In his pioneering work of medieval scholarship, written six years after the first publication of News from Nowhere, W.P. The apparent paradox presented by the full title deserves further investigation. The full title, News from Nowhere or An Epoch of Rest being some chapters from a Utopian Romance, reveals Morris’s awareness that the strategies of imaginative fiction are not those of the discursive mode which he had used to present his vision of socialism through his journalism and public speaking and to which he had dedicated much of his energies in the 1880’s. It is at once the culmination of the political journalism in which he had attempted to expound the principles of socialism to a wider public and a more realistic version of the "radical fantasies"1 which occupied the later years of his life. It was a product of his thinking about social conditions in late-nineteenth Britain, thinking which had led to his profound engagement with socialist politics. News from Nowhere is the representation in fictional terms of William Morris’s vision of a sane and humanly feasible society. Lineaments of Ungratified Desire: William Morris’s News From Nowhere as Utopian
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