News from Nowhere and Other Writings

Author: William Morris
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141927429
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 597

Book Description
Poet, pattern-designer, environmentalist and maker of fine books, William Morris (1834-96) was also a committed socialist and visionary writer, obsessively concerned with the struggle to achieve a perfect society on earth. News From Nowhere, one of the most significant English works on the theme of utopia, is the tale of William Guest, a Victorian who wakes one morning to find himself in the year 2102 and discovers a society that has changed beyond recognition into a pastoral paradise, in which all people live in blissful equality and contentment. A socialist masterpiece, News From Nowhere is a vision of a future free from capitalism, isolation and industrialisation. This volume also contains a wide selection of Morris's writings, lectures, journalism and letters, which expand upon the key themes of News From Nowhere.

News from Nowhere

Author: William Morris
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486143198
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
One of the most literary of utopian fantasies, this 1890 novel distills the author's attitudes toward politics, art, and society. A resonant critique of state socialism, it offers remarkably modern proposals for an alternative, idyllic society.

William Morris

Author: Fiona MacCarthy
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571174959
Category : Artists
Languages : en
Pages : 780

Book Description
Winner of the Wolfson History Prize, the essential biography of the father of the Arts and Crafts movement. The author, Fiona MacCarthy, is the curator of the National Portrait Gallery's 2014-15 exhibition Anarchy and Beauty: William Morris and His Legacy.'One of the finest biographies ever published in this country' A. S. Byatt Since his death in 1896, William Morris has come to be regarded as one of the giants of the Victorian era. But his genius was so many-sided and so profound that its full extent has rarely been grasped. Many people may find it hard to believe that the greatest English designer of his time, possibly of all time, could also be internationally renowned as a founder of the socialist movement, and could have been ranked as a poet together with Tennyson and Browning.With penetrating insight, Fiona MacCarthy has managed to encompass all the different facets of Morris's complex character, shedding light on his immense creative powers as artist and designer of furniture, fabrics, wallpaper, stained glass, tapestry and books, and as a poet, novelist and translator; his psychology and his emotional life; his frenetic activities as polemicist and reformer; and his remarkable circle of friends, literary, artistic and political, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. Fiona MacCarthy's skilful drawing together of these disparate elements makes for a comprehensive and compelling biography.

William Morris by Himself

Author: William Morris
Publisher: Little Brown GBR
ISBN: 9780316727983
Category : Artists
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
Through his own work and in his own words, the book traces the fascinating progress of William Morris, pre-Raphaelite poet and architectural student into designer, writer and pioneer socialist. His youthful enthusiasm for the Middle Ages and Gothic architecture fired him with the conviction that he must dedicate his life to 'Art'. Later letters written to friends explain how in the industrialised nineteenth century Morris become preoccupied with the loss of traditional skills and pride in work and during the last ten years of his life he became increasingly involved in political agitation, and his stories, poems and lectures all reflect his commitment to the socialist cause and his ideals for art and society. Other extracts from his letters and poems reveal more intimate aspects of Morris's life and personality, reflecting the despair and isolation he felt over the breakdown of his marriage and his reliance on the friends who helped him through his personal crisis. WILLIAM MORRIS BY HIMSELF is a tribute to an exceptional man, whose work and reputation have survived for more than a century.

The Last Utopians

Author: Michael Robertson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691202869
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Book Description
The Last Utopians delves into the biographies of four key figures--Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman--who lived during an extraordinary period of literary and social experimentation. The publication of Bellamy's Looking Backward in 1888 opened the floodgates of an unprecedented wave of utopian writing. Morris, the Arts and Crafts pioneer, was a committed socialist whose News from Nowhere envisions a workers' Arcadia. Carpenter boldly argued that homosexuals constitute a utopian vanguard. Gilman, a women's rights activist and the author of "The Yellow Wallpaper," wrote numerous utopian fictions, including Herland, a visionary tale of an all-female society. These writers, Robertson shows, shared a belief in radical equality, imagining an end to class and gender hierarchies and envisioning new forms of familial and romantic relationships. They held liberal religious beliefs about a universal spirit uniting humanity. They believed in social transformation through nonviolent means and were committed to living a simple life rooted in a restored natural world. And their legacy remains with us today, as Robertson describes in entertaining firsthand accounts of contemporary utopianism, ranging from Occupy Wall Street to a Radical Faerie retreat.

Writing in the Disciplines

Author: Mary Lynch Kennedy
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780130210272
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 740

Book Description
This reader provides a firm grounding in academic writing, showing students how to read academic texts and use them as sources for college papers. Offering a broad and comprehensive selection of readings to help students develop their abilities to think critically and reason cogently, it shows them how to work individually and collaboratively as they move through the entire process of writing from sources from reading the original source to planning, drafting and revising essays.

Harlem is Nowhere

Author: Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
Publisher: Granta Books
ISBN: 1847084591
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Book Description
A walker, a reader and a gazer, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is also a skilled talker whose impromptu kerbside exchanges with Harlem's most colourful residents are transmuted into a slippery, silky set of observations on what change and opportunity have wrought in this small corner of a big city, Harlem, with its outsize reputation and even-larger influence. Hers is a beguilingly well-written meditation on the essence of black Harlem, as it teeters on the brink of seeing its poorer residents and their rich histories turfed out by commercial developers intent on providing swish condos for cool-seeking (and mostly white) gentrifiers. In a mix of conversations with scholars and streetcorner men, thoughtful musings on notable antecedents and illustrious Harlemites of the twentieth century, and her own story of migration (from Texas to Harlem via Harvard), Rhodes-Pitts exhibits a sensitivity and subtlety in her writing that is very impressive and very promising. There are echoes of Joan Didion's distinctive rhythms in her prose. This is an exceptionally striking and alluring debut.

Looking Backward: 2000-1887

Author: Edward Bellamy
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781492149248
Category : Utopias
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Book Description
Looking Backward: 2000-1887 is a utopian science fiction novel by Edward Bellamy, a lawyer and writer from Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts; it was first published in 1887. According to Erich Fromm, Looking Backward is "one of the most remarkable books ever published in America".

Anarchy & Beauty

Author: Fiona MacCarthy
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300209464
Category : Artisans
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Published to accompany an exhibition of the same name held at the National Portrait Gallery, London, October 16, 2014-January 11, 2015.

They Came Like Swallows

Author: William Maxwell
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 144643477X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
Discover William Maxwell’s classic, heart-breaking portrait of an ordinary American family struck by the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic 'A story of such engaging warmth that it would thaw the heart of any critic... Will melt many a reader to tears’ TIME Elizabeth Morison is an ordinary woman. Yet, to eight-year-old Bunny, his mother is the centre of his universe. To Robert, her elder son, she is someone he must protect against the dangers of the outside world. And to her husband, James, she is the foundation on which his family rests and life without her is unimaginable. As the dark winter of 1918 dawns and the shadow of Spanish flu starts to disturb day-to-day life, a moving portrait of Elizabeth takes shape, set against the lives and fate of the Morison family. ‘As you read They Came Like Swallows, you catch yourself from time to time being astonished at how tightly you're gripping the pages... There isn't a word that has dated. It could have been written yesterday, or tomorrow’ Nicholas Lezard, Guardian