David Latham – författare

William Morris was a Victorian master of all trades, standing at the forefront of five historic movements in western culture. As the author of The Defence of Guenevere in 1858, he wrote the first book of Pre-Raphaelite poetry. Co-founder of Morris & Co. in 1861, he was the leader of the Arts and Crafts movement, designing textiles, wallpapers, and stained glass. Editor of The Commonweal for the Socialist League in the 1880s and lecturing at political rallies, he was the leader of the socialist movement for revolution in Britain. Founder of the Kelmscott Press in 1891, he was the leader of the private-press movement with his Kelmscott Chaucer among the most beautiful books ever printed. The innovative author of eight prose romances in the 1890s, he was the leading force in shifting the genre of fiction from the novel to the romance, the primary influence on C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.Writing on the Image is a collection of essays that showcases the varied canon of Morris. The essays demonstrate how the most revolutionary artist, writer, and socialist of the nineteenth century now stands at the centre of interdisciplinary studies in the twenty-first century, challenging academics and artisans alike to pursue an ideal community of scholarship, craftsmanship, and subversive statesmanship.

Begun by young rebels committed to revolutionizing the creative arts, Pre-Raphaelitism has moved from the margins of nineteenth-century art and literature to the vanguard of interdisciplinary studies. The term is now used to denote the Pre-Raphaelite, Aesthetic, and Decadent movements in art, culture, and literature, but it has remained as difficult to define as ever. Haunted Texts attempts to meet the challenge of defining and illustrating the full spectrum of Pre-Raphaelitism.Working with a diverse range of Pre-Raphaelite poetry, painting, decorative arts, book illustration, and political prose, the ten contributors to Haunted Texts pursue the critical strategies of such leading figures as Christina Rossetti and Dante Rossetti, William Morris and Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, and Aubrey Beardsley. The essays consider the bibliocritical issues of archival research concerning the personal letters and diaries of the Rossetti family; the technological issues that challenge conventional methods of scholarship; the gender issues concerning constructions of identity derived from the changing conceptions of love, desire, anxiety, and brotherhood; and the interdisciplinary cultural issues that transgress the borders of high art and popular culture.Haunted Texts pays tribute to the scholarship of Professor William Fredeman who devoted much of his career since the 1950s to establishing a critical foundation that would enable future scholars to define their understanding of the complexity of Pre-Raphaelitism.