Swinburne

Abstract

In “William Morris: An Annotated Bibliography 2016–2017,” David and Sheila Latham provide the nineteenth installment of their biannual annotated compilations of critical and scholarly contributions on Morris and his circle. This twoyear period saw 119 publications, with the greatest number devoted to lit er a ture (p. 29), the decorative arts (p. 28), and more general items (p. 27). Politics lagged a bit behind, with seventeen entries, and book design weighed in with seven. The Lathams’ invaluable biblio graphies can be consulted online through the US William Morris Society website, but at some point, readers would benefit from an aggregated and indexed compilation; with twenty installments covering forty years, the next version might offer a propitious gathering point. The William Morris Archive has added several introductions during 2021— for Poems by the Way by David Latham, Beowulf by Yuri Cowan, and Sigurd the Volsung by Peter Wright. An inspiring conclusion to Morris studies of the year is provided by the artist David Mabb’s “News from SOMEWhERE” (JWMS 24, nos. 1–2 [2021]: 88–94), a twentyfoot painting and collage created from altered versions of Morris’s text that glow in front of a black nightsky background. The work is made from altered pages of a facsimile of the Kelmscott Press edition of News from Nowhere that have been overpainted in black, leaving only ornamented initials vis i ble as these spell out “somewhere,” creating an effect like stars leaping forth against the night sky. Mabb notes that the exhibit is designed, like its source text, as “a utopian space which rejects late nineteenthcentury industrial cap i tal ist society in all its exploitation and ugliness” (p. 88), and he interprets his painting’s (and Morris’s) message of deferred hope: “it is out of fragments and facsimiles, which can be appropriated from the past and repurposed for the future, that a new somewhere might be made pos si ble, even if there appears nowhere but the night sky for a somewhere at pre sent” (p. 89).