Morris Online Edition
Goals of the Morris Online Edition
The working goal of the Morris Online Edition 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 has remained unedited for almost a century now.
Although the Marxists Internet Archive (http://www.marxists.org/) and other web sites offer scanned versions of existing editions of Morris’s works, the aim of the Morris Online Edition is to prepare newly edited and annotated texts of uniformly high quality, with interactive features when feasible and appropriate.
About the Morris Online Edition
Morris Online Edition texts will be 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 msot editions an individual editor is listed, who has provided the text, introduction, variants and notes. Linkes to supplementary materials have been added by Florence Boos.
At present one edition of the site has been entered into the databases for NINES (Networked Interface for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship, www.nines.org), powered by Collex, and we hope that other editions will soon follow.
The current managing editor of the Morris Online Edition is Florence Boos (florence-boos(at)uiowa.edu), and the Advisory Board consists of David Latham (York University), Peter Faulkner (emeritus, Exeter University), William Peterson (emeritus, University of Maryland), and Phillippa Bennett (Northhampton University). They welcome inquiries, suggestions, and proposals for new editions.
The edition is hosted by the University of Iowa Libraries, whose staff have assisted with technological advice and the preparation of images. Help with design and images has been provided by Karla Tonella, Kimn Gollnick and Kim Maher.
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 http://www.morrissociety.org/ and http://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 worldwide.