studies

"Hobson works thoroughly and logically to introduce a complex and important set of new meanings into both fields of British Romanticism and Blake studies." --The Wordsworth Circle