‘Embryos we must be’: Embodiment, Biopower, and Biopoetics in William Blake

by Dr. Tara Lee (The University of Hong Kong)

Additional Content

The School of English cordially invites you to attend the following seminar offered by Dr. Tara Lee:

‘Embryos we must be’: Embodiment, Biopower, and Biopoetics in William Blake

Dr. Tara Lee, The University of Hong Kong

May 21, 2024, Tuesday, 4:30 p.m.

Room 7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, The University of Hong Kong

How are Blake’s prophetic books shaped by different late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century visions of life? How do his mythopoetic works relate to broader speculations about vitality by Romantic-era writers as well as contemporary philosophers? This talk presents the argument that William Blake’s understandings of biology, formulated in productive opposition to the pre-Darwinian theories of evolution that were gaining ground at the turn of the nineteenth century, were indebted to a broader discourse in the life sciences that privileged the virtual existence in each being over material processes of change and development. Engaging with the wider subfield of Romantic literature and the life sciences, this talk shows how Blake staged within his illuminated books a symbolic encounter between two competing biological paradigms (preformation and epigenesis) to ask unique questions about the nature of embodiment, political power, and poetics. Considering works such as The Book of Urizen (1794) and Jerusalem (1804-1820), it argues, ultimately, that the anti-evolutionist elements of Blake’s visual and verbal works present a radical critique of the monstrously materialist, expansionist logic of empire and the definitions of vitality that come with it. 

Tara Lee is currently a Research Assistant Professor and a Fellow of the Society of Fellows in Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. She obtained her AHRC-funded DPhil in English Literature from the University of Oxford with a thesis on Blake and evolution. Her articles can be found in European Romantic Review, Studies in Romanticism, Romanticism on the Net and The Keats-Shelley Review. She is preparing a monograph tentatively titled Blake and Romantic Biology: Evolution, Species, and Organic Form. Alongside this, she is also developing an HKRCG-funded project titled ‘Visionary Machines: Technology and the Epic in Britain, 1790-1830’, which explores how real and imaginary machines afforded thinking about revolution, progress, and empire in the Romantic epic.