William Morris Centenary Essays : Paper from the Morris Centenary Conference Organized by the William Morris Society at Exeter College Oxford 30 June-3 July 1996

This well illustrated book celebrates every aspect of the wide-ranging achievements of William Morris - writer, designer, cultural critic, revolutionary socialist - with particular emphasis on their relevance to our own times. The book makes available up-to-date Morris scholarship in accessible form.

 

Written by a group of international scholars who took part in a conference marking the centenary of the death of Morris in 1896, the book has sections devoted to Morris and Literature (covering texts from The Earthly Paradise to the late romances); Morris, the Arts & Crafts and the New World (including discussions of his influence in Rhode Island, Boston, Ontario and New Zealand); and Morris, Gender and Politics (with fresh consideration of his relation to Victorian ideas of manliness and of the particular qualities of his anti-statist politics). The latter section also draws attention to a hitherto unknown play by Morris's daughter May and concludes with an account of his biographer, the late E.P. Thompson.

Peter Faulkner is Reader in Modern English Literature, University of Exeter. He is currently editor of the Journal of the William Morris Society. Peter Preston is Senior Lecturer in Literature, University of Nottingham, and was formerly Honorary Secretary of the William Morris Society and Editor of its Newsletter.