William Morriss Utopianism

This book offers a new interpretation of William Morriss utopianism as a strategic extension of his political writing. Morriss 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 sicle 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. Thompsons and Miguel Abensours argument that Morriss 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 Morriss utopianism emerged against the grain of the now-here, embroiled in instrumental, propagandistic polemic, complicating Thompsonsand Abensours view of its anti-political character.