Document Type

Honors Thesis

Publication Date

Spring 5-2017

Abstract

This thesis attempts to view William Morris and his work at the Kelmscott Press as a thoroughly modern endeavor, instead of the nostalgic enterprise his work is usually branded as. To do this, this thesis inquires into Morris’s ideas about art and experience, and how these ideas are both tied to his ideas of the mediaeval and are the same ideas that will haunt modern artists throughout the twentieth century. In this thesis I argue that how Morris designed the pages produced by him and a long list of collaborators at the Kelmscott Press shows the readers/viewers of Kelmscott books a way to gain pleasure and meaning from the world in a way detached from the capitalist structures that readers/viewers would normally go through to gain these things.

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