Chapter 4 shows how The Four Zoas, as an unfinished manuscript, formally registers Blake’s troubled fascination with evolutionary models of the mind. The first section of the chapter compares the images of fluidity associated with Tharmas, who continually emerges from and dissolves into the waves of the unconscious, against Erasmus Darwin’s poetic descriptions of liquid ontogeny. The next section examines how the sexual drive appears in the text as a disruptive fluid force, illustrating and criticising the materialist argument (found in Mandeville and Malthus) that love and altruism are merely the evolutionary products of libidinal self-interest. The final section returns to the textuality of The Four Zoas and shows how the nervous mind and the sinuous text work together to give unreliable body to thought. Comparing Blake’s poetics to that of Erasmus Darwin and Edward Young, the chapter discusses the mimetic qualities of Blake’s revisionary verse and ends with an analysis of the poem’s fantasies of symbolic liberation through physical destruction.

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.

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.

The introduction sets the stage by close reading two mid-century works by the poet Edward Young. Contrasting microscopy-inspired metaphors of the soul in Young’s Night Thoughts (1742-1745) against organicist descriptions of artistic genius in Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), it shows how eighteenth-century biology (and, accordingly, aesthetics) might be characterised by a shift from images of permanence to narratives of development. This leads into the book's main subject, William Blake, who illustrated Young's works and presented a complicated response to this emergent evolutionist paradigm in his own writings. Situating the book against recent scholarship, the introduction establishes the book's central thesis, giving an account of the stakes of the matter, and provides an overview of how each chapter advances the book's argument.

Chapter 1 chapter presents a revised account of Blake’s relation to two major paradigms in eighteenth-century embryology: preformation and epigenesis. Challenging criticism that aligns Blake with a bio-ontology that privileges open-ended development and plastic self-shaping, this chapter reveals why preformation, which was used to articulate ideas of virtual form and genetic inheritance, might have been appealing for Blake. Tracing the links between Blake and preformationist biologists such as Charles Bonnet via Johann Kaspar Lavater, it shows how Blake’s preformationist influence explains some of the differences between his conception of life to those of major figures in European Romanticism such as Coleridge, Goethe, Herder, Blumenbach, and Kant. Exploring ableist and racist implications of relevant discourses, it discusses how preformationist science supplied Blake with the conceptual means to develop understandings of human difference and selfhood which differed from that of many of his contemporaries.

The brief conclusion summarises the book’s argument about Blake in relation to the critical terms of humanism and posthumanism. It argues that Blake’s nuanced representation of the body, which, in his universe, is simultaneously preformed and self-organised, aligns him with a distinctly Romantic humanism while also allowing him to anticipate the insights of posthumanism. Finally, it suggests that Blake’s works offer the concept of elasticity as an alternative to plasticity – a concept which acknowledges the complexities of embodiment while insisting on the importance of resilience and identity.