Teaching William Morris ed. by Jason D. Martinek and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (review)

Jason D. Martinek and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller's edited collection Teaching William Morris makes good on just about everything it promises, which is no small feat given the range and diversity of Morris's interests and artistic endeavors. The collection aims to provide the "connective tissue" missing from so many approaches to teaching Morris that focus on a part rather than the whole of his work (3). As its title makes clear, this is a book about teaching Morris, and it offers a rich set of essays that cover multiple sites of teaching—from university extension programs in the early twentieth century, to the Hull-House Labor Museum in Chicago and workshops at the Kelmscott House Museum in Hammersmith for school-aged children, to undergraduate and graduate courses at a variety of postsecondary institutions—and multiple paths and modes for introducing students to Morris and capturing the expansiveness of his career. The collection is organized into five broad categories that are meant less to divide up the areas within which Morris worked than to give shape to his "multivarious complexity," and it covers an impressive amount of ground (2). Sections on "Pasts and Presents," "Political Contexts," "Literature," "Art and Design," and "Digital Humanities" touch on Morris's Icelandic sagas; political speeches and writings from The Commonweal (1885–94); poetry; wallpaper designs, tapestries, and other artisanal crafts; architecture; his founding of "the firm" (222); his relationship to the fine arts movement; his utopian novels News from Nowhere (1890) and A Dream of John Ball (1888); and his unorthodox translation of the Odyssey (1887). The list itself says it all in terms of what "multivarious" means when it comes to Morris.

Matching this range are the various responses to and forms of engagement with Morris, be it writing a young adult novel about him, as John Plotz discusses; creating the first ever William Morris blog, followed by YouTube videos and Twitter threads, a digital project of Tony Pickney's; looking at how Morris was taught to tenement dwellers in Chicago around 1900, as Elizabeth Helsinger does; or thinking about how he can best be taught today in an era defined by increasing specialization and alienated forms of labor, intellectual and otherwise—in short, the very things at the heart of Morris's critique of his own society. Against these present tendencies, Martinek and Miller's collection hopes to keep in play the "threads of interconnections that pass between and among [the essays]" both within and across the sections of the volume (4).

In this brief review, I cannot hope to do justice to all the fine essays brought together here. Instead, I will focus on a number of key themes, challenges, and innovative pedagogical approaches that emerge across the collection. A central question addressed in many of the essays is how we might get current students interested in Morris at all, a considerable task. Deanna Kreisel begins her essay on News from Nowhere by bluntly stating that "literary utopias are boring," and that Morris's is no exception, as her undergraduate students made clear in no uncertain terms (161). Given this shared experience, many of the essays helpfully describe different attempts to pique students' interest in Morris. KellyAnn Fitzpatrick invites students to read Morris's medievalism against J. R. R. Tolkien in order to see how "various manifestations of medievalism have made their way into contemporary fantasy" (70). David Latham focuses on five key transformations that Morris envisions—some of which seemed far-fetched during Morris's day but have now come to pass—in order to illustrate the power of the utopian ideal and to prompt students to think about where we "find our inspiration for thinking, for living, for improving the world" (116). As he concludes, "If we can change the weather, and our health and our height, then we may answer 'yes, surely,' we can find time to consider a different kind of...