William Morris's News from Somewhere

On Thursday January 27th 2011 we turned to William Morris's News from Nowhere which features an utopian post-revolutionary Bloomsbury, in the form of a surviving relic of the past: the British Museum. We found the book particularly interesting in the way it married a genuinely rigorous interest in abstract ideas with an autobiographical dimension that was clearly palpable throughout, and indeed discernable in the text's geography as much as anything else. We discussed the book's proto-ecological aspects, and also turned to its rather problematic relationship to the aesthetic, especially when discussing the human (and more often than not, female) form, which led to the rather fascinating query whether this book can be seen within a social-Darwinist (and possibly fascist) tradition as much as a Marxist one...