Deformed, Dismembered, and Disembodied: Reinventing the Body Politic in William Blake

This thesis examines William Blake’s illuminated books from 1794–1820, suggesting that he reinvents the traditional body politic metaphor through disabled and deformed figures inspired by Norse myth. The body politic figures society within a metaphorical body to imply that diverse parts are united within the parameters of the nation. Blake’s bodies are traditionally seen as moving towards Christian ideas of renewal, a ‘perfect’ form, but this thesis argues that this is not always the case in the illuminated books. Typical body metaphors are predicated on wholeness, in other words, an able-body politic, however Blake disassembles this model in the illuminated books to reveal a nation body that continues to be in contention with itself.

Throughout the eighteenth century, ideas of nation, identity, and ‘Britishness’ were topics of debate. Britain’s collective anxiety over its identity was expressed within eighteenth-century Northern antiquarianism, a literary and artistic movement interested in Old Norse culture and its influence on individual nations across the British Isles. Eighteenth-century scholars, poets, and artists such as Thomas Gray, Henry Fuseli, and James Macpherson, mediated an idea of ancient Scandinavia, recasting it as a land of wild, untamed liberty from which different British heritages could source cultural narratives. This thesis proposes that Northern antiquarianism provided Blake with the necessary language and imagery to critique formations of British identity at the turn of the century.