News from Nowhere and Other Writings (Penguin Classics)

Customer Reviews:

Delightful.......2006-01-07

"News from Nowhere" is a Utopian fantasy in strong reaction against the Industrial (factory) Capitalism of the time (1890s England).

It's like a cross between "Rip Van Winkle" and "Gulliver's Travels." William, the hero, goes to sleep in 1890s England (the powerhouse of rapacious Industrialism and Imperialism) and wakes up in a post-2000 England, where Industrialism is gone, and life is like heaven.

How has all this happened? Simple. People have given up the Ethic of Scarcity mentality, which says "Let him who does not work not eat"--which turns life into never-ending toil. And they have turned to an Ethic of "Follow Your Bliss."

This, naturally, has destroyed Industrial (factory) capitalism.

Morris believed that Industrial (factory) Capitalism, with its fierce division of labor and assembly-line techniques--although very efficient--was grotesque and dehumanizing. Like Marx, he believed that such a system turned workers into mere components of the machine--mechanical and highly expendable.

For workers, it made life repetitive and soul-killing (and body-killing) drudgery. And for consumers, it turned out floods of shoddy assembly-line trash--"goods" that were hardly good at all but unesthetic, cheap, throwaways.

Morris realized that Industrialism had traded quality for quantity, and it had given the wrong answer to Jesus' question, "What profiteth it a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?"

(Sound familiar? It is precisely what we have now.)

He wanted to change all that. And unlike the Marxian socialists, Morris did not see the factory system as inevitable.

He favored a more anarchist type of socialism.

In "News from Nowhere"--in the TRULY brave new world he envisions--there is no government (because people and quite capable of governing themselves and reaching mature agreements), there are no schools (because people instinctively learn what is useful and what interests them), and most of all there is no work, in the sense of toil and drudgery (because people do what they like, out of their own artistic gifts and interests).

As a result, people like their lives and they like other people. They are happy, and as a consequence healthy. They make things and do things not for profit but because they like doing them--and in the grand scheme of things, all necessary and beautiful things get done.

This is a marvelously charming book, and presents the (quite achievable) Anarchist Paradise in simple and concrete terms.

Artist and Socialist.......2005-05-13

Yes, I mean that with a capital S. The title story, "News from Nowhere", is a Socialist Utopia like Bellamy's "Looking Backward." In fact, Morris wrote an intro to Bellamy's brief book, and criticized it (gently) for not going far enough.

Morris' view of that happy future occupies about half of this thick compilation. It is an incredible Eden, where hale, hearty, and lovely people swing into everything with the greatest gusto. Morris' character, the Guest, arrives just when everyone is falling over themselves to row upstream for the privelege of baling hay. Through some Socialist magic, everyone has become beautiful, intelligent, and youthful. In fact Ellen, who takes a shine to the Guest, has such "beauty and cleverness and brightness" (her own words, p.223) that she lives out of town to avoid causing a ruckus among the young bucks there.

Outside of everyone's passion for good, hard labor (with the fear of some future shortage of sweaty work to go around), 'Nowhere' is most notable for the changes it has wrought on the English countryside. Since government no longer serves a Socialist need, the old trappings of power have been torn down. The one exception is the old Parliament building, which now serves as the transfer station between the producers of manure and its consumers - with a clear implication that little has changed.

Exchange of manure is about the most sophisticated social interaction, since Morris declares that "this is not an age of inventions. The last epoch did all that for us," (p.192) and they let more of the old knowledge slip away every year. Instead, his healthy and pastoral people work for love of work, and infuse some vague sense of art into whatever it was they were going on about. Issues of medical care are waved away under their general shiny health, despite the fact that pastoral, non-technological people filled their graveyards with women dying in childbirth.

The other half of this book is divided between a number of essays and lectures, most of which extol the Socialist ethos. About 120 pages of "Lectures" discuss design, and some few - with gritted teeth - acknowledge that science may deserve to exist. Yes, he tolerates those people in whom the desire to know burns most brightly. Mostly, however, "science" is something good for cleaning flue gas so the rural colors may shine more brightly.

