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The relevance of Morris's utopia

journal contribution
posted on 2006-05-31, 10:12 authored by Ruth KinnaRuth Kinna
This paper considers the reputation of William Morris’s News From Nowhere and its evaluation as a utopia. It argues that there is a discrepancy between scholarly estimations of the book’s importance and its treatment as a utopia relevant to socialism. Whilst scholars have for many years almost unanimously praised News From Nowhere as Morris’s crowning achievement, most have also attempted to argue that Morris did not intend his work to be used as a serious model for socialism. After reviewing some of the secondary literature and distinguishing between a variety of different interpretations of Morris’s work, I suggest that the relevance of News From Nowhere might be assessed by the standards which Morris applied to Thomas More’s Utopia. Considering Morris’s work in this framework of utopianism, I argue that the relevance of Morris’s utopia lies in what Norman Geras has called its ‘maximum’ vision.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Politics and International Studies

Pages

78428 bytes

Citation

KINNA, R., 2004. The relevance of Morris's utopia. The European Legacy, 9(6), pp. 739-750

Publisher

© Taylor and Francis

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 2.5 International (CC BY-NC-ND 2.5) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/

Publication date

2004

Notes

This article was published in the journal, The European Legacy [© Taylor and Francis] and is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1084877042000311590

ISSN

1084-8770

Language

  • en

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