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.

This paper analyzes and evaluates William Morris’s esthetic for community. He presented this esthetic in lectures, letters, newspaper articles, and the dream novel of a happier future England, News from Nowhere. At the age of forty-three, after becoming an eminent poet and a well-known decorative design artist, he began to devote most of the last twenty years of his life to generating an interest in the better community. First, he worked with people of the upper and middle classes, then he turned his attention to the working men. I divide the analysis and evaluation of this work of William Morris into five sections. The first section names the man and places him in the period, the Victorian Age. Within the over-all context of the rapid industrial development of this period, I trace the four kinds of change that played significant roles in turning William Morris to a commitment for an esthetic for community—an art-centered society for all Englishmen. These areas are political reform, religious change, scientific development, and a turning to the Middle Ages. I then relate Morris to each area and note his responses. The second section presents Morris’s esthetic philosophy as he outlined it in his first lecture, The Lesser Arts,” and elaborated it in two later lectures, “The Prospects of Architecture” and “How We Live and How We Might Live.” The third section outlines Morris’s ever-changing proposals for putting his esthetic into effect. Drawing from his knowledge of history, he first sought simple, much repeated methods that might produce results within the socio-political system as it was. Later, discouraged by lack of whole-hearted response, he moved to a serious consideration of changing the system and in turn recommended socialism, communism, and finally revolution for a period n the future. Through all this, he held to the basic idea that civilization had developed to the point where change could be consciously planned instead of unconsciously permitted as it had been in the past centuries. The main part of the thesis, section four, uses some thirty lectures and articles for analyzing his esthetic and uses elements of his novel News from Nowhere, for illustrative purposes. The major elements of his esthetic which carries with it its own politics, religion, education and morality are functionalism, art, beauty, the proper uses of nature, pleasureful work and play, and happiness. The conclusion suggests how Morris’s esthetic for community which defines a good life in a just and equal society may be relevant to our times. Morris accepted a challenge of his day—motivating the working men, the rising middle class, and the leisure ridden wealthy to the possibilities of a nineteenth-century self-developing esthetic. Our present day faces a similar challenge—motivating the poverty stricken, the well paid middle and lower classes and the overly affluent to a twentieth century self-developing esthetic.

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

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

Employing the designer William Morris as a source of inspiration, this project seeks to explore the call for nature and beauty as a part of our lives. Moreover, it interweaves the necessity for experience of the sensual world (the five senses) with the cerebral world (a requisite to igniting the internal imagination)—a concept embodied in the form of the book. It advocates a redefining of the book as an imagination sculpture (the external and the internal) reflecting this new definition.

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.

Between 1888 and 1896, William Morris wrote several medieval-inspired, proto-fantasy romances which have consistently threatened to fall into the doldrums of literary criticism. I am particularly interested, here, in the most complete of these compositions entitled The Story of the Glittering Plain, The Wood Beyond the World, The Well at the World’s End, The Water of the Wondrous Isles, and The Sundering Flood: texts which I call Morris’s late romances. Critics who have engaged with these texts have often taken on the difficult task of reconciling Morris’s growing political vehemence during the time of their composition and the ostensibly escapist stance these romances seem to purport. As such, critics have largely relied on Morris’s fidelity of the Middle Ages as a time that offered a more authentic, original, innocent, or natural mode of human experience, which Morris preferred over the industrial capitalism of his own Victorian period. Through various versions of this stance, critics have articulated that the late romances can offer socially progressive content through an outdated mode of literary production. While this dissertation maintains the significance of anti-escapist readings of these late romances, it also expresses the value of alternative readings of the critical appeal to authenticity. Using critical theories from Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and most especially Slavoj Žižek, this dissertation suggests that any recognition of authenticity is reliant upon its own corruption and that part of the communist value of William Morris’s late romances exists not in their exemplification of a (medieval) world unblighted by modern corruption but through their demonstration of the conceptual necessity to incorporate modern corruption into any possible vision of past authenticity. That is, the late romances show that past authenticity is a product of an intellectual frame produced by modern corruption; they therefore imply that, in a similar way, communism can only become recognizable as a result of capitalist exploitation. In this way, I hope to aid in resurrecting these beautiful and valuable texts so that they can play a role in the communist struggles of the future.