Writing Generation: Revolutionary Bodies and the Poetics of Political Economy

This chapter reconsiders the emergence of political economy, biology, and literature as separate fields of research—disciplines—by examining representations of noxious generation in the politics and poetry of the late eighteenth century. In the debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine over the status of the French Revolution, both writers collapse biological theories of reproduction and political theories of social collectivity, depicting generation as the proliferation of embodied collectives stimulated by print. In their poems The First Book of Urizen (1794) and “To a Little Invisible Being, Soon to Become Visible” (probably composed in 1799), William Blake and Anna Barbauld critique that collapse, even as they reflect upon how that collapse is itself facilitated by the tools of poetic discourse, by form and figure. Both poets explore how the “visible form” of writing, the structure of the book, and the figure of the womb are complicit in the generation of new kinds of bodies in the world. In so doing, Blake and Barbauld expose the unavoidably shared ground of poets, political economists, and scientists at the very moment those writers began increasingly articulating their own separateness.