Anarchism and Utopia
William Morris's News from Nowhere
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 16007461 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michael Holzman, Michael D Holzman (0000-0003-2758-9583, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1984 |
| Volume | 51 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 589-589 |
| Publication date | 1984-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | ELH (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-8304 • E-ISSN: 1080-6547 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2872939 |
| OpenAlex | W2334782934 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 9 |
News From Nowhere is a complex work, requiring interpretation on many levels: literary-historical, biographical, political.' This essay will concentrate on the last of these. News From Nowhere is unusual among utopian romances in that it was intended to have a direct bearing on the political tactics of a group attempting to bring about the changes in society proposed by the text. This aspect of News From Nowhere can best be analyzed when it is considered not as a book, but in its original form, as a newspaper serial. In the following pages I will discuss William Morris's association with the Socialist newspaper Commonweal, then trace a debate about Anarchism which took place in its pages. This information will then be used as an introduction to an analysis of the political material in News From Nowhere. I hope to establish by this means that News From Nowhere was not merely an escapist utopian fantasy (although it was that too), but was, at least in part, a political act. I also wish by these reflections to add something to our knowledge of an interesting text, and of an important author, and perhaps to contribute some information to the discussion of the status of texts located on generic borderlines. An imaginative work serialized in a newspaper may differ in at least one crucial way from the book form of the same work: it can have a particular, time-bound context in the pages of the newspaper. This serves to focus interpretation immediately-at least for the original audience. News From Nowhere contains criticisms of certain tendencies in the emerging English revolutionary movement of the 1890s, especially those of the Anarchists. This layer of meaning, which would have been most important to the first audience of the tale-the readers of the Socialist League's newspaper Commonweal-was pointed to by the opening phrases of News From Nowhere, which they found on the front page of the January 11, 1890 issue of that paper
Art · Art history · Environmental ethics · Utopia · Anarchism and Radical Politics · History · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism
Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900
Building a Bridge to Nowhere
Apocalyptic Visions and Utopian Spaces in Late Victorian and Edwardian Prophecy Fiction
Reappraising News From Nowhere
Liberal Possibilities in a Communist Utopia
Writing the wave
Redesigning the Language of Social Change
Fictional Commodities
Socio-economic Utopianism in Spain at the End of the Nineteenth Century
| Unique citing works | 9 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,35 |
| Citation span | 2000 - 2021 (22) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 9 |