William Morris

Queering the Pre-Raphaelites: The William Morris Society & the LGBTQIA Caucus

Examining poetry, art, or other media, Queering the Pre-Raphaelites invites proposals exploring the diverse ways same-sex, trans-, and nonbinary desires inform or shape the circulation of figures central to or on the periphery of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood/Sisterhood. Please include a 250-word abstract and short bio no later than Monday, 28 February 2022, to jnixon@salemstate.edu & lauraamurray@usf.edu.

This article looks in more depth at the different ways in which ideas about cashless societies were articulated and explored in pre-1900 utopian literature. Taking examples from the works of key writers such as Thomas More, Robert Owen, William Morris and Edward Bellamy, it discusses the different ways in which the problems associated with conventional notes-and-coins monetary systems were tackled as well as looking at the proposals for alternative payment systems to take their place. Ultimately, what it shows is that although the desire to dispense with cash and find a more efficient and less-exploitable payment system is certainly nothing new, the practical problems associated with actually implementing such a system remain hugely challenging.

Is  it possible for the elite criticism of the new modernist studies to engage with devotees of popular culture and fantasy fiction? Can the faeries and dragons of the bestseller lists talk shop with the coteries and little magazines of high modernism? What if their conversation was about anarchism? What surprising fellowship would that trilogy make? Such a dialogue would question root assumptions in all three areas and unearth a legacy of politically radical and formally experimental modernist fantasy fiction, a red thread running from the 1890s to the 1970s.

The recuperation of that lost tradition is as important as revising the critical traditions that excluded it from the start. The exclusion of fantasy fiction written by modernists like Hope Mirrlees and John Cowper Powys challenges how we understand modernism itself. The endless definitions of genre and rhetorics in fantasy and science fiction are also transformed here by modernist studies, as a catalyst. In both stances, anarchist critical and artistic praxis conjures a pathway to flexible new links between fields and ideas. Scholars and students of literary modernism, popular culture, critical & cultural theory, and anarchism will find a provocative challenge in A Modernist Fantasy.

Proponents of the Arts and Crafts Movement in the United Kingdom put William Morris’s artistic and social ideals into practice by emphasizing a return to handcraft and freedom of individual creative expression, regional or local design and materials, a repudiation of industrial manufacturing, and socioeconomic justice both through production and consumption of well-made, beautiful goods. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, U.K. architects became strongly influenced by the aesthetics of the Arts and Crafts Movement, yet primarily limited its expression to large homes for wealthy owners—embracing most of Morris’s artistic ideals, yet far from his egalitarian vision. While some U.S. architects build grand homes inspired by their U.K. predecessors, the movement focused more on the Craftsman aesthetic of Gustav Stickley and the bungalow-style home, primarily in modest, single-family homes for working- and middle-class residents. This paper argues that while both U.S. and U.K. architects valued individual craftsmanship and local materials, in the United States multi-building developments and thousands of partially prefabricated Craftsman-style homes created an American vernacular style that provided improved living conditions for a wide economic cross-section of society. In embracing modern technological production and distribution, American Arts and Crafts architecture moved away from the pure ideals of craftsmanship yet achieved more of the goals of style and comfort for all.

En 1855, William Morris n’est pas encore un immense artiste pluridisciplinaire mais un étudiant en théologie. Avec deux camarades d’Oxford, il vient prendre des vacances dans le nord-ouest de la France. Après Abbeville et avant Beauvais, Chartres, Rouen, il visite Amiens et sa cathédrale. Il marche ainsi sur les traces des architectes et critiques d’art George Edmund Street, Gilbert Scott, John Ruskin. Comme eux, il célèbre certains traits remarquables que ne présentent pas ou peu les édifices gothiques anglais : hauteur impressionnante, remplages et surtout portails sculptés, que William Morris lit, trente ans avant La Bible d’Amiens, dans un long article, « Shadows of Amiens », qu’il publie dans The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, avec deux nouvelles, médiévale et fantastique, également consacrées à la cathédrale : « The Story of the Unknown Church » et « A Night in a Cathedral ». La fiction n’est pas moins pertinente que la description pour rendre compte d’un édifice que William Morris aborde de façon résolument affective, émotive et subjective, qu’il se pose en visiteur, donne la parole à un des constructeurs de la cathédrale ou qu’il soulève ses difficultés de scripteur confronté à la difficulté de traduire une architecture en mots. Dans tous les cas, sa posture est artistique, humaniste, agnostique. Les textes qu’il publie suite à sa visite à Amiens s’avèrent donc en accord avec sa décision, simultanée, de renoncer aux ordres pour devenir artiste. Bien plus, on y perçoit, en les lisant de près, de nombreux germes des écrits communistes, quoique bien plus tardifs, de William Morris – non seulement des idées clés de ses conférences mais aussi des motifs de ses fictions, tels que la nuit dans l’église ou la sculptrice, qu’il retravaille et sublime en symboles d’un bonheur non plus passé mais à faire advenir en mettant fin au système capitaliste destructeur de la beauté de la vie.

