© Columbia University Press
William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History, and Propaganda, 1880–1914
December, 2010
Cloth, 256 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-7486-4149-9
Edinburgh University Press
$105.00
This study focuses on the great polymath William Morris and his contemporaries and followers: from the popular or notorious, like H. Rider Haggard, H. G. Wells, and Friedrich Engels, to the quickly forgotten. In what ways did these Victorians and Edwardians talk about 'community' and 'modernity'? To what uses did they put the notions, and how did different discourses contribute to their formation and appropriate their meanings?
To answer these questions, Anna Vaninskaya has drawn upon a wide array of primary sources: from fantastic and working-class fiction, and articles in mainstream periodicals and fringe radical newspapers, to political pamphlets and ephemera, historical, anthropological, and literary treatises, autobiographies and diaries. Vaninskaya's narrative proceeds from the realm of publishers' advertisements, romance bestsellers, and sniggering reviews to the university towns and debates in the pages of weighty historical tomes, and thence to the headquarters of revolutionary parties, to street-corners and shabby lecture halls.
In each of these domains the dream of a primitive or socialist community clashed with the reality of the modern state and market. The three parts of the book foreground each of these domains in turn, highlighting the paradoxical negotiations Morris and his contemporaries had to engage in, and bringing together hitherto unexplored aspects of nineteenth-century literature, culture, and history.