Global Blake: In Conversation with David Worrall - William Blake's Visions
This book is an inquiry into whether what Blake called his ‘visions’ can be attributed to recognizable perceptual phenomena. The conditions identified include visual hallucinations (some probably derived from migraine aura), and auditory and visual hallucinations derived from several types of synaesthesia. Their individual phenomenology is recoverable, both within his art and writings and also through the testimonies of his friends. None of Blake's conditions were pathological, all of them have a degree of prevalence in modern populations. Blake has been celebrated as a ‘visionary,’ yet his ‘visions’ have been ignored for too long.
David Worrall
David Worrall is Emeritus Professor of English at Nottingham Trent University. He is editor of The Urizen Books (1995), and (with Steve Clark) editor of Historicizing Blake (1992), Blake in the Nineties (1999), Blake, Nation and Empire (2006) and many chapters in books and journal articles. He was also Principal Investigator of the Blake and Moravians project (AHRC,2004-06), with Keri Davies and a Panacea Society funded project on the female visionary, Dorothy Gott (with Nancy Cho).