Th.--Lett.--Montpellier 3, 1977. / Contient des poèmes inédits de W. Morris. _ Index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, 1965. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

Thesis--Hamburg. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 173-179) and index.

Inaug. Diss.--Jena. / Lebenslauf. Bibliography: p. [vii]-ix.

The purpose of this study of William Morris’s 1875 translation of Vergil’s Aeneid is to rehabilitate this translation after more than a century of almost total critical neglect. Following an introductory chapter that situates Morris within the context of emerging theories that seek to characterise the problems that are unique to classical translation activity and the nature of “retranslation” as promulgated by Laurence Venuti and others, I examine Morris’s preparation for this massive classical task, interrogating the extent and character of his classical education at Marlborough College and Oxford University in the 1850s. I then examine his “two Aeneids” – an illumination on vellum of Vergil’s epic in Latin, begun in 1874 with Edward Burne-Jones but never completed, and his subsequent unadorned translation of the Aeneid into English, which he completed in 1875 and which was published by the end of that same year – in a third chapter that engages what little criticism is available on the illuminations, before describing and interpreting them for the reader (plates are also provided as an Appendix.) My fourth chapter, the centrepiece of the dissertation, constitutes a close critical reading of Morris’s translation alongside the Latin original, and the final chapter rounds out the discussion by way of addressing the spotty critical treatment of this lengthy work of classical translation, after which I situate Morris within the history of English translations of the Roman epic by means of theory: namely, Antoine Berman’s “retranslation hypothesis”, Lawrence Venuti’s concept of “doubly-abusive fidelity”, and Siobhan Brownlie’s proposal for a post-structuralist retranslation theory. I conclude that a just interpretation of Morris’s achievement will begin with an understanding of his aesthetic, ethnic, and political motivations, and I conclude that his Aeneids are a unique and valuable contribution to late Victorian classical translation praxis.

In the mid-nineteenth century, when organizations such as the Early English Text Society began making an increasing variety of medieval texts accessible to Victorian readers, the "everyday life" of the past became an important subject of historiography. For many of William Morris's contemporaries, this project of social history and textual recovery provided welcome evidence to support either narratives of nostalgia for an ordered past or a comforting liberal sense of progress; for Morris himself, however, the everyday life of the medieval past offered an array of radical possibilities for creative adaptation. Morris's broad reading in newly recovered medieval texts, his library of manuscripts and woodcut books, and his personal experience of medieval domestic architecture were more instrumental in developing his sense of the past than were such artefacts of high culture as the great cathedrals and lavishly illustrated manuscripts, since it was through the surviving items of everyday use that Morris could best approach the creative lives of ordinary medieval men and women. For William Morris, the everyday medieval "art of the people" was collaborative, de-centralizing, and devoted to process rather than to the attainment of perfection. Morris consistently works to strip ancient texts of their veneer of authority, resisting the notion of the rare book as an object of cultural mystery and as a commodity. His response to the art of the past is a radical process, in which reading is not mere "poaching" on the hegemonic territory of capital and cultural authority, but an immersive activity in which any reader can be intimately and actively engaged with the artefact from the earliest moment of its production. Such active reception, however, as diverse and fallible as the individuals who practice it, requires in turn an ongoing creativity in the form of adaptations of, and even collaboration with, the past. Morris's theory of creative adaptation was consequently itself not static, and this dissertation traces its evolution over Morris's career. In his early poetry, Morris reveals his sense of the limitations of the historical record as his characters grasp simultaneously at fantasies and physical objects to make sense of the crises in which they find themselves, suggesting the incomplete and unstable circumstances of textual reception itself. In the socialist lectures and fiction of the 1880s, Morris makes use of surviving and imagined fragments of medieval material culture and domestic architecture to describe an aesthetic that can embrace creative diversity, co-operation, and even imperfection across historical periods. In the works produced by his Kelmscott Press, the material book itself becomes a collaborative site for artists, illustrators, and editors to work out the active reception and dissemination of the popular reading of the past. Finally, in the romances of the 1890s, Morris describes a diversity of possible social geographies, ultimately articulating a vision of the romance genre itself as a popular art, equally capable of transformation over time as are the artefacts of everyday life that Morris creatively employs in his fictions throughout his career.

In the mid-nineteenth century, when organizations such as the Early English Text Society began making an increasing variety of medieval texts accessible to Victorian readers, the "everyday life" of the past became an important subject of historiography. For many of William Morris's contemporaries, this project of social history and textual recovery provided welcome evidence to support either narratives of nostalgia for an ordered past or a comforting liberal sense of progress; for Morris himself, however, the everyday life of the medieval past offered an array of radical possibilities for creative adaptation. Morris's broad reading in newly recovered medieval texts, his library of manuscripts and woodcut books, and his personal experience of medieval domestic architecture were more instrumental in developing his sense of the past than were such artefacts of high culture as the great cathedrals and lavishly illustrated manuscripts, since it was through the surviving items of everyday use that Morris could best approach the creative lives of ordinary medieval men and women. For William Morris, the everyday medieval "art of the people" was collaborative, de-centralizing, and devoted to process rather than to the attainment of perfection. Morris consistently works to strip ancient texts of their veneer of authority, resisting the notion of the rare book as an object of cultural mystery and as a commodity. His response to the art of the past is a radical process, in which reading is not mere "poaching" on the hegemonic territory of capital and cultural authority, but an immersive activity in which any reader can be intimately and actively engaged with the artefact from the earliest moment of its production. Such active reception, however, as diverse and fallible as the individuals who practice it, requires in turn an ongoing creativity in the form of adaptations of, and even collaboration with, the past. Morris's theory of creative adaptation was consequently itself not static, and this dissertation traces its evolution over Morris's career. In his early poetry, Morris reveals his sense of the limitations of the historical record as his characters grasp simultaneously at fantasies and physical objects to make sense of the crises in which they find themselves, suggesting the incomplete and unstable circumstances of textual reception itself. In the socialist lectures and fiction of the 1880s, Morris makes use of surviving and imagined fragments of medieval material culture and domestic architecture to describe an aesthetic that can embrace creative diversity, co-operation, and even imperfection across historical periods. In the works produced by his Kelmscott Press, the material book itself becomes a collaborative site for artists, illustrators, and editors to work out the active reception and dissemination of the popular reading of the past. Finally, in the romances of the 1890s, Morris describes a diversity of possible social geographies, ultimately articulating a vision of the romance genre itself as a popular art, equally capable of transformation over time as are the artefacts of everyday life that Morris creatively employs in his fictions throughout his career.

