Title: Reclaiming William Morris
First published: 1996
Description: Casting new light on the relations between nationalism, rhetoric, and revolution, Michelle Weinroth shows how the English legacy of William Morris was appropriated in the interests of political forces seeking hegemonic power. She argues that Conservative claimants readily disseminated Morris's aesthetic oeuvre, declaring it to be the embodiment of English sensibility. Communists, however, struggled to retain Morris's Englishness while promoting his political doctrine.

Weinroth demonstrates that these peripheral ideologues were caught in a paradox: they could not grip the masses without the aesthetic appeal of Englishness, but Englishness was imbued with the very imperialism that they abhorred. Theirs was a propaganda strained by the conflict between political dissent and ruling-class cultural forms.

. Moving through theoretical, historical, and exegetical analyses of propagandist texts, Reclaiming William Morris brings out the aesthetic underpinnings of nationalist ideology. Combining the philosophical substance of Karl Marx, Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, and Ernst Bloch with Kantian aesthetics, Weinroth constructs a conceptual apparatus that explains the impassioned yet decidedly marginal rhetoric of early twentieth-century English communism.
Subjects: Communism, Dissenters, English National characteristics, History, Influence, National characteristics, English, Socialism, Sublime, The, The Sublime, Political and social views, Biography, English Authors, Morris, william, 1834-1896, Socialism, great britain, Communism, great britain
Places: Great Britain
People: Robert Page Arnot (1890-), William Morris (1834-1896)
Time periods: 19th century, 20th century
LC classification: HX243 .W45 1996