William Blake and Romantic Biology

An insightful study showing how Blake's critique of biological ideas of evolution and self-organization are key to shaping his works.

Delving into his biological imagery, Tara Lee shows how Blake articulates radical views about spirituality and embodiment, revolutionary politics, sexuality and genius, as well as textual and artistic reproduction. This insightful study sheds new light on the relationship between literature, science, and culture in the long eighteenth century.Blake's unique pronouncements on spirituality and embodiment, revolutionary politics, sexuality and genius, as well as on textual and artistic reproduction, were formulated in opposition to the pre-Darwinian theories of evolution and self-organisation emerging over the course of the long eighteenth century. Over the last two decades, literary critics have uncovered the many ways in which discoveries in the life sciences led the Romantics to increasingly understand art and life in terms of matter's vibrant powers of self-organisation. Here, however, Tara Lee shows how Blake was influenced by a preformationist paradigm that privileged the unique kernel of identity in each being over material processes of change and development. Readers will leave this book with a greater appreciation for how Blake's works were in intimate dialogue with a range of intellectual discourses – political, theological, poetic, aesthetic – that were shaped by vibrant debates about embodiment and organic form.