Victorian Literature and Culture series. xvi+206 pages with index. Cloth & boards. Fine in dustjacket. "Paradise Dislocated" offers a re-reading of William Morris's neglected poem, "The Earthly Paradise". While most critics have seen this work as the antithesis of the radical socialist politics that Morris embraced later in his career or, at best, as an awkward prelude to that later development, Jeffrey Skoblow proposes that "The Earthly Paradise" is, in fact, central to Morris's political vision - indeed the most radical manifestation of that vision. Skoblow argues that the poem constitutes a far-reaching critique not only of the capitalist order of late 19th-century England but of the fundamental suppositions of Romanticism, suppositions that are intricately linked to the psychosocial dynamics of capitalist culture. Morris's work, as Skoblow presents it, is at once rooted in the late Romantic traditions and a subversion of that tradition in favour of an alternative idea of the imagination - a materialist imagination that is itself both akin to the historical materialism of Marxist theory and a transformative challenge to that theory. Morris emerges as a critical revisionist of both Romantic and Marxist doctrine. "Paradise Dislocated" explores the problematic relations between critical thought, art, utopian aspirations and dystopian realities. It proposes a revaluation of Morris's poem and of his career as a whole.

Morris, William 19th century Victorian english literature the earthly paradise 0813914396