The first edition of The Sympathy of Things, published with V2_Publishing, was quickly sold out to later be published in a revised new edition with Bloomsbury: https://www.academia.edu/19435584/The_Sympathy_of_Things_Ruskin_and_the_Ecology_of_Design_2nd_ed_

This article begins by considering representations of the legendary English outlaw, Robin Hood, in the broader English socialist movement of the nineteenth century. By and large, they had very little to say about him. Yet he was not totally absent for we find the outlaw briefly referenced in William Morris's A Dream of John Ball (1888). I suggest that Morris's short allusions to the medieval outlaw invoke the radical political sentiments of Joseph Ritson's Robin Hood: A Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads (1795) and, to a lesser extent, John Keats's Robin Hood: To a Friend (1818). Morris appropriated Ritson's revolutionary Robin Hood, conceived at the height of the French Revolution, in order to depict the outlaw as figuratively preparing the way forward for the Peasants' Revolt. The outlaw's exploits are depicted as the antecedent of socialism. Just as News from Nowhere was situated in the tradition of revolutionary romanticism, so too was A Dream of John Ball. Morris's enthusiasm for all things medieval can hardly be overstated. 1 As well as A Dream of John Ball, medievalism can be found throughout a number of his writings. Although his medievalism predated his conversion to socialism, it was a reading of Henry Hyndman's The Historical Basis of Socialism in England (1883) which convinced Morris that England had an indigenous tradition of socialism from the fourteenth century onwards. 2 Yet in all of his published works, there are only a few references to one of England's most famous medieval outlaws. In Morris's private letters, there are no references to Robin Hood, and the reasons for this remain unclear; it certainly seems strange in view of the fact that Robin Hood, as a man who, according to legend, stole from the rich and gave to the poor, would seem to fit well with Morris's socialist ideology. Morris was not the only early socialist who gave scant attention to the outlaw's legend. Henry Hyndman in The Historical Basis for Socialism in England (1883) made no reference to Robin Hood, and neither did Max Beer in The History

The world is in urgent need of ways to change in order to avert runaway climate change and ecological catastrophe. In this essay I examine the radical alternatives to be found in the utopian visions of two poets and polymaths, one from the East, the other from the West: Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and William Morris (1834-1896). They were visionaries as well as being politically engaged, and also social reformers and educators. They criticised industrialisation and the pursuit of profit, and advocated culturally rich, self-sufficient local communities. Both failed in their own practical attempts in this direction and wrote utopian stories about the ways of life they longed for, as if they could never come about in the real world. However, if we focus on their ideas on education and skills training, we find they have much to teach us that is highly relevant to the challenges and opportunities of today. That relevance is enhanced if we also consider how these ideas on learning for life could encourage and accelerate the emergence of the kinds of locally selfreliant communities which Tagore and Morris would recognise and welcome. According to the 'Living Planet Report 2020' from The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF): 'The population sizes of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles have seen an alarming average drop of 68% since 1970'. 1 Wildlife and natural habitats are declining globally at rates unprecedented in millions of years, with extinction taking place at over a hundred times the natural rate in the course of evolution.

