To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss

William Morris's Radicalism and the Embodiment of Dreams

Michelle Weinroth, Paul Leduc Browne

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780773544611
• eBook ISBN: 9780773596986
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss casts new light on the political radicalism and social thought of nineteenth-century artist, author, and revolutionary, William Morris. Standing on the cusp of a new wave of scholarship, this book presents an exciting convergence of views among internationally renowned scholars in the field of Victorian Studies.

Balancing variety and unity, this collection reappraises Morris’s concept of social change and asks how we might think beyond the institutions and epistemologies of our time. Though the political significance of Morris’s creative work is often underestimated, the essays in this volume showcase its subtlety and sophistication. Each chapter discerns the power and novelty of Morris’s radicalism within his aesthetic creations and demonstrates how his most compelling political ideas bloomed wherever his dexterous hand had been at work - in wallpapers, floral borders, medievalist romances, and verse. Morris's theory and practice of aesthetic creation can be seen as the crucible of his entire philosophy of social change.

In situating Morris's radicalism at the heart of his creative legacy, and in reanimating debates about nineteenth-century art and politics, To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss challenges and expands received notions of the radical, the aesthetic, and the political.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Colour plates follow page
• Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 William Morris’s “Lesser Arts” and “The Commercial War”
• 2 Illuminating Divergences: Morris, Burne-Jones, and the Two Aeneids
• 3 Radical Tales: Rethinking the Politics of William Morris’s Last Romances
• 4 Telling Time: Song’s Rhythms in Morris’s Late Work
• 5 The Pre-Raphaelite Tongue: The Politics of Antiquarian Poetics
• 6 Translation, Collaboration, and Reception: Editing Caxton for the Kelmscott Press
• 7 Morris’s Road to Nowhere: New Pathways in Political Persuasion
• 8 A Dream of William Morris: Communism, History, Revolution
• 9 News from Nowhere Two: Principles of a Sequel
• 10 Redesigning the Beautiful: Morris, Mabb, and the Politics of Wallpaper
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index