How the Writings of William Morris Shaped the Literary Style of Tennyson, Swinburne, Gissing, and Yeats. Barthesian Re-writings Based on the Pleasure of Distorting Repetition

William Morris and His Readers investigates William Morris’s pervasive influence on such eminent nineteenth-century readers as Alfred Tennyson, Algernon Swinburne, George Gissing and William Butler Yeats. This book focuses on a selection of Morris’s writings (lectures, short stories, poems and romances) and situates them in the fields of art, culture and society. Through Roland Barthes’s notion of the pleasure of the text it is possible to demonstrate that Tennyson, Swinburne, Gissing, and Yeats were active readers of Morris’s works, i.e. “writerly texts” or “texts of bliss” which not only stimulated their writing but also infused them with desire, which destabilised and unsettled their artistic and cultural assumptions.
The adventure of reading “The Hollow Land,” The Earthly Paradise, The Defence of Guenevere, News from Nowhere, The Well at the World’s End, and so forth calls for another writing, because, as Barthes puts it, “reading is a conductor of the Desire to write.” The aim of this book is to explore the ways in which Tennyson, Swinburne, Gissing and Yeats were seduced by Morris’s writerly texts and induced into multiple writings and re-writings. Idylls of the King, The Masque of Queen Bersabe, Workers in the Dawn and The Celtic Twilight are only a few examples of “Barthesian” re-writings based on the pleasure of distorting repetition of the original. Morris’s writings framed the minds of eminent Victorians, affecting their literary, artistic and ideological styles, and, in so doing, they acted as major vehicles for the formation of the literary canon.