Why did Victorian writers use metaphors of biological organisms in their writings?

Meet Shyam Patel, Doctoral Student in English and member of the Humanities Center Graduate Liaison Network, to Find out!

Shyam Patel was born in Chicago and raised in northern Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C.  After receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Virginia, he began his Ph.D. studies in English at UC Irvine.  His dissertation, titled “More Like Life: Metaphors of Organicism in Late Victorian Aesthetic Cultures," considers the political implications of the biological analogies that informed the critical and creative work of a wide range of writers associated with British Aestheticism.  Beginning from the observation of the pervasive organicism of Victorian thought - the tendency to analogize artworks, minds, economies, and societies to biological organisms in this period - it analyzes how writers like Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde exploited this methodological invocation of the organic in order to propose novel responses to the political and economic tensions emerging in the wake of the mid-century ascendency of capitalism and liberal democracy.