Fed up with the commercial and moral restrictions of the mainstream press, the diverse avant-garde groups of authors and artists of the Aesthetic Movement developed a new genre of periodicals in which to propagate their principles and circulate their work. Such periodicals are known as ‘little magazines’ for their small-scale production and their circulation among limited audiences, and during the late Victorian period they were often conceptualized as integrated designs or total works of art in order to visually and materially represent the ideals of their producers. Little magazines like the Pre-Raphaelite Germ, the Arts & Crafts Hobby Horse and the Decadent Yellow Book launched the careers of innovative authors and artists and provided a site for debate between minor contributors and visiting grandees from Matthew Arnold to Oscar Wilde. This book offers detailed discussions of the background to thirteen major little magazines of the Victorian era, both situating these within the periodical press of their day and providing interpretations of representative items, in doing so, it outlines the earliest history of this enduring publication genre, and of the Aesthetic Movement that developed along with it.


Key Features:
----------------------
* First monograph to focus on the origins and development of the little magazine genre during the Victorian period
* Each chapter provides a representative introduction to the respective little magazines
* Combines new insights with a critical overview of the state of the art on each discussed little magazine

Table of contents
----------------------------
Introduction
1. The Germs of a Genre: The Germ and the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine
2. Mounting the (Century Guild) Hobby Horse
3. The Little Magazine as a Periodical Portfolio: the Dial, the Pagan Review and the Page
4. Selling the Yellow Nineties: the Yellow Book and the Savoy
5. Politicised Aestheticism outside London: the Quest and the Evergreen
6. Little Excursions Outside the Avant-Garde: the Pageant, the Parade and the Dome
(In)conclusions

The Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalism: Language and Cognition in Remediations of the East redefines the task of interpreting the East in the late nineteenth century. Weaving together literary, linguistic and cognitive analyses of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, illustrations and writings, socio-cultural investigations of the Orient, and rhetorical considerations about Arabian forms of writing, the terms of critical debate surrounding the East are redefined. It takes as a starting point Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) in order to investigate the latent and manifest traces of the East in Pre-Raphaelite literature and culture. As the book demonstrates, the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates appeared to be the most eligible representatives of a profoundly conservative manifestation of the Orient, of its mystic aura, criminal underworld, and feminine sensuality, or to put it into Arabic terms, of its aja’ib (marvels), mutalibun (treasure-hunters) and hur al-ayn (femmes fatales).

Though we were already able to perceive how fundamental the English contribution was in defining the most current and global concept of Restoration, still a clear overview of the complex events relating to the affirmation of conservative principles and a more in-depth knowledge of the documentary sources until now was missing. It was certainly essential to analyse the cultural profiles of all the main protagonists, accenting their theoretical contributions and changes in the restoration site approaches.
The historical reconstruction of the events was about developed over the course of three centuries, from the end of the 17th century to the beginning of the 20th, mostly based on the translation and study of texts never circulated in Italy, such as the fundamental document entitled “Papers on the Conservation of Ancient Monuments and Remains” (1865). The method to organize the research results is marked by the desire to know the sources in depth, structuring the text through them, always in relation to an overall view and a chronologically ordered path.
The first conservative propensities were felt at the end of the seventeenth century, and the attitudes that progressively led to a more mature conception of restoration began to be highlighted by Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor, and John Vanbrugh during the 18th century. The philosophical concept of authenticity emerged on the British cultural scene, and interest in the study and conservation of the prehistoric site of Stonehenge began.
John Ruskin is still universally considered the main representative of the reaction against the destructive treatment of ancient buildings, but the centrality of other contributions due to Welby Pugin, Gilbert Scott, and John James Stevenson was highlighted both in the development of the disciplinary theory and in the commitment to the conservative redirection of practice in the restoration site.
William Morris was positively affected by Ruskin’s influence, although his attitude was also marked by social and political issues; he fought to extend the concept of safeguarding to all historical heritage through the S.P.A.B. Society for the Protection of Ancient Building. The international campaign to defend St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice was launched in 1879, unequivocally affirming the principle of the universal value of historical and artistic testimonies, intended as a cultural heritage of humanity to be transmitted to the future. Thanks to the legitimate protests received from the United Kingdom, the young Italian State began a self-critical process in restoration matter and attempted to correct the serious organizational dysfunctions through the first legislative initiatives for the protection of monuments. The engineer Francesco Bongioannini and the archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli (head of the Direzione Generale di Antichità e Belle Arti of the Ministry of Public Education) were the key figures of these important innovations.
The same awareness also emerged in the United Kingdom, and the first government measures to defend the nation’s architectural and environmental heritage were enacted between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The National Trust (also born from a vision of John Ruskin) added to the numerous associations already operating in the protection sector.
The research remains open to further acquisitions, but the less blurry portraits and the sharper cultural profiles of the numerous protagonists and interpreters of the restoration in the United Kingdom can already be perceived, reconfirming the precious contribution offered by the English culture to the birth and affirmation of the Restoration as a modern European conservative discipline.
God save the Restoration!

