Apocalyptic nightmares that humanly-created intelligences will one day rise up against their creators haunt the western creative imagination. However, these narratives find their initial expression not in the widely disseminated Frankenstein story but in William Blake's early mythological works. This book looks at why we persistently fear our own creations by examining Blake's illuminated books of the 1790s through the lens of Kierkegaard's theories of personality and of anxiety. It offers a close examination of Kierkegaard's and Blake's similar, and to an extent shared, historical milieux as...