William Blake and the Body

"William Blake and the Body re-evaluates Blake's central image: the human form. Blake's designs depict transparent-skinned bodies contorted with passions, and in his verse, metamorphic bodies burst from each other in gory, gender-bending births. The culmination, on which all Blake's bodily depictions rely, is an ideal human which unites one and many, form and freedom, flesh and spirit.

Connolly explores romantic-era contexts like anatomical art, embryology, miscarriage, ancient human sacrifice, and twentieth-century theories like those of Kristeva, Douglas and Girard, to provide an innovative new analysis of Blake's transformations of the body and identity."--BOOK JACKET.