Abstract

Paradise Dislocated offers a radical rereading of William Morris's neglected masterpiece, The Earthly Paradise. While most critics have seen this poem as the antithesis of the radical socialist politics that Morris embraced later in his career, or, at best, as an awkward prelude to that later development, Jeffrey Skoblow proposes that The Earthly Paradise is in fact central to Morris's political vision - indeed, it is the most radical manifestation of that vision. Skoblow argues that the poem constitutes a far-reaching critique not only of the capitalist order of late nineteenth-century England but of the fundamental suppositions of Romanticism, suppositions that are intricately linked to the psychosocial dynamics of capitalist culture. Morris's work, as Skoblow presents it, is at once rooted in the late Romantic tradition and a subversion of that tradition in favor of an alternative idea of the imagination - a materialist imagination that is itself both akin to the historical materialism of Marxist theory and a transformative challenge to that theory. Morris emerges, then, as a critical revisionist of both Romantic and Marxist doctrine. Paradise Dislocated explores the problematic relations between critical thought, art, utopian aspirations, and dystopian realities. It proposes a revaluation of Morris's poem and of his career as a whole, as well as a judgment upon the possibilities (and impossibilities) of imaginative and cultural criticism at Morris's moment - and at our own.