Chapter 2 discusses the soteriological nuances of Blake’s preformationist imagery. From the seed in the husk to the larva in the chrysalis, preformationist science offered Blake potent images with which to present the idea that the soul might persist beyond the death of the body. This chapter examines these symbols as they appear across Blake’s corpus, from early illuminated books such as The Book of Thel (1789) and Vision of the Daughters of Albion (1793) to later works such as The Four Zoas and Jerusalem. The chapter also shows how the ecological aspect of this paradigm further provided Blake with the vocabulary to articulate how life after death is ultimately a communal affair. The final section of the chapter, reading Blake through Alfred Gell, explores how attending to the preformationist language of exuviae and shells can shed new light on how to approach the exuvial materiality of the Blakean book.

Chapter 5 explores how different models of generation and sexuality provide a framework for juxtaposing inspired and uninspired creativity in Milton. The first section situates the poem's preformationist imagery against the developmental organic metaphors of late eighteenth-century literary criticism to show how Blake resists the naturalisation of genius and inspiration. The chapter then considers how the poem's scenes of epigenetic growth are used to symbolise a kind of narcissistic poetic activity which denies any participation of the divine. Building upon recent work on Blake's depiction of homosexuality, I show how Blake casts inspiration in homoerotic light to separate literary production from biological reproduction. The last section expands upon Milton's sexual myth by reading the poem against efforts by Erasmus Darwin, Richard Payne Knight and others to account for the origins of world religions via recourse to ancient fertility cults. This chapter ultimately argues that Milton, ending with the mythic transformation of reproductive bodies into symbolic images, presents itself as a poetic attempt to reverse the naturalising tendencies of late eighteenth-century criticism.

This chapter discusses the literary censorship of Katy O'Brien's novels: Mary Lavelle (1936) and The Land of Spices (1941). O'Brien's novels were banned in Ireland because of their explicit depiction of sex. The chapter emphasizes the political significance of O'Brien's novels, arguing that she offered to Irish society the ideal of liberal individualism.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book attempts to trace the utopian arc. Jean Genet's commitment, as argued in the book, is to a deterritorialised world, to a utopos. The book addresses Genet's contemporary political significance by looking at his key influence on modern directors in Spain, the USA and UK. The decidedly spatial aspect of this textual practice confirms the relationship existing between Genet's late theatre and his post-1968 political commitment. Despite a brief moment of hope from the late 1960s through to the mid-1970s, racism simply took new forms and migrated en masse from the global South to the global North. That Genet himself realised this is apparent in his commitment to armed insurrection in the 1970s, and in the equivocal but inescapable melancholy that haunts his last book, Prisoner of Love.

In The Balcony, Jean Genet departs from the Aristotelian schema that he implicitly rails against in the 'Avertissement' by investing in allegory. In Society of the Spectacle, written roughly a decade after the first version of The Balcony, Guy Debord borrowed and updated Georg Lukács' theory of reification to show how life in mediatised. In opposition to the spectacle which sought to heal the wound by manufacturing images of national consensus and by encouraging a retreat into private space, The Balcony makes this 'lack' palpable in the public space of the auditorium. Recalling Henri Lefebvre's dictum that every society secretes its own space, it is possible to suggest that Genet's focus on theatre's heterotopic spatiality is an attempt to produce a new type of politically efficacious theatre. Lefebvre's dialectically complex reading of modernisation provides the specific context that is missing in sociologist Lucien Goldmann's interpretation of The Balcony.

This chapter discusses Angela MacNamara's promotion of purity, chastity and marriage in her works which were aimed at teenage readers for the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland (CTSI). McNamara's work in the 1960s represents an innovative development within the Catholic sexual discourse.

Four: I turn from the cormorant itself to the bird’s natural product, guano, a resource that in the nineteenth century brought the Pacific into the global economy, profoundly affected the environment worldwide and enriched Europeans through the de facto slavery of thousands of Chinese indentured labourers on the Peruvian guano islands. Beginning with the filthy riches made from the guano trade by the UK-based Gibbs family, I outline the chemistry of guano, the European capitalisation of guano, and the conditions of labour of the guano workers. I then turn to the James Bond novel Dr No, locating Ian Fleming’s interest in guano and his transposition of the guano trade from Peru to the Caribbean in his banking family’s close connection with the Gibbses. I conclude with a discussion of the origins in the history of guano of the idea of dirt as ‘matter out of place’.