Morris was a visionary. He was also a brilliant and driven man, a skilled artisan, and eloquent writer. Unfortunately, he was born into a good-sized estate, so never had to pay all that much attention to the fussy bits of how people put the bread on their tables. The disconnect between his plenty and the majority's need is painfully apparent, but not to himself.

The best-reasoned essay of the lot was the last, on the founding philosophy of his Kelmscott Press. He explained, in concrete terms, how he decided on the principles of artisanship of printing, and goes into some detail about how well-made text should appear. Much of what he said made sense, and much of the rest could be confirmed or denied by printing up a few pages and seeing what worked - the essence of his reviled "science."

Morris had a fine and wide-ranging mind. This book shows many of its aspects, but also shows many of its failings. I was happier thinking of him only as the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement.

//wiredweird

William Morris' salutary alternative to industrial dystopia.......2003-11-14

This edition focuses primarily upon William Morris' influential utopian romance News from Nowhere, and contains some useful notes for the reading of the text together with several other of his pieces relating to the themes of Earthly Paradise, the arts and crafts and the nature of work.

If News from Nowhere seems unfamiliar to most people now, it is perhaps not so much due to its age than to the many successful novels written since that warn of the perils of striving blindly toward some Brave New World ideal. Yet News from Nowhere was itself written partly as a reaction to one such industrial utopia, namely Edward Bellamy's `Looking Backward', and is perhaps more relevant today than at any time since its original publication in 1890. William Morris offers here a prophetic anticipation of the concerns of today's growing environmental and `anti-globalisation' movements.

Although others have presented Morris' ideas as backward and Luddite, such labelling imparts a misleading picture of his views. Indeed, far from being a 'Luddite' Morris was quick to embrace the innovative Jacquard loom in his own workshops - a programmable punch-card system for automated weaving, and one of the precursors of modern computing. The irony inherent in such a label will not be lost on those familiar with the history of the Luddites.

Rather than denouncing technology News from Nowhere sees a world so technologically and socially advanced that it has surpassed any need for the industrial technology of Capital, ably providing for its own happiness and wellbeing without it. Progressive and sustainable technology is woven so seamlessly into its idyllic tapestry that if you were to blink you would easily miss it. And this is exactly the point Morris was making about the appropriate use of technology. Unpolluting, smokeless furnaces and silently powered barges drift by almost unnoticed as a group of friends make their way gently along the Thames by rowing boat - another technology perfectly suited to their own immediate needs and fancies.

The power and beauty of Morris' novel does not lie simply in the descriptions of the material environment of its imaginary society. Morris' vision is never so shallow. He is concerned above all with the quality of life of its inhabitants and the forms of social organisation that bequeath them its benefits, and how this contrasts so starkly with the forces of coercion and seduction that govern our own society. The inhabitants that Morris describes with such convincing lucidity are nurtured in a social environment founded upon a resurgence of vernacular values and an abandonment of institutionalised forms of control and exploitation. The fire of Morris' polemic being eloquently voiced through the dialogues of old Hammond in the heart of the novel.

If you are interested in a serious and profound analysis of our own society and the development of a saner view of the world then News from Nowhere will provide you with many pertinent insights. A testimony to the prescience of his vision, written as it was almost one hundred years before the environmental revolution in thinking that swept the world in the late 1980's and beyond, Morris provides us here with a very timely view of an alternative future to that promised by our own society, leading us as it is towards the brink of ruinous global turmoil.

This long neglected novel won't fail to move the hearts of a new generation of readers who may be disillusioned with a life of stifling employment and meaningless industrial consumption.

