‘To Make a New Tongue’: Natural and Manufactured Language in the Late Fiction of William Morris

The paper considers William Morris's belief that modern language was ‘degraded’, and explores how his late fiction tried to resist this degradation. Morris was influenced by the romantic philology of the mid-Victorian period which depicted languages as living organisms. Philologists such as Max Müller claimed that modern civilization had arrested this growth, mechanizing language into conventional signs; and Morris adapted the idea into a critique of industrial capitalism. He conceptualized modern English as manufactured external forms, sundered from organic history. His late prose fictions trace the ‘natural’ meanings of words which he imagined feudalism and capitalism had suppressed. However, this narrative of organic origins existed in tension with Morris's socialist ideals, which sought an objective language above local or national perspectives. The older Morris was writing at a time when romantic philology was coming under attack from a new generation of scholars. These proto-linguists regarded meaning as conventional and narratives of organic ‘roots’ in the distant past as mere mythology. Morris's struggles to reconcile the contradictions in his philosophy of language reflect wider tensions in romantic philology. His imaginary worlds in which everyone spoke the same relied upon myths of original linguistic unity and stasis which new research and theories were undermining. Ironically, Morris's attempts to re-organicize English inadvertently demonstrated the conventionality and perspectivism of language, relying upon common cultural frames of reference.     

MEDIEVALISMS AND MEDIEVAL TIMES: CONFRONTING CHRONOPOLITICS WITH MEDIEVAL TEXTURES OF TIME

This review essay examines Nadia R. Altschul's discussion of medievalism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South America in Politics of Temporalization: Medievalism and Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century South America. She explores a chronopolitics whereby the notion that late medieval Iberia lagged developmentally behind the rest of Europe sustained the claim that parts of South America were still medieval, even while capitalist modernity was established elsewhere. Her exploration of the instrumentalization of this trope for neocolonial and neoliberal purposes provokes my own exploration here of medieval ideas about time. Medieval people actually had very sophisticated ideas about time, and this complexity troubles the idea of a simplistic and dully repetitive medieval temporality on which the linear hierarchies of time analyzed and critiqued by Altschul rely. More than this, though, I suggest that medieval ideas of time provide us with alternative chronotopes in the sense of thinking through the relationships between time and space in very different ways; in turn, this might permit a different kind of chronopolitics. First, I explore the ways in which medieval people experienced and articulated multiple interwoven layers of time, de-essentializing hierarchies of temporalities and puncturing the illusion that certain spaces should be associated with certain times. Second, I look at the ways in which time was not straightforwardly conceived of as linear in the Middle Ages and consider the ways in which this troubles ideas of periodization; a short discussion of nostalgia in different periods sustains this point. Third, I explore the ways in which ideas about time could be contested in the Middle Ages, challenging the idea that chronopolitics need just be a study of hegemonic attitudes.     

The Reception of Romanticism in Italy and Spain: Parallels and Contrasts

Summary

Liberalism arose alongside Romanticism but the two were qualitatively different. Romantic Liberalism in Italy and Spain, with roots in the Enlightenment, looked for the reasons why supposed past liberties had been lost and for methods to regain them. The constitutional issue, however, exposed the differences between the two countries, due principally to continued foreign rule in Italy, lack of political unity and the absence of an accepted common language. In both countries, however, the conjunction of Liberalism and Romanticism assisted the elaboration of national myths. Literature in both countries responded to the overriding issues but with different emphases. Spain Romanticism produced no writer of Alessandro Manzoni's stature.     

Heritageisation as a material process: the bishop’s crosier of Turku Cathedral,Finland

The old episcopal crosier of Turku Cathedral is a typical heritage item: a clearly identifiable object pregnant with traditions, including both medievalism and nationalism. A subject of the heritageisation process, it has become a familiar and discursive part of the past. The damaged and worn state of the crosier, which has lost its hook of silver, is a necessary indicator of the passage of time traced back to the Middle Ages. In 1931, the crosier was used as a model for a new one made for the Archbishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, which aroused public debate. The crosier was re-examined scientifically in 2009, and the results complicate its history, providing a new angle to its heritageisation. Not only does the fragmentary state of heritage objects destabilise the familiarity of the past, but also materiality as such is both a necessity and a risk for heritageisation.