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William Morris and the Uses of Violence, 1856 1890 offers a new
reading of Morris s work, foregrounding his commitment to the idea
of transformative violence. Hanson argues, contrary to prevailing
critical opinion, that Morris s work demonstrates an enduring
commitment to an ideal of violent battle and that combat, both
imaginary and actual, is represented as a potentially renewing and
generative force in his writings, from the earliest short stories
to the late propaganda poems and political romances.
Hanson examines Morris s imagination of violence as a way of
understanding the world and the self. The interactions of combat,
work and play, of self-sacrifice and hope, class war and prowess in
his writings draw together conflicting cultural narratives about
individual and political identity in a way that complicates or
reframes their meanings.
Moving chronologically through his works, the book discusses the
philosophy and phenomenology of violence by which Morris delineates
his ethical and aesthetic positions, as well as examining the ways
in which they intersect with those of his contemporaries. It
combines close readings of his work with historical and contextual
analysis to suggest that Morris s paradoxical commitment to
violence as a means to wholeness shapes the form and style of his
works as well as their content and reception."
A fresh new approach to Victorian medievalism, showing it to be far
from the preserve of the elite. This book offers a challenge to the
current study of nineteenth-century British medievalism,
re-examining its general perception as an elite and conservative
tendency, the imposition of order from above evidenced in the work
of Walter Scott, in the Eglinton Tournament, and in endless
Victorian depictions of armour-clad knights. Whilst some previous
scholars have warned that medievalism should not be reduced to the
role of an ideologically conservative discourse which always and
everywhere had the role of either obscuring, ignoring, or
forgetting the ugly truths of an industrialised modernity by
appealing to a green and ordered Merrie England, there has been
remarkably little exploration of liberal or radical medievalisms,
still less of working-class medievalisms. Essays in this book
question a number of orthodoxies. Can it be imagined that in the
world of Ivanhoe, the Eglinton Tournament, Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
Alfred Tennyson, the working class remained largely oblivious to,
or at best uninterested in, medievalism? What, if any, was the
working-class medievalist counter-blast to conservatism? How did
feminism and socialismdeploy the medieval past? The contributions
here range beyond the usual canonical cultural sources to
investigate the ephemera: the occasional poetry, the forgotten
novels, the newspapers, short-lived cultural journals, fugitive
Chartist publications. A picture is created of a richly varied and
subtle understanding of the medieval past on the part of
socialists, radicals, feminists and working-class thinkers of all
kinds, a set of dreams of the Middle Agesto counter what many saw
as the disorder of the times.
This newly selected edition of William Morris's works brings
together poetry and prose, lectures, articles, and letters from his
life, ordered chronologically, with an introduction highlighting
his pressing and prescient writing on matters of the natural and
built environment, human and non-human relations, internationalism,
migration, and social justice, as well as the wide range of his
literary and artistic concerns. Expert textual notes draw attention
to the interconnectedness of Morris's writing and its rich
literary, historical, and political contexts and sources: this is
work that reaches back to tales of personal, dynastic, and
political passion in medieval Europe or the craftsmanship of
ancient Persia as deftly as it lambasts Victorian work practices
and living conditions in Britain or sets out to correct
misconceptions about the nature of social revolution; it creates
visions of a just, equal, and beautiful future from re-told or
imagined pasts. This selection includes lyric, epic, and narrative
poetry and a range of prose writings that tell stories, conjure
worlds, rouse their readers to action, and urge them to care for
the earth, its inhabitants, its beauty, and its histories. It
demonstrates the continuing power of Morris's writings to speak to
the present with as lively, particular, and provocative a voice as
it spoke to its own time.
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