William Morris has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 6 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 7 ratings. The most-rated is News From Nowhere.
News From Nowhere
Summary
News from Nowhere (1890) is the best-known prose work of William Morris. The novel describes the encounter between a visitor from the 19th century, William Guest, and a decentralized and humane socialist future. Set over a century after a revolutionary upheaval in 1952, these 'Chapters from a Utopian Romance' recount his journey across London and up the Thames to Kelmscott Manor, Morris's own country house in Oxfordshire. Drawing on the work of John Ruskin and Karl Marx, Morris's audiobook is not only an evocative statement of his egalitarian convictions but also a distinctive contribution to the utopian tradition. Morris's rejection of state socialism and his ambition to transform the relationship between humankind and the natural world, give News from Nowhere a particular resonance for modern readers.
©2013 William Morris (P)2013 Audible Ltd
The Poetry of William Morris
Summary
William Morris was born in Walthamstow, London, on 24 March 1834 and is regarded today as a foremost poet, writer, textile designer, artist and libertarian. Morris began to publish poetry and short stories in 1856 through The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, which he founded with his friends and financed while at university. His first volume, in 1858, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems, was the first published book of pre-Raphaelite poetry. Due to its lukewarm reception he was discouraged from poetry writing for a number of years. However, his return to the form was met with great success in the poem 'The Life and Death of Jason' in 1867, which was followed by 'The Earthly Paradise', themed around a group of medieval wanderers searching for a land of everlasting life; after much disillusion, they discover a surviving colony of Greeks with whom they exchange stories. In the collection are retellings of Icelandic sagas. From then until his Socialist period Morris' fascination with the ancient Germanic and Norse peoples dominated his writing, and he was the first to translate many of the Icelandic sagas into English; the epic retelling of the story of Sigurd the Volsung being his favourite. In 1884 he founded the Socialist League, but with the rise of the Anarchists in the party he left it in 1890, and the following year he founded the Kelmscott Press, publishing limited-edition illuminated style books. His design for The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer is a masterpiece. Morris was quietly approached with an offer of the Poet Laureateship after the death of Tennyson in 1892 but declined. William Morris died at age 62 on 3 October 1896 in London. This volume comes to you from Portable Poetry, a specialised imprint from Deadtree Publishing. Our range is large and growing and covers single poets, themes and many compilations.
©2019 Deadtree Publishing (P)2019 Copyright Group
The Pre-Raphaelite Poets
Summary
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood began as a group of painters, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, who wished to reject the stern and academic strictures of current painting and return to the simpler and more uncomplicated days before the Italian High Renaissance and the days of Raphael. The movement was short lived but very influential and, as well, was taken up by a number of different arts. For poetry, it was a major movement and, because of its depiction of pleasures of the flesh, was, at the time, heavily criticised. One critic called it ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’. However, the sensationalist aside, it unleashed works that had instant appeal. The movement pushed back against contemporary writings, which seemed full of tradition and the more mundane problems of society. To exploit and gain attention for their ideas, the Brotherhood started their own periodical, The Germ, which, although it lasted only four numbers, did much to bring them attention. Its devotion to the mediaeval, to symbols and a more naturalistic and detailed approach to poetry, was refreshing, especially as the movement sprang up from a Victorian society that believed morals should be strictly managed, at least in public. The Pre-Raphaelites as an organised group eventually went their own way but had behind them works which heavily influenced painting and literature for decades to come. With poets of the calibre of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his sister Christina Georgina Rossetti, William Morris, Charles Algernon Swinburne and George Meredith, poetry of great beauty, tenderness and even rawness was placed on the page. This volume comes to you from Portable Poetry, a specialized imprint from Deadtree Publishing. Our range is large and growing and covers single poets, themes, and many compilations.
Public Domain (P)2019 The Copyright Group NET
The Wood Beyond the World
Summary
"The Wood Beyond the World" is a fantasy novel by William Morris, perhaps the first modern fantasy writer to unite an imaginary world with the element of the supernatural, and thus the precursor of much of present day fantasy literature. It was first published in hardcover by Morris' Kelmscott Press in 1894.
©2017 SAGA Egmont (P)2017 SAGA Egmont