La première œuvre arthurienne féministe.
En 1857, dans une Angleterre victorienne patriarcale, William Morris, jeune poète de 23 ans proche du mouvement préraphaélite, s’empare de la légende arthurienne qui connaît alors une popularité croissante. Mais, au lieu de célébrer les exploits des chevaliers, l’auteur décide de donner pour la première fois la parole à la reine Guenièvre.
Reprenant l’un des épisodes les plus célèbres du mythe du Camelot durant lequel la souveraine est accusée d’adultère avec Lancelot, William Morris place Guenièvre au centre de son récit et lui laisse le champ libre pour qu’elle présente seule sa défense devant un parterre de juges : tous des chevaliers, tous des hommes. La reine développe alors ses arguments, défend son amour et montre qu’elle a aussi été contrainte dans une condition qu’elle n’a pas voulue.
À travers elle, William Morris entreprend de critiquer les mœurs de son temps, à une époque où les femmes n’ont pas la parole dans l’espace public, tout en célébrant la passion des amants, la sexualité féminine et l’union libre.
Ce texte essentiel, particulièrement original dans toute la production arthurienne du XIXe siècle, est pour la première fois traduit en français et publié en édition bilingue, suivi d’un autre poème de Morris : Près d’Avalon.
Édition bilingue
Traduction de Philippe Mortimer
Présentation de William Blanc
72 pages — 5 €
Parution : 22 avril 2021
ISBN physique : 9782377291748
ISBN numérique : 9782377291755
Lien : https://www.editionslibertalia.com/catalogue/la-petite-litteraire/william-morris-la-defense-de-guenievre

Secrets d'ateliers, l'ornement Art nouveau, Bruxelles, Editions du musée Horta, 2020

Secrets of the studios, Art Nouveau ornament, Bruxelles, éditions du musée Horta, 2020 The Horta Museum’s spring 2020 exhibition is dedicated to ornamentation from the Art Nouveau era. The real question is why such a subject is so decisive in this period straddling the 19th and 20th centuries: a point of time in the history of art that is exalted right across Europe while crystallizing into patterns so varied that it is sometimes difficult to see a coherent style. It is the last moment of grace of interior decoration, a blazing sunset before ornamentation falls into disgrace.

Late Victorian Orientalism is a work of scholarly research pushing forward disciplines into new areas of enquiry. This collection of essays tries to redefine the task of interpreting the East in the nineteenth century taking as a starting point Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) in order to investigate the visual, fantasised, and imperialist representations of the East as well as the most exemplary translations of Oriental texts. Contributors: Eleonora Sasso (Introduction), Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Florence S. Boos, Eleonora Sasso, Andrea Mariani, Elisa Bizzotto, Miriam Sette, Christopher Cowell, Ben Cocking, Fabrizio Impellizzeri.

If perhaps somewhat surprisingly, throughout history craft has played a significant role in imagining numerous alternatives to the existing social order. Indeed, the reasons for the emphasis on craftwork, as well as the approaches to the understanding of craft within all these quests have been as varied as the worldviews that inspired them. Notwithstanding though, from literary utopias, through monasteries, intentional communities, through the 19th and 20th century art, craft and design reforms or the 1960s rise of DIY movement up to the quite recent phenomenon of Craftivism, craft seems to have repeatedly resonated in times of political, social, economic and cultural crises. Despite the variety of approaches employed, one of the common features linking all these approaches together have always been their vulnerability to the charges of ΄idealism΄ and ΄utopianism΄ of one kind or another. The aim of the proposed paper is therefore to look at the relationship between craft, social transformation and utopianism. Consequently, the paper will seek to answer the question of whether and how can craft act as an agent of social change through drawing a connection between the ideas of the British poet, designer and socialist William Morris (1834-1896) and the currently flourishing Craftivism movement.
 
