William Blake's Visions

David Worrall is Emeritus Professor of English at Nottingham Trent University. He has published widely on both William Blake and Eighteenth-Century Theatre.

“In William Blake’s Visions: Art, hallucinations, synaesthesia, David Worrall explores the visions’ ‘traceable perceptual phenomenology’. What Blake experienced, he explains, were not illusions or delusions, but hallucinations, ‘images produced on his retina through neural processes’. The book, which appears in the Palgrave Studies of Literature, Science and Medicine series, gives a highly technical account of the retino-cortical processes involved. ... It is good to have a firm scientific explanation of the visions ... .” (Jenny Uglow, TLS The Times Literary Supplement, April 25, 2025)

• Introduction.- CHAPTER ONE: The Physiology of Blake’s Hallucinations.- CHAPTER TWO: Perceiving More Than Perception.-   CHAPTER THREE: Klüver Form-Constant Visual Hallucinations.- CHAPTER FOUR: Agents Inducing Klüver Visual Hallucinations- CHAPTER FIVE: Blake’s Synaesthesia.- CHAPTER SIX: Blake’s Synaesthesia II: The Visionary Heads.- CHAPTER SEVEN: Blake’s Synaesthesia III: the Testimony of Crabb Robinson.- CHAPTER EIGHT: Discussion and Conclusion.