The Review of English Studies Prize Essay * 'The measured music of our meeting swords': William Morris's early romances and the transformative touch of violence

Hanson, Ingrid

Abstract

Between the showy chivalric pageantry of the 1839 Eglinton tournament and the literary appearance, in 1859, of Tennyson’s Arthurian Idylls of the King, William Morris published his first romances of medieval knighthood and battle. This essay will argue that the stories’ portrayal of visceral, corporeal violence as a form of intimate, transformative touch goes beyond the interest in knighthood common to much nineteenth-century medievalism. They engage with contemporary debates about mind and body, violence and war, and offer a disturbing and culturally disruptive vision of the relationship between violence and selfhood. While most of the few scholars to consider these early romances have briefly noted, but not examined, their focus on battle, death and mutilation, I will suggest that their central preoccupation is the development of identity through the physical violence of combat. Violent touch, associated both with creation and destruction, is invested with moral nuances that shift the focus of meaning from the supernatural or spiritual to the corporeal and textural. At the same time, the hand-to-hand killing and committed, communal warfare of these multilayered tales offer a passionate alternative to the materialism, mechanisation and individualism of Victorian society.

Citation

Hanson, I. (2010). The Review of English Studies Prize Essay * 'The measured music of our meeting swords': William Morris's early romances and the transformative touch of violence. Review of English Studies, 61(250), 435-454. https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgq014

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Online Publication Date: Feb 24, 2010
• Publication Date: Jun 1, 2010
• Deposit Date: Nov 13, 2014
• Journal: Review Of English Studies
• Print ISSN: 0034-6551
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 61
• Issue: 250
• Pages: 435-454
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgq014
• Keywords: Linguistics and Language; Literature and Literary Theory; Language and Linguistics
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/470634
• Publisher URL: https://academic.oup.com/res/article/61/250/435/1590013