The Luddite lover of liberty?.......2000-06-24

I suspect that many people who come across this book will be art lovers, specifically admirers of Art Noveau and perhaps even recent visitors to the exhibition of this particular form of turn-of-the-century expression at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. And this is, notwithstanding the prominence of the title story and Clive Wilmer's introduction, which focuses on the political aspects of Morris's writing, a book about the author's vision of beauty, of craftsmanship not for its own sake, but with the aim of producing work of skill and magnificence, and, as a secondary but vital consideration, the satisfaction of the artist. Morris comes across as a brilliant man, devoted to his many crafts (he taught himself thirteen) and passionate about human equality, though the impression from his writing is that the quality of the artist's skill, and particularly in the field of the decorative (what he calls the 'lesser') arts, matters more to him than the egalitarianism he trumpets. The political pieces, such as the title story, which comprises almost half the book and portrays Morris's vision of an ideal society in the year 2102, are the weakest, speculating as they do about a population of uniform mind in its espousal of the superiority of the Mediaeval ideal of art and its fanatical rejection of progress and technology. Genetics, the evolutionary territorial imperative, the diversity of human imagination which has since spawned the Information Age, are all swept aside by the juggernaut of Morris's Luddite, Gothic world-view (and although I accept the context in which he writes, namely late-Victorian London, I can't ignore his failure to mention the benefits of the industrialisation he despises, such as the increased life-expectancy, the majesty of the scientific leaps within his lifetime). Nonetheless, Morris is an inspiring polemicist: his rejection of the State, his fierce and uncompromising belief in his ideas, his utterly convincing support for the rightness of the individual's potential for common-sense and ability to recognise what is good, what is true, in the face of the pronouncements of authority, mark him as a defender of freedom quite apart from many of his orthodox Marxist contemporaries.

Here and Nowhere Else: Late Seasons of a Farm and Its Family

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a little book about a small farm written with unusual poetry and love
Here and Nowhere Else

Here and Nowhere Else: Late Seasons of a Farm and Its Family
Jane Brox
Manufacturer: Beacon Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0807062006

Book Description

In her first book, which won the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award, Jane Brox writes of going back to the farm where she grew up, to help her aging father and the troubled brother who works the land with him. She memorably captures the cadences of farm life and the people who sustain it, at a time when both are waning.

Customer Reviews:

a little book about a small farm written with unusual poetry and love.......2007-08-31

I am a city person, and the closest I have been to a small farm is buying apples in the autumn at a roadside stand. I have no idea how I chose to buy this book and Jane's two other ones, but I did buy it and fell in love with it. The poetry is deep; she tells the story of her aging father who in his eighties tries to keep his beloved farm going, her brother who has stayed to help but is angry and sometimes dysfunctional, her mother, and her own return after many years. These are wound around and blended with tales of seasons of growth -- of apples, berries, all sorts of corn and the customers who show up decade after decade to buy what they loved last year. It is truly a spiritual book, and gives this city girl a sense of the enduring earth and its gifts and the people who are closest to it.

Here and Nowhere Else.......2000-01-04

Here and Nowhere Else captures with its perfect language the timeless undulations of rural living. It is not so much like reading a book as it is like walking the land with someone who respects both the comfort and the pain it can give. A truthful recording of enormous loss and a lyric epitaph for a family farm.

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Raymond Bernard at his finest!

Letters from Nowhere
Raymond Bernard
Manufacturer: Joel Friedlander Publisher
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0936385324

Book Description

For a number of years, the internationally known esotericist Raymond Bernard sent letters to a large number of correspondents. From the beginning, he called these texts Letters from Nowhere. He explained this title by the fact that they might be produced here and there during his frequent trips all around the world, and their subject matter was comprised of his experiences and encounters on these occasions. From anywhere on earth he would be able to present facts and arguments of universal meaning, which thereby took on a dimension which could be considered to come from everywhere or, indeed, from nowhere.

