Embodied Visions in William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion

William Blake characterised an abstract as “A murderer of its own Body,” an attempt to impose stable mastery on an unstable reality (E153). This thesis reads Blake’s illuminated poem, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, from the ‘unstable’ perspective of ‘Embodied Visions,’ based on the hypothesis that readings of the poem have often been distorted by the imposition of binary divisions: divisions that are undermined within the work itself. This approach to Visions of the Daughters of Albion is in three chapters: firstly aligning Blake’s work with Japanese manga artist Tezuka Osamu (1928-1989), tracing the construction of Blake in Japan, and how this can occasion new perspectives; secondly I read Visions with Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, placing both texts in response to oppressive sexual prescriptions of the 1790s, in order to chart where they concur and diverge; and finally I examine the effect of dualistic critical frames on readings of Visions, arguing that we must read the sections exploring perception as continuous with the rest of the poem in order to appreciate Blake’s engagement with an embodied reality.