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.
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An insightful study showing how Blake's critique of biological ideas of evolution and self-organization are key to shaping his works.
Introduction: redefining life with William Blake;
1. 'Living form is
eternal existence': Blake and romantic biology;
2. 'It is raised/a spiritual
body': Blake and the preformationist sciences of the soul;
3. 'Intelligent,
organiz'd': Blake and the French revolution;
4. '[ E]mbryon nerves':
manuscript autopoiesis and materialist psychology in the four Zoas;
5. 'From
sires to sons, unknown to sex': gender, genius, and the evolution of sex in
Milton;
6. '[ E]mbodied and organized in solid marble': Blake's critique of
neoclassical organicism; Conclusion: Blake and the (Post)human; Bibliography;
Primary sources; Secondary sources; Index.
Tara Lee is Assistant Professor in English Literary Studies at the University of Hong Kong. She received her DPhil in English Literature from Oxford University and was formerly a Research Assistant Professor in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at HKU.