The term Craftivism (craft + activism) was coined in the early 2000s by the writer and ΄crafter΄ Betsy Greer. Greer defines craftivism as “a way of looking at life where voicing opinions through creativity makes your voice stronger, your compassion deeper and your quest for justice more infinite”. Most of the issues at the core of the craftivist agenda (environmentalism, anti-capitalism, anti-sweatshop or antiwar), quite strikingly resemble the topics eagerly addressed by William Morris almost one and a half century ago. Yet, despite the very similar points of departure and the mediatory role ascribed to craft in both craftivist and William Morris’s anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist stance, there are a number of differences that draw these two approaches apart and, moreover, raise justified questions about the power of craft to negotiate social change. The proposed paper will suggest that the main differences between the two approaches are threesome and lie in their treatment of: 1. creativity, 2. materials and 3. skill. These, with special focus on the latter, will therefore serve as the main framework for the discussion of transformative potential of craft. The paper will question how creativity relates to skill and whether a consistent and convincing political statement can be made without what Richard Sennett describes as “quality-driven work”.

En el último tercio del siglo XIX surgió en Gran Bretaña un importante movimiento artístico llamado Arts & Crafts que tenía como objetivo ofrecer una alternativa al arte mecanizado e impersonal del momento, producto de la Revolución Industrial. Diferentes escritores, artistas, arquitectos y pensadores de la época aunaron sus fuerzas para desarrollar una reforma estética. El representante más importante de este movimiento fue William Morris (1834-1896), poeta, artesano, impresor, diseñador de interiores y activista socialista.

William Morris Gallery and National Museum in Kraków (NMK), in association with Lund Humphries and the Polish Cultural Institute, London, are pleased to announce a major new publication, Young Poland: The Polish Arts and Crafts Movement, 1890 – 1918. This ground-breaking study is the first book in any language to explore the Young Poland (Młoda Polska) period in the context of the international Arts and Crafts movements. Edited by art historians Julia Griffin and Andrzej Szczerski - who uniquely combine expertise in Polish and British design - the book will be published in November 2020 ahead of a major exhibition on the subject at William Morris Gallery in Autumn 2021.
The Young Poland movement emerged in the 1890s in response to the country’s non-existence for almost a century. From the end of the 18th-century Poland underwent successive partitions dividing the country between Russia, Austria and Prussia, resulting in the country disappearing from the map of Europe for 123 years. In the words of historian Norman Davies, Poland became “just an idea – a memory from the past or a hope for the future”. With the failure of military uprisings, culture became a means to preserve an endangered national identity.
The movement originated under the more liberal Austrian partition (known as Galicia), namely in Kraków and the nearby village of Zakopane (in the Tatra Mountains), and soon spread across the nation. It embraced an unprecedented flourishing of applied arts and the revival of crafts, drawing inspiration from nature, history, peasant traditions and craftsmanship to convey patriotic values.
This pioneering and lavishly illustrated publication charts the rich history of the artists, designers and craftspeople whose schemes came to define Young Poland, including over 250 illustrations of ceramics, furniture, textiles, paper cuttings, wood carvings, tableware, stained glass, book arts, children’s toys and Christmas decorations as well as domestic, church and civic interior decoration schemes.
The book argues that Young Poland shared fundamental parallels with the British Arts and Crafts movement, and that it was specifically this Arts and Crafts ethos which fuelled the movement’s patriotic ideology and the nation’s quest to regain Polish independence. While the diverse visual language of Young Poland was created autonomously, in search of a distinctive cultural style and identity, it simultaneously looked outwards to the rest of Europe including British influences, notably the Pre-Raphaelites and the vision of John Ruskin and William Morris. In fact, as the book reveals, there was a cultural exchange between both nations: in 1848 the members of the newly-founded Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood included the Polish fighter for freedom, Tadeusz Kościuszko, on their list of ‘Immortals’ (inspirational heroes).
Among key figures of the Young Poland movement, Stanisław Wyspiański (1869 – 1907) can most closely be considered a counterpart to William Morris. Nature and history were key subjects for both reformers and crucially, they shared firm belief in the equality of fine and decorative arts. Like Morris, Wyspiański was a polymath whose prolific output included wall paintings, decorative patterns, stage sets, textiles, stained glass, book arts, church and domestic interior decoration, as well as achieving acclaim for his writing. Wyspiański was also instrumental in the foundation of the Polish Applied Arts Society in 1901, the equivalent of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society which raised the status of the decorative arts in Britain. Both men were also early champions of the preservation of historic buildings.
Young Poland also gave rise to the Zakopane Style of architecture and interior decoration which drew on the vernacular building techniques and traditions of local people who lived in the foothills of the Tatra Mountains. Zakopane Style founder Stanisław Witkiewicz believed that these traditions were the essence of “Polishness”. While the style developed before he became aware of John Ruskin and William Morris, Witkiewicz later said that his work had unknowingly fulfilled the theories of these British reformers. In 1899, Witkiewicz corresponded with Ruskin, sending him photographs of Zakopane Style projects; Ruskin replied appreciatively and regretted that his advanced age prevented him from visiting Zakopane himself.
The book also explores in detail the work of unsung heroes from the period, notably Karol Kłosowski and Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, whose unique role in developing the Young Poland aesthetic has often been overlooked. Kłosowski was a prolific sculptor and woodcarver, painter, textile designer and paper cutter, whose Silent Villa (Willa Cicha) is a Zakopane Style Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) that epitomises the Arts and Crafts ethos and lifestyle. The polymath Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, famous for her lyrical poetry, was also a painter of bold and intimate watercolours, often incorporating fantastic and macabre elements inspired by Polish folk traditions; the book explores this important aspect of her oeuvre for the first time.

