The William Morris Society in the
U.S. is pleased to award the
2018 Dunlap Fellowship to Shyam Patel, a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of California,
Irvine. His
dissertation concerns the relationships among moral perfectionism, political
utopianism, and aesthetic organicism in the work of British authors and artists
(including William Morris) in the second half of the nineteenth century. Here
is Shyam’s summary of his project:
In the Morris portion of my
dissertation – “Romanticism, Socialism, and Organicism: The Aesthetic of
William Morris’ Late-Career Politics” – I locate the ideological unity of
Morris’ dedication to artistic production and political activism in the
Romantic tradition of organicism, whose simultaneous critique of political
economy and advocacy of aesthetic autonomy Morris sought to embody over the
course of his multifaceted career.
Focusing on the last decade of Morris’s life, I argue that the
complementarity of the Romantics’ organic models for artistic activity and
social life helps to demonstrate both the aesthetic dimensions of Morris’ work
organizing for the Socialist League (from 1884 to 1890) and the political
dimensions of his work managing the Kelmscott Press (from 1891 to 1896). I claim that Morris’ turn from the former to
the latter represents not an apolitical “retreat” into pure aesthetics, but
rather an attempt to practically realize on a smaller, private scale the
Romantic union of aesthetic and political organicism that his previous cultural
criticism and socialist activism sought to secure on the grander scales of
public opinion and policy, respectively.
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| Kelmscott Press logo |
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| Kelmscott Press edition of Coleridge |
The Joseph R. Dunlap Memorial
Fellowship will allow me to visit special collections at The University of
Maryland and The University of Texas at Austin
that contain manuscripts, letters, and ephemera from Morris’ work with the
Kelmscott Press and the Socialist League.
The research at these collections will help me to develop this project
in two directions. On the one hand, it
will allow me to complete a standalone article that reads Morris alongside the
Romantic tradition of organicism, in order to challenge the ambiguities,
equivocations, and binary oppositions that have become calcified in the
scholarship concerning Morris’s relationships to Romanticism and
socialism. On the other hand, this
research will be integrated into a dissertation that considers the function of
organicist metaphors in Victorian aesthetics, sociology, and political economy
more broadly, placing Morris in meaningful relation to Romantic and Victorian
figures with whom he is not ordinarily associated, including Coleridge, De
Quincey, Spencer, Mill, Dickens, and Hardy.
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| Hammersmith branch, Socialist League. Morris stands fifth from right on second row. |
