William Morris Archive
Goals of the William Morris Archive
Tthe working goal of the William Morris Archive is to provide readable annotated texts of Morris’s poetry and selected prose, prepared in accordance with current scholarly and critical norms, using current technology for text-searching, manuscript presentation, and comparison of multiple versions. Our longer-term hope is that we and our successors will bring these together in a complete scholarly edition of Morris’s literary works online.
Why Undertake This Project?
Several of Morris’s contemporaries—Tennyson, Hopkins, the Brownings, and the Rossettis, for example—have benefited from recent critical editions, but much of Morris’s extensive lifework had remained unedited ffor a century. The William Morris Archive (formerly the William Morris Archive) was inaugurated in 2005 to address this need.
Although the Marxists Internet Archive (www.marxists.org/) and other web sites offer scanned versions of existing editions of Morris’s works, the aim of the William Morris Archive is to prepare newly edited and annotated texts of uniformly high quality, with interactive features when feasible and appropriate.
About the William Morris Archive:
The William Morris Archive texts are whenever possible based on collations of known manuscripts and editions published in Morris’s lifetime, as well as on the last edition Morris is known to have corrected or overseen. Insofar as is feasible, each will appear with an introduction, annotations, textual notes, and images and transcriptions which make alternative formats of the text available where apposite (such as images of the manuscript and Kelmscott Press versions). For most editions an individual editor is listed, who has provided the text, introduction, variants and notes. Links to supplementary materials have been added by Florence Boos.
The current general editor of the William Morris Archive is Florence Boos (florence-boos@uiowa.edu), and the Project Manager is Kimberly A. Maher (University of Iowa). The Advisory Board consists of David Latham (York University), Peter Faulkner (emeritus, Exeter University), Linda K. Hughes (Texas Christian University), William Peterson (emeritus, University of Maryland), Phillippa Bennett (Northhampton University), and Laura Mandell (Texas A. and M. University), who also serves as technical advisor. They welcome inquiries, suggestions, and proposals for new editions.
The William Morris Archive is a member of NINES (Networked Interface for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship, www.nines.org), powered by Collex. The Archive is hosted by the University of Iowa Libraries, whose staff have assisted with technological advice and the preparation of images. Special thanks are due to Sidney Huttner, Greg Prickman, and David Schoonover of Special Collections and Mark Anderson of Digital Technologies. Help with design and images has been provided by Karla Tonella, Kimn Gollnick, Kim Maher and Matt Runkle.
The William Morris Society
The editors and contributors of this web site work in harmony with the William Morris Society in Britain, Canada, and the United States. We encourage you to visit the Morris Society on the web at www.morrissociety.org/ , www.williammorrissociety.org.uk and www.wmsc.ca/ , where you can learn more about Morris and his times, see examples of Morris’s work in several media, and take an active role in the endeavors of the William Morris Society.
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