This 24-volume set, published 1910-15, reveals the development and scope of a Victorian polymath's literary, aesthetic and political passions.

A prolific artist, writer, designer, and political activist, William Morris remains remarkably powerful and relevant today. But how do you teach someone like Morris who made significant contributions to several different fields of study? And how, within the exigencies of the modern educational system, can teachers capture the interdisciplinary spirit of Morris, whose various contributions hang so curiously together? Teaching William Morris gathers together the work of nineteen Morris scholars from a variety of fields, offering a wide array of perspectives on the challenges and the rewards of teaching William Morris. Across this book’s five sections—“Pasts and Presents,” “Political Contexts,” “Literature,” “Art and Design,” and “Digital Humanities”—readers will learn the history of Morris’s place in the modern curriculum, the current state of the field for teaching Morris’s work today, and how this pedagogical effort is reaching well beyond the college classroom.

These volumes bring to a close the only comprehensive edition of the surviving correspondence of William Morris (1834-1896), a protean figure who exerted a major influence as poet, craftsman, master printer, and designer. Volumes III and IV, taken together, give in detail the comments and observations that articulate his problematic political and artistic stands and equally problematic position within the aesthetic movement as it developed in the 1890s. Most eloquently voiced also are the complexities of his troubled marriage and his devotion to his epileptic daughter, Jenny, and his other daughter, May. But dominating all these themes, organizing and structuring them, are the Kelmscott Press and the building of Morris's important library of medieval manuscripts and early printed books. The letters record the way in which the Press becomes not only the center of Morris's aesthetic ambitions and achievements but also the site for his closest human relations and for much of his connecting with the makers of early modernism. The letters in Volumes III and IV are thoroughly annotated, and through texts and notes provide a new assessment of Morris's career. Included also, as appendices to Volume IV, are two important documents: the first, never before published, is F. S. Ellis's Valuation List of Morris's library, made after Morris's death, and the second, never before reprinted, is the text of what was to be Morris's final essay on socialism, published in April 1896. Originally published in 1996. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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’s and Abensour’s view of its anti-political character.

William Morris (1834–96) was an English poet, decorative artist, translator, romance writer, book designer, preservationist, socialist theorist, and political activist, whose admirers have been drawn to the sheer intensity of his artistic endeavors and efforts to live up to radical ideals of social justice. This Companion draws together historical and critical responses to the impressive range of Morris’s multi-faceted life and activities: his homes, travels, family, business practices, decorative artwork, poetry, fantasy romances, translations, political activism, eco-socialism, and book collecting and design. Each chapter provides valuable historical and literary background information, reviews relevant opinions on its subject from the late-nineteenth century to the present, and offers new approaches to important aspects of its topic. Morris’s eclectic methodology and the perennial relevance of his insights and practice make this an essential handbook for those interested in art history, poetry, translation, literature, book design, environmentalism, political activism, and Victorian and utopian studies.

Reproduction of the original: William Morris by Elisabeth Luther Cary

‘William Morris and the Uses of Violence, 1856–1890’ combines a close reading of Morris’s work with historical and philosophical analysis in order to argue, contrary to prevailing critical opinion, that his writings demonstrate an enduring commitment to an ideal of violent battle. The work examines Morris’s representations of violence in relation to the wider cultural preoccupations and political movements with which they intersect, including medievalism, Teutonism, and the visionary, fractured socialism of the ‘fin de siècle’.