Jean Genet has long been regarded as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. This chapter aims to argue for Genet's influence, and focuses on the politics of his late theatre. It presents Genet as a revolutionary playwright by engaging with the uncompromising political readings that have started to emerge in Genet scholarship in France, the UK and the USA in the past decade. Genet's texts have been regarded as favoured sites for a politics based on theoretical notions of difference and différance, Rustom Bharucha and Marie Redonnet encourage us to locate his politics in history. The ideas of Marxian geographer Henri Lefebvre cast a different light on the politics of Genet's late plays. They imply that the political significance of his theatre is not limited to thematics alone, but rather resides in how it affects the audience, physically, in the heterotopic space of the auditorium.

Six: I again reverse the focus so as to reflect on the cormorant’s role as an icon of indigeneity providing an unexpected parallel to the role of its cousin the pelican, outlining the latter by way of the Australian children’s book Storm Boy and then turning back to the cormorant to show how it too has at times acquired status both as a marker of indigeneity and as a local victim of human environmental destruction, notably in images of cormorants affected by oil spills, drawing in particular on a Gulf War poem by Tony Harrison and on an image in the writing of Jean Baudrillard. I conclude by returning to the longstanding association of cormorants and China through an analysis of an advert for HSBC (‘The World’s Local Bank’), assessing the co-option by capital of the cormorant’s new-found and hard-earned sense of global belonging.

This chapter discusses the concept of sexuality as a moral problem in the first decades of the new Irish state. Irish Catholics were involved in social activism directed at issues of public morality. The new independent Irish state had organisations involved in this campaign, which included the Irish Vigilance Association, the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland, St Vincent de Paul Society and the Legion of Mary. These organizations aimed to incorporate the public morality framework into social policy and legislation.

This chapter focuses on the works of Edna O'Brien and John McGahern. O'Brien's The Country Girls trilogy (1960–64) and McGahern's The Dark (1965) were banned due to their portrayal of sexuality. The chapter also discusses the reform of literary censorship and the contribution of these novels to the cultural reconfiguration of sexuality and social change in Ireland.

Chapter 3 demonstrates how Blake’s biological myth, though obscure, was deeply embedded in contemporary revolutionary discourses. Reading the Urizen books against Blake’s neglected, unpublished The French Revolution (1791), this chapter puts Blake in intimate dialogue with Burke, Sieyès, and other revolutionary and reactionary writers who evocatively updated the body politic metaphor to describe a radically changing political landscape. Having discussed Blake’s critical attitude towards political self-organisation, this chapter discusses the further connotative development of the word “organization” in The Four Zoas, which picks up on the use of the term in British responses to France’s imperialist military project in the Revolutionary Wars. The chapter ends with a discussion of how after a turbulent revolutionary decade of utopian miscarriages, Blake came to envision political change in terms of regeneration and rejuvenation instead of gestation and birth.

Chapter 6 further explores Blake’s anti-historicist inclinations in the contexts of his artistic theory and practices. During the late eighteenth century, the injection of organicist language into neoclassical aesthetics produced a new cult of original genius. This chapter examines discussions and depictions of statuary, particularly the famous Laocoön fragment, as well as debates around copying and imitation (involving, notably, Sir Joshua Reynolds and others) to demonstrate how Blake used preformationist ideas to resist the adulation of self-sufficiency, formal autonomy, and cultural autochthony in late eighteenth-century criticism. This chapter situates Blake in opposition to Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose highly influential developmental history of art relied heavily on organic metaphors of autopoiesis. Winckelmann encouraged the modern artist to become, like the Greeks, ‘inimitable’, original. This chapter, however, shows Blake turning the emerging Romantic discourse of originality (found in Goethe and Herder) on its head. The artist’s task is not one of creation but regeneration, not of producing something wholly new but of giving new life to the preformed visions found in works of old.