Communism in Furs: A Dream of Prehistory in William Morris's John Ball

@article{Eisenman2005CommunismIF,  title={Communism in Furs: A Dream of Prehistory in William Morris's John Ball},  author={Stephen F. Eisenman},  journal={The Art Bulletin},  year={2005},  volume={87},  pages={110 - 92},  url={https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:153319221}}
  • S. Eisenman
  • Published1 March 2005
  • History, Political Science
  • The Art Bulletin
William Morris was engaged in most major political causes of his day, yet his writing and designs are marked by archaism. Influenced by Morgan and Engels, Morris believed that history progressed in an upward spiral, with a “backward as well as forward movement.” Thus, the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, the subject of Morris's novel A Dream of John Ball and Burne-Jones's etching, left a profound imprint on the consciousness of later revolutionaries. The medieval ideal of primitive communism… 

11 Citations

Redesigning the Language of Social Change: Rhetoric, Agency, and the Oneiric in William Morris's A Dream of John Ball

Forced in 1890 to surrender his editorship of Commonweal, the radical paper of the Socialist League, William Morris turned to designing beautiful books at his Kelmscott Press. Traditionally

Between Utopia and Tradition: William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball

ABSTRACT William Morris, author of the famous nineteenth-century utopian novel News from Nowhere, thought it both possible and desirable to develop a utopian vision that could be affirmed by many

Revolutionary failure and utopia: William Morris and the Paris Commune

What constitutes revolutionary failure, and how, if at all, can the utopian imagination reanimate unfulfilled revolutionary dreams and aspirations? In this essay I aim to demonstrate the inadequacy

How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions

In this panoramic historical analysis, Neil Davidson defends a renovated concept of bourgeois revolution. Davidson shows how our globalized societies of the present are the result of a contested,

Dreams of John Ball: Reading the Peasants’ Revolt in the Nineteenth Century

In 1381, all over England, the labouring classes rose in revolt. They attacked lawyers, abbots, tax-collectors, and royal commissioners; they burned title-deeds and manor rolls, broke open jails and

The end of the Neolithic?

In his 1865 book Pre-historic Times, the English entomologist and anthropologist John Lubbock took the momentous step of dividing humanity’s origin story into four successive periods: the

Tax and the Forgotten Classes: from the Magna Carta to the English Revolution

This paper looks at three key early events in English tax history, the 1215 Magna Carta, the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 and the English Revolution from 1640 to 1649. It uses these events to explore the

The social, political and economic determinants of a modern portrait artist, Bernard Fleetwood-Walker (1893-1965)

As the first major study of the portrait artist Bernard Fleetwood-Walker (1893-1965), this thesis locates the artist in his social, political and economic context, arguing that his portraiture can be

Bibliography

Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The Second Series, ed. Malcolm C. Godden, Early English Text Society, s.s. 5, London: Oxford University Press, 1979. Ascham, Roger, Toxophilus, ed. Edward Arber, London:

Arts and Crafts Painting: The Political Agency of Things

Can there be such a thing as “Arts and Crafts” painting? This article will address that question by interrogating the points of connection between PreRaphaelite painting and the Arts and Crafts

39 References

Related Papers

Showing 1 through 3 of 0 Related Papers