The Evolutionary Spiral

The individual-centred narratives of the New Romance may have been products in the capitalist marketplace, but with a little interdisciplinary help from history and anthropology they could also provide a picture of the communal ideal, or better yet, approximate in their form a communal literary creation. But though familiarity with those disciplines was a mark of the New Romancers as a group, Morris was virtually alone in adapting it to a collectivist agenda. At the time he wrote his late prose romances Morris was a socialist, and though he operated in the same intellectual context as his literary peers, his interpretation of the common sources was inflected by a particular political ideology. Nevertheless, it was an ideology premised on the findings of mainstream history and anthropology, and socialist fictions dealing with the communities of the past, no less than the political propaganda which used these communities as historical models, had to draw on the latest ‘bourgeois’ scholarship. The vision of community once again depended for its realisation upon modern institutions, though in this case it was not the capitalist publishing industry but the professional historical disciplines that were responsible for the paradox.

The distinction between primary and secondary sources, between the books that made it onto Morris's ‘Hundred Best’ list and the ‘tools’ that were left off of it, here takes centre stage. On the one hand there were the sagas, histories and codes of law, which, prior to any but an editorial and a textual interpretation, could furnish a wealth of lived detail to flesh out the historicity of the romances.