Publication: Tara Lee, William Blake and Romantic Biology: Evolution, Originality, and Organic Form (Cambridge UP, 2026).

We are delighted to point our readers towards the publication of Tara Lee's William Blake and Romantic Biology, an incredibly exciting new work which places the poetry of the long eighteenth-century in relation to the natural sciences. From the CUP description:

“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

inûuenced 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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