Nowhere and Everywhere: The End of Portability in William Morris's Romances

In News from Nowhere and his neglected prose romances (1891-1896), William Morris aims to refute a Victorian novelistic commonplace: that personal identity and cultural privilege are portable properties, and that empathic identification depends on individuals' carrying a durable sense of self with them, housed in such portable properties. Influenced by the Chartists and by a subterranean tradition of English radical writing, Morris produced these romances as a series of anti-novels, aiming for a deindividuating aesthetic of surfaces over depths, an aesthetic that erased not only apparent differences between words, but also between persons.