Rewilding Morris: Wilderness and the Wild in the Last Romances

This chapter proposes that understanding William Morris’s Late Romances as wild works can generate a new appreciation of them in the twenty-first century, the early decades of which have seen a growing ecological and cultural fascination with wilderness and the concept of wildness. We have, in recent years, also witnessed the coining of a new term, ‘rewilding’, which relates originally to proposals for the rewilding of our landscapes but which has subsequently been applied more broadly to consider how we might re-energize our own overly regimented and largely urbanized lives. With their ebullient celebration of the natural world and their protagonists’ appreciative and respectful engagement with it, Morris’s late romances serve as a manifesto for rewilding over a century before the term or the ideas and practices it denotes became part of our cultural discourse.