Ayraç Dergi 2011

.... Birçokları için Bellamy’nin gücünün en etkileyici ispatı Leo Tolstoy gibi bir kişinin Geriye Bakış’ın ilk Rusça çevirisinden sorumlu olması gerçeğinde yatar...”
Otuz yaşlarında bir Boston sakini olan Julien West bir manyetizma profesörü tarafından uyutulduktan sonra gözlerini 2000 yılının Boston’unda açar.

During the last third of the 19th Century, an important artistic movement called Arts & Crafts emerged in Great Britain with the aim of offering an alternative to the mechanized and impersonal art of the moment, product of the Industrial Revolution. Different writers, artists, architects and philosophers of the period joined their forces to develop an
aesthetic reform. The most representative figure of this movement was William Morris (1834-1986), poet, craftsman, printer, designer and political activist.

This chapter investigates the place of Kelmscott in Morris’s life and its history during his lifetime (1871–1896). It comprises two parts—a comprehensive literature review of existing scholarship on Morris at Kelmscott, followed by a study of largely unexplored aspects of the topic. His association with the manor has been the subject of various articles and book chapters. The great majority of these have focussed on exploring the influence of the house on the formation of Morris’s ideology and on his public life, namely in relation to historic buildings, society and the countryside. The manor’s impact on the Arts and Crafts Movement in the Cotswolds has also been investigated. Due to this focus in the scholarship thus far, paradoxically, very little is known about the nature of Morris’s stays at, and lived-in experience of, Kelmscott, which I seek to address in this chapter. Specifically, I will interrogate the circumstances behind Morris’s rental of the manor, the reformer’s perception of the function of Kelmscott in his life and his evolving attitude to the house. Consideration will be given to the frequency and duration of his visits and Morris’s uses of the manor, most notably as an important site of work. I will also examine the little-studied subject of the appearance of key Kelmscott interiors under the Morris family’s occupancy, based on contemporaneous life writings and various visual depictions dating primarily from the 1890s. This chapter will aim to recover the reality of Morris’s tenure of Kelmscott, whilst illuminating the manor’s role in his life as well as its wider cultural significance as a literary house, an artist’s house and a Morris memorial. In doing so, it will also allude to the subject of the manor’s reputation in the Victorian public consciousness.
I will attempt simultaneously to challenge some assumptions about Morris and Kelmscott perpetuated in modern scholarship, such as the notions that from the moment he first saw it, the manor became his ‘most-loved house’, or that it was solely a place of recreation. It will be argued that Morris did not, in fact, fully embrace Kelmscott until the final years of his life—following his withdrawal from active management of, or semi-retirement from, Morris & Co. in 1890. It was only then that he was able to spend a considerable part of the year there, and he appears to have developed undivided affection for the building. Furthermore, from the outset of the tenancy until the end of Morris’s life, the house served as a significant site of all aspects of his design and literary production, and to a lesser extent, his activism. Last but