"Smite this Sleeping World Awake": Edward Burne-Jones and The Legend of the Briar Rose

Challenging entrenched preconceptions about the supposed escapism and conservatism of Edward Burne-Jones's art, this paper seeks to establish his monumental painted series, The Legend of the Briar Rose, as a fundamentally radical and confrontational work. Critics have long viewed it as an endorsement of sleepy stasis, antithetical to the political activism espoused by his friend William Morris. By unraveling the intertwining themes of the series—the transformative dream vision, artistic labor, the decorative mode, and social egalitarianism—the Briar Rose series is revealed instead to be a dramatization of the struggle for personal, social, artistic, and even environmental awakening.