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Showing posts from April, 2019

New Voices in Morris Studies: Sheryl Medlicott, Bath Spa University

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[Image 1] Frontispiece of  News from Nowhere, Kelmscott Press Edition William Morris & the Environment When William Guest awakes in the future utopian London envisaged by Morris in News from Nowhere , the ‘smoke-vomiting chimneys’ are gone, there are salmon nets catching salmon in the Thames, and he is taken out on the river by a boatman who is utterly confounded by attempts to pay him for the boat trip, the exchange of labour for money being a completely alien concept. [1]    Evidently society has fundamentally transformed, and with it the environment.   News from Nowhere is in many ways Morris’ response to man-made (or specifically capitalist-made) environmental degradation.   This blog post focuses on Morris’ environmentalism and the insight his utopia offers for twenty-first century responses to environmental crisis, in particular with regards to a common concern about the scale on which humans are acting as agents for environmental change. [Image 2]  1871 Ordnance Survey