William Blake and Romantic Biology: Evolution, Originality, and Organic Form

Image shows a book cover for William Blake and Romantic Biology, it depicts a drawing of an undressed woman, with trees on either side of her.
William Blake and Romantic Biology

4th Floor Linkway, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne.

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William Blake and Romantic Biology: Evolution, Originality, and Organic Form

Tara Lee (The University of Hong Kong)

  • Wednesday 7 October, 1:15-2:30pm
  • 4th Floor Linkway, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne

Abstract

In William Blake and Romantic Biology, Tara Lee shows how Blake’s illuminated books were shaped by Romantic-era debates about the self-organizing nature of living form. Situating Blake within a range of scientific, theological, political, and aesthetic discourses about the nature of life itself, Lee shows how Blake’s biological myth was held in tension between the mobility of vital matter and openness of evolutionary change on the one hand, and the resilience of preformed identities and flexibility of virtual structures on the other. Ultimately, William Blake and Romantic Biology invites scholars to reconceptualise Romantic-period definitions of vitality and consider the implications this might have on our understandings of Romantic poetics and aesthetic thought more generally.

Tara Lee

Image shows a headshot of a woman with black hair above the shoulders, wearing black with a silver necklace and earrings.

Tara Lee is Assistant Professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. She received her DPhil in English Literature from Oxford University and recently published her first monograph, William Blake and Romantic Biology: Evolution, Originality, and Organic Form (2026) with Cambridge University Press. Her research, which spans across the fields of Romantic poetics, ecocriticism, and literature and science, can be found in such journals as Romanticism, European Romantic Review, Studies in Romanticism, and The Keats-Shelley Review. Her next projects, funded by the HKRGC, explore the intersections between early nineteenth-century machine cultures and Romantic poetry, especially poetry by women.