Fantasies of pattern: the spirit of design in the late romances of William Morris

Carew, Evangeline Rose Marie (2023). Fantasies of pattern: the spirit of design in the late romances of William Morris. University of Birmingham. M.Res.

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Abstract

Recounting the many avenues of William Morris’s vast career and his prolific creation of patterns, May Morris refers to her beloved father as a ‘literary artist’. Taking this title as a useful coda of Morris’s work across the many fields of his fancy, such as stained glass, tapestry, chintz, wallpaper, poetry, revolutionary newspaper, and prose romance, this thesis will demonstrate the ways in which pattern ought to be treated as the definitive key to understanding his complex and fantastical works centring on how this is expressed in his late prose romances. A pattern designer, pattern maker and pattern writer, Morris’s affinity with this mode and form of order and instinct, and beauty and delight, is no less at the fore of his compositions in the romances than in his heyday, designing wallpapers at Morris and Co.. The Wood Beyond the World, The Well at World’s End, and The Water of the Wondrous Isles are the creations of a rich interdisciplinary mind. A craftsman who took prose as his final medium of choice, in these romances Morris drafts the most intricate and affecting worlds which are not only replete with a sense of both fantasy and pattern as distinct qualities but are in fact, fantasies of pattern.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Masters by Research > M.Res.)

Award Type:

Masters by Research > M.Res.

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