<p>William Morris has for many years now been considered a minor figure in Victorian literature. His poetry, which enjoyed immense popularity in the nineteenth century, has become unfashionable, and his prose writings, which have never been popular except with a few poets seem very widely underestimated in academic circles~ even where they are read at all. On the other hand, his fabrics and wall-paper designs have never been more popular, and he is still quite well-known as a political figure, with the result that these aspects have dominated most writing on him since the Second World War, while his literary work has been largely ignored, or only treated by critics in other fields who have not felt themselves qualified to appraise his work in this area on any scale.</p> <p>This lack of concern for Morris's literary work, and particularly for his prose romances, which have been most unjustly neglected, has come about chiefly through two factors: the changes in taste which have caused twentieth century critics to be chiefly interested in lyric poetry and in the novel, instead of in narrative poetry and in the prose romance; and the resulting ignorance about the conventions of these genres which have led them to judge Morris's work by inappropriate norms. That Morris's work is relevant to the twentieth century is shown by the new non-academic revival of interest in his prose romances, and it seemed that the time had come when a serious attempt should be made to understand just what Morris was trying to do in his poetry and prose, and how far he succeeded.</p> <p>This thesis attempts therefore to distinguish a line of development in Morris's aesthetic theory, working from his writings on art and on literature, to analyse that development, and to apply it to his literary work. The thesis thus falls into five parts: a section which deals with critical attitudes to Morris and the break-down of suitable critical terminology for judging his work which has brought about his present low status; two sections setting out Morris's aesthetic theory in design-work and literature; and two sections in which this theory is related to his literary achievements in the earlier and the later work. This means that the thesis considers at least briefly most of Morris's literary production, but main areas of concentration are on the early prose tales, The Earthly Paradise, and the late prose romances. The resulting picture of Morris's theory and practice shows how his thought and art, modified by the needs of his political ideals, developed from his early naive work in design and literature towards a much more sophisticated art, which can be read on a number of levels, in which his wide knowledge of myth and legend and his own symbol-system taken from the world of nature blend in equal parts.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

[pt] Esta dissertação tem por objetivo investigar a teoria da revolução socialista de William Morris. Nascido em 1834, Morris produziu muitos trabalhos até o ano de 1896, quando morreu com 62 anos. O recorte temporal sob o qual se assenta minha pesquisa está compreendido entre os anos de 1883 e 1890, quando o autor filiou-se a uma organização revolucionária e decidiu dedicar os seus textos à transformação da sociedade inglesa oitocentista. As fontes que nos permitem visualizar a sua teoria apresentam-se em dois discursos diferentes: o panfletário e o ficcional. Em relação ao primeiro, Morris valeu-se de jornais vinculados às organizações revolucionárias para intervir nos debates públicos ingleses e, em meio a essa intervenção, construiu a sua teoria da revolução. Em 1890 a sua teoria estava completa, mas apareceu sob outra roupagem: atravessando o romance utópico Notícias de lugar nenhum. Diante do que foi exposto, é imperativo para esta dissertação compreender os discursos mobilizados pelo cidadão inglês para demonstrar qual foi o papel que eles exerceram nas suas intervenções políticas. Para alcançar esse objetivo, alguns conceitos se fazem importantes, como, por exemplo, o conceito de propaganda porque permitem que as fontes analisadas sejam compreendidas como um meio de atuar na realidade política da Inglaterra vitoriana. / [en] This dissertation aims to investigate the theory of socialist revolution of William Morris. Born in 1834, he produced many works until 1896, when he died at the age of 62. The time frame on which my research is based is between the years 1883 and 1890, when the author joined a revolutionary organization and decided to dedicate his texts to the transformation of the nineteenth century s English society. The sources that allow us to visualize his theory are presented in two different discourses: the pamphleteer and the fictional. Regarding the first, Morris used newspapers linked to revolutionary organizations to act in English public debates and, in the midst of this intervention, built his theory of revolution. In 1890 his theory was complete, but appeared under another guise: traversing the utopian novel News from Nowhere. Based on what was exposed, it is imperative for this dissertation to understand the discourses mobilized by the English citizen to demonstrate what role they played in their political interventions. To achieve this goal, some concepts are important, such as the concept of propaganda because they allow the sources analyzed to be understood as a means of acting in the political reality of Victorian England.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2001. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 75-82).