These letters had a great impact on those who were privileged to receive them. Their author, writing as if to a friend, expresses himself in easy, familiar language. He shares thoughts and travel notes, along with often surprising encounters with eminent, well-known people. In Letters From Nowhere, you will find yourself on a journey with Raymond Bernard, as he describes the present situation of humanity; you will become acquainted with the Grand Master of the Druzes, you will learn a little bit about the Rosicrucians, travel to India and to the Secret Ashrams. You will visit with the Grand Lamas of Tibet and finally, you will have an opportunity to learn more about the Bodhisattva and of Tibetan Buddhism. In Letters from Nowhere, Raymond Bernard takes us on a journey of discovery in which the inner world is the true destination!

Customer Reviews:

Raymond Bernard at his finest!.......2004-02-11

A wonderful book from a wonderful man.
In our view, this book is divided in two distinct parts. The first one is dedicated to a Tribute, paid by Raymond Bernard, to Kamal Joumblatt, the Grand Master of the Druzes, which allow us to have a complete new idea of this Lebanese man, shot to death in San Francisco. Still in the first half of the book, the Rosicrucian mysticism is referred, along with a brief analysis of the author's son - Christian Bernard, who is, in the present day, the Imperator of AMORC -, by the author himself.
On the second part of the book, which is larger than the first, Raymond Bernard shares his spiritual journeys in the Eastern Countries, in a way that is understandable to us all. His contacts with eminent personalities in India, and in other foreign countries, like Tibet or Nepal, are described at length. This contacts are described in depth, and all that Raymond is allowed to unfold, he does. By doing so, it permits a spiritual growth among the readers who address this book with openness of heart and mind.

News from Nowhere (Routledge English Texts)

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William Morris' futuristic utopia based on Medieval ideals

News from Nowhere (Routledge English Texts)
William Morris
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0415075815

Book Description

No online description is currently available. If you would like to receive information about this title, please email Routledge at info@routledge-ny.com

Customer Reviews:

William Morris' futuristic utopia based on Medieval ideals.......2004-08-30

William Morris is best known for his involvement in the Pre-Raphaelite movement and as one of the greatest European pattern-designers since the Middle Ages. He was also a campaigning socialist, a pioneering environmentalist, and a lyric poet, as well as a journalist and a storyteller with a penchant for making his dreams reality. Much of his prose writings focused on the theme of an earthly paradise, which is the subject of "News from Nowhere." First published in serial form in the "Commonweal" in 1890, this novella offers Morris' ideal future for England as a pastoral society born out of revolution. A true utopian vision of the future, it is largely forgotten in comparison to the dramatic dystopian works such as "Brave New World" and "Nineteen Eighty-Four," which have dominated the interest of scholars and students.

"News from Nowhere, or, An Epoch of Rest: being some chapters from a Utopian Romance" tells the story of a young Englishman who goes to bed one night in his London home and wakes up in a strange world where his "neighbors" talk about the year 2001 as thought it had happened in the past. Morris depicts an England where radical changes have altered not only the way things look but the key elements of the society, which is now structured according to the ideals of communism. This means a world without money or private property but with a perfect equality between all citizens who share in the daily labor.

In addition to these common features of a utopian society, Morris argues that labor would be regarded as a pleasure rather than as a chore. This is possible because in the ideal world Morris envisions every citizen does the job that matches their skills and is able to take pride in the fruit of their labors. Consequently, for Morris "work" is more akin to "art," specifically in terms of the Medieval idea of individual workmanship, where even the production of a dish was celebrated as an art form. Towards this end Morris creates a future where humanity has eliminated all but the simplest forms of machinery, forcing a reliance on the individual skins of the workman. Even the city of London becomes a collection of villages in this post-industrial utopia.

At one point an old man who had studied the revolution explains what happened, which is where "News from Nowhere" gives Morris the opportunity to comment on the injustices he perceives in his own society. The revolution came when the conflict between workers and the state became violent. Unions had banded together in larger organizations and when the establishment ordered unarmed protesters to be gunned down and the workers decided to fight back. In many ways the story Morris tells through his character clearly predicts some of the conflicts that would take place between labor and the state around the world in the decades to come, but there is also a strong affinity with the story of the French Revolution.

