1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910254763003321

Autore

Holland Owen

Titolo

William Morris’s Utopianism : Propaganda, Politics and Prefiguration / / by Owen Holland

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cham : , : Springer International Publishing : , : Imprint : Palgrave Macmillan, , 2017

ISBN

3-319-59602-0

Edizione

[1st ed. 2017.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (XI, 337 p. 5 illus.)

Collana

Palgrave Studies in Utopianism

Disciplina

941

Soggetti

Great Britain—History

Europe—History—1492-

Civilization—History

Intellectual life—History

World politics

History of Britain and Ireland

History of Modern Europe

Cultural History

Intellectual Studies

Political History

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

PART I -- ONE: Introduction: No-where and now-here -- TWO: Twentieth-century critical readings of Morris’s utopianism -- PART II -- THREE: At the cross-roads of socialism and first-wave feminism -- FOUR: The pastoral structure of feeling in Morris’s utopianism -- FIVE: Imperialism, colonialism and internationalism -- SIX: Organic and mechanical -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- Index.

Sommario/riassunto

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.