not least, the manor bore witness to several suppressed narratives, not least as a site of Jane Morris’s (1839–1914) infidelities, which are irreconcilable with the romanticised notions of the Morrises’ carefree domesticity at Kelmscott. Countering the relatively recent yet already entrenched proposition that Kelmscott had been knowingly and altruistically taken out by Morris as a love nest for his wife’s extramarital affair with Rossetti, it will be argued that, ironically, it was the newly found shared tenancy that provided the inevitable catalyst for the intimate relationship to begin, and that Morris was initially unaware of it.

Proust has shown little interest in the decorative arts of his time, but his work bears the mark of the "submarine style" distinctive of Art nouveau. The low bookshelves with glass panes in the Grand Hôtel room at Balbec ― the symbol of À la Recherche’s unity, according to Georges Poulet in Proustian Space ― prove to be authentic witnesses of “modern style”. But what does “modern style” actually mean? À la Recherche includes five occurrences of the expression that could lead to misunderstanding. Contrary to a preconceived idea, it is not the English name for Art nouveau. This French coined anglicism refers to the international revival of the decorative arts at the beginning of the twentieth century, a fascinating but disturbing blend of aesthetics and social ideas. Proust detected at once and discreetly highlighted the cosmopolitan and "rastaquouère" (so to speak "métèque") inspiration of an ephemeral artistic movement contemporary with the Dreyfus affair. Enriched with an abundant and entirely original iconography, full of new discoveries and identifications, Rastaquarium brings back to life an epoch of which the novelist caught the essence. For the first time the whole question of decorative arts in À la recherche is fully tackled in all its ramifications, in a fascinating instance of the network of connections at the heart of Proust’s system.

Proust n’a manifesté que bien peu d’intérêt pour les arts décoratifs de son temps, mais son œuvre ponctuée d’aquariums est marquée par le «style sous-marin» caractéristique de l’Art nouveau. Les «bibliothèques vitrées» de la chambre de Balbec ― dans lesquelles Georges Poulet voyait le symbole de l’unité de l’œuvre ― se révèlent d’authentiques témoins du «modern style». Mais qu’est-ce que le «modern style»? L’expression, qui revient cinq fois dans À la Recherche du temps perdu, n’avait jamais vraiment été élucidée. Contrairement à une idée reçue, ce n’est en rien le nom anglais de l’Art nouveau. Cet anglicisme bien français désigne un renouveau international des arts décoratifs qui, mêlant esthétique et idées sociales, fascine et inquiète… Proust a parfaitement perçu et discrètement mis en valeur l’inspiration cosmopolite et «rastaquouère» d’un courant artistique dont le bref épanouissement coïncide avec les années de l’affaire Dreyfus. Enrichi d’une vaste iconographie, entièrement originale, fourmillant de trouvailles et d’identifications nouvelles, Rastaquarium fait revivre une époque dont l’écrivain a su capter l’essentiel. Toujours abordée de façon fragmentaire, la question des arts décoratifs dans la Recherche n’avait jamais été traitée dans son ensemble, seule manière de saisir les réseaux de correspondances si chers à Proust.


Table of Contents

Note sur l’iconographie – Remerciements – Abréviations

Rastaquarium

Qu’est-ce que l’Art « nouveau » ?