Ultimately, "News from Nowhere" is a combination of Morris' ideal of the Medieval workman as a happy artisan and his socialist beliefs. The irony for utopian scholarship is that while Morris was prompted by "Looking Backward" to write "News from Nowhere" as a refutation of Bellamy's reliance on the modern institutions of technology and complex organizations, but today the two works are seen as being kindred spirits because they both predict a brighter future for humanity. Still, it is became Morris is looking backward from the end of the 19th century to the past to find the ideal state that should be achieved in the future, that "News From Nowhere" is one of the most atypical examples of utopian literature.

News From Nowhere (Oxford World's Classics)

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William Morris' futuristic utopia based on Medieval ideals

News From Nowhere (Oxford World's Classics)
William Morris
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0192801775

Book Description

'The only English utopia since More's that deserves to be remembered as literature.' News from Nowhere (1890) is the best-known prose work of William Morris. The novel describes the encounter between a visitor from the nineteenth 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 book 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, giveNews from Nowhere a particular resonance for modern readers. The text is based on that of 1891, incorporating the extensive revisions made by Morris to the first edition.

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William Morris' futuristic utopia based on Medieval ideals.......2006-05-17

An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from
<i>Utopia</i> to
<i>The Tempest</i> (New Historicism, 16)

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An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest (New Historicism, 16)
Jeffrey Knapp
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World

ASIN: 0520073622

Book Description

What caused England's literary renaissance? One answer has been such unprecedented developments as the European discovery of America. Yet England in the sixteenth century was far from an expanding nation. Not only did the Tudors lose England's sole remaining possessions on the Continent and, thanks to the Reformation, grow spiritually divided from the Continent as well, but every one of their attempts to colonize the New World actually failed.
Jeffrey Knapp accounts for this strange combination of literary expansion and national isolation by showing how the English made a virtue of their increasing insularity. Ranging across a wide array of literary and extraliterary sources, Knapp argues that English poets rejected the worldly acquisitiveness of an empire like Spain's and took pride in England's material limitations as a sign of its spiritual strength. In the imaginary worlds of such fictions as Utopia, The Faerie Queene, and The Tempest, they sought a grander empire, founded on the "otherworldly" virtues of both England and poetry itself.

News from Nowhere: Television and the News

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An excellent view on television content.

News from Nowhere: Television and the News
Edward Jay Epstein
Manufacturer: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1566633001

Book Description

This detailed, probing analysis of the decision-making process of network news organizations has achieved the status of a classic. What we see on the network evening news, Mr. Epstein demonstrates does not mirror reality because TV's essential aim is not to inform but to excite viewers enough to induce them to stay tuned. The best book ever written about any aspect of television. --Richard Schickel. With a new Introduction by the author.

Customer Reviews:

An excellent view on television content........2000-06-06

Edward Jay Epstein's News From Nowhere provides a focus on television and the news, probing the decision-making processes involved in network programming and news presentations and showing how internal politics often dictate the content and direction of television coverage. An excellent view on television content.

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Journey Up the Thames
John Payne
Manufacturer: Five Leaves Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Aggression and Utopia. A note on William Morris's News from Nowhere

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Aggression and Utopia. A note on William Morris's News from Nowhere
Lionel Trilling
Manufacturer: NP
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000IUY37I

The Collected Works of William Morris: Volume 16. News from Nowhere. A Dream of John Ball. A King's Lesson

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The Collected Works of William Morris: Volume 16. News from Nowhere. A Dream of John Ball. A King's Lesson
William Morris
Manufacturer: Adamant Media Corporation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1402150156
Release Date: 2004-03-19

Book Description

With an introduction by May Morris. This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1912 edition by Longmans, Green, and Company, London, New York, Bombay, Calcutta.

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