Morris Online Edition
Welcome
Welcome to the official web site for the Morris Online Edition, a web-based and text-searchable scholarly edition of the poetry and selected prose of William Morris, and currently in its early stages of development.
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 descriptions, and hypertext features. Our longer-term hope is that we and our successors will bring these together in a complete scholarly hypertext 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. Each will appear with an introduction, full annotations, textual notes, and hyperlink features which make alternative formats of the text available where apposite (such as images of the manuscript and Kelmscott Press versions). An editorial board will select proposals, provide oversight, and approve final versions before they are completed.
The planning committee for the Morris Online Edition is currently chaired by Florence Boos (florence-boos@uiowa.edu). 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 has been provided by Karla Tonella and Kimn Gollnick.
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 doings of the William Morris Society worldwide.