Le « modern style » n’est pas un style

Naissance d’une expression

Le mobilier des Proust

Le monde de Liberty

Contre Ruskin

1905 : « Sur la lecture »

La Femme inconnue de Lille et le Printemps par « Brown »

Le moment Maple

Bing !

Le « modern style » dans la Recherche

Les bibliothèques vitrées de Balbec

De la référence anglaise à la référence bavaroise : le Salon d’Automne de 1910

Style « sous-marin »

Le Royaume de Neptune ou la civilisation de l’aquarium

Le « modern style », agent de l’étranger

L’esthétique dreyfusarde

Siegfried n’est pas Samuel

Le règne de l’impur

Le style franco-sémitique

Une nouvelle croisade

Dreyfusards avant Dreyfus

Style rastaquouère

Bibliographie - Index nominum - Table des illustrations

The dark, malodorous wetland called the Dead Marshes ranks among the most memorable and enigmatic landscapes in fantasy literature. While one influential line of scholarship connects the passage to Tolkien’s experiences in the Great War, this article argues that the Marshes should also be read as a reception of Tacitus’s depiction of the Teutoburg Forest. The link between the two texts is both simple and complex. Tolkien read Tacitus, and the latter’s influence has been detected elsewhere in The Lord of the Rings; yet Tolkien identified William Morris as an even more important source for the Marshes than the Great War, and the relevant passage in Morris is also a reception of Tacitus. It will be shown that Tolkien comes closer to Tacitus than Morris in his vision of the way landscapes manifest—to sight, hearing, and touch—the memory and meaning of military losses. Recognizing this reception both explains Tolkien’s ascription of such importance to Morris and offers an important example of a modern author reaching outside his own era and genre to participate in a distinctly Roman tradition of representing war-dead, landscape, and memory.

In Viaggio attraverso Utopia, Maria Luisa Berneri s'è proposta di fornire una descrizione ed una valutazione critica dei più importanti (e il lettore imparerà presto che ella non intendeva necessariamente i più famosi) scritti utopistici fin da quando Platone per primo diede, nella sua Repubblica, forma letteraria ai sogni di una Epoca Aurea e di società ideali che hanno certamente ossessionato l'uomo sin dall'inizio del consapevole dibattito sui problemi sociali.

The Arts and Crafts Movement of late 19th century England professed to democratize art and the production wares. The most prominent character of the Movement was poet, craftsman and socialist William Morris. I claim that today open source philosophy and peer production combined with 3D printing technology represents a similar philosophy about the democratization of production as the 19th century Arts and Crafts Movement. 3D printing is a nascent technology which allows the physical rendering (prototyping) of computer models. As The Arts and Crafts Movement was opposed to machines, I try to ascertain to what extent the Movement’s opposition toward the machine extends and what it is based on. Therefore, I discuss the machine’s two-sided role as, on the one hand, the destroyer of art, and on the other hand, the saviour of art.

The Arts and Crafts Movement and 3D printing along with its related philosophies are connected by their endeavour to make the production of wares more accessible to ordinary people. They also share ideas about co-operative work, the strive for quality instead of profits, and a kind of socialism. In the upcoming future, if current trends persist, it is foreseeable that progress toward an Arts and Crafts vision of society will take place. The concepts of art, handcraft and machine work have been, and still are, in a state of constant change. This entails that other related concepts will change, too, such as the concepts of authenticity and uniqueness, which are definitive concepts of the era of handmaking, and they will begin to denominate new, contemporarily more relevant phenomena. My discussion of Lewis Mumford’s concepts (Megamachine, polytechnics, monotechnics) details that the role of the machine as the destroyer or the saviour of art is contingent on the ideology of the man who wields power over the machine. In this light the Movement’s opposition toward the machine appears more as opposition toward the prevailing capitalist system rather than as simple Luddism.

I study the Arts and Crafts Movement through the texts of its members paying special attention to the writings of its father character William Morris. As 3D printing is still an emerging field of technology my study material, aside from academic articles, also includes news articles, popular literature, lectures and interviews that I have conducted myself. Study material on peer production and open source is based on academic literature. This thesis falls under cultural criticism in which I apply comparative analysis.