Bøker av William Morris

The Water of the Wondrous Isles is a landmark in fantasy fiction. First published a year after Morris¿s death in 1897 by Kelmscott Press¿Morris¿s own printing company¿the novel follows Birdalone, a young girl who is stolen as a baby by a witch who takes her to serve in the woods of Evilshaw.After she encounters a wood fairy that helps her escape the witch¿s clutches, Birdalone embarks on a series of adventures across the titular Wondrous Isles. These isles are used by Morris both as parables for contemporary Britain and as vehicles for investigating his radical socialist beliefs. As Birdalone travels through the isles she slowly evolves into the embodiment of the Victorian ¿new woman,¿ embracing hard physical labor, healthy exercise, higher education, socialist values, and financial freedom, while rejecting sexual exploitation, physical abuse of both women and children, and the restrictive sexual mores of the era. This makes her unique in the fantasy fiction of the era as one of the genre¿s first examples of a strong female hero.This socialist-feminist allegory is presented in an Arthurian-style fantasy world complete with magic, witches, fairies, knights both chivalrous and evil, and castles (indeed, anyone doubting the allegorical nature of the work only needs to look at the name of the tale¿s main redoubt: ¿The Castle of the Quest¿). The language is purposefully archaic, reveling in vocabulary drawn from the language¿s Anglo roots; and the prose is lent a hypnotic quality by its lack of quotation marks to offset dialog, and its short chapters characterized by a fairy-tale-narrative voice.

William Morris wrote a fantasy book titled The House of the Wolfings. It is written in an archaic style and contains a significant amount of poetry. It is a beautifully rebuilt depiction of the life of the Germanic Gothic tribes. Morris integrates his own idealistic beliefs with the culture and language of his subjects as it was truly understood at the time. He depicts them as being simple and hardworking people who were moved to heroism by the attacks of imperial Rome to protect their families and freedom. The House Of The Wolfings is regarded as a classic book and can be read by the readers of several age groups. Some of the other classics by William Morris include: The Hollow Land (1856), The Defence of Guenevere, and other Poems (1858), The Life and Death of Jason (1867), The Earthly Paradise (1868-1870), A Book of Verse (1870), Love is Enough, or The Freeing of Pharamond: A Morality (1872), The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1877), Hopes and Fears For Art (1882), The Pilgrims of Hope (1885), A Dream of John Ball (1888), Signs of Change (1888), A Tale of the House of the Wolfings, and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse (1889), The Roots of the Mountains (1889).

The famous novel News from Nowhere (1890), written by socialist pioneer and artist William Morris, combines utopian socialism and soft science fiction. Starting on January 11, 1890, it was first serialized in the Commonweal newspaper. In the story, William Guest, the narrator, falls asleep on the way home from a Socialist League meeting and wakes up in a world where the means of production are owned by everyone and democratically controlled. This society lacks private property, large cities, authority, a monetary system, marriage and divorce, courts, jails, and class structures. The only reason this agrarian culture is able to function is that people enjoy being in nature and consequently enjoy what they do. The structure of this civilization as well as the interpersonal interactions it fosters are some of the topics covered in the book. When Morris presents himself as an enchanted character in a period and place other than Victorian England, he combines Marxism and the romance genre. Morris, the romance character, runs into romance archetypes dressed in Marxist garb as he searches for love and camaraderie and, through them, a reborn self. Old Hammond is the sage of romance as well as the communist teacher who introduces the modern world to Morris.