William Morris's Utopianism: Propaganda, Politics and Prefiguration

by Owen Holland

Overview

This book offers a new interpretation of William Morris’s utopianism as a strategic extension of his political writing. Morris’s utopian writing, alongside his journalism and public lectures, constituted part of a sustained counter-hegemonic project that intervened both into the life-world of the fin de siècle socialist movement, as well as the dominant literary cultures of his day. Owen Holland demonstrates this by placing Morris in conversation with writers of first-wave feminism, nineteenth-century pastoralists, as well as the romance revivalists and imperialists of the 1880s. In doing so, he revises E.P. Thompson’s and Miguel Abensour’s argument that Morris’s utopian writing should be conceived as anti-political and heuristic, concerned with the pedagogic education of desire, rather than with the more mundane work of propaganda. He shows how Morris’s utopianism emerged against the grain of the now-here, embroiled in instrumental, propagandistic polemic, complicating Thompson’sand Abensour’s view of its anti-political character.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783319866611
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	08/30/2018
Series:	Palgrave Studies in Utopianism
Edition description:	Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2017
Pages:	337
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Owen Holland is Career Development Fellow in Victorian and Modern Literature at Jesus College, Oxford, UK. He is also editor of The Journal of William Morris Studies.

Table of Contents

PART I.- ONE: Introduction: No-where and now-here.- TWO: Twentieth-century critical readings of Morris’s utopianism.- PART II.- THREE: At the cross-roads of socialism and first-wave feminism.- FOUR: The pastoral structure of feeling in Morris’s utopianism.- FIVE: Imperialism, colonialism and internationalism.- SIX: Organic and mechanical.- BIBLIOGRAPHY.- Index.