A Comparison of Morris' News from Nowhere and Life in the Twin Oaks Community Page: 2
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translated into French, Italian and German, and this 'slightly constructed
andessentially insular romance' was being read in many more countries than his
'more important works of prose and verse', to the disapproval of his first
biographer, Mackail. It was widely distributed in Russia in the years just before
the Revolution. It was also the Socialist Bible of the supposedly dyspeptic
politicians who built the post-war British Welfare State: G. D. H. Cole, Clement
Attlee and the rest. (ibid.)
This last statement suggests a degree of societal impact few utopias have achieved.
Moreover, News from Nowhere continues to be one of Morris' most well-known and
widely discussed literary works. Though current trends in the majority of world nations
seems to be largely toward global capitalism, the book's demonstrated ability to instruct
and inspire must be regarded as a potential catalyst for future socialist movements. It
would not be a shock to see Morris embraced in South America, just as Whitman has
been adored in struggling democracies such as Chile.
The novel also continues to possess remarkable predictive ability in terms of non-
economic cultural trends. MacCarthy goes on to observe:
For the late-twentieth-century reader the message we recognize in News from
Nowhere is 'the personal is political'. Morris shows an almost uncanny prescience
of many of the issues addressed by the feminist and gay liberation movements in
Europe and the USA from the 1960s on. Nowhere is a place of real sexual
equality. Women do work traditionally regarded as men's work and vice versa.
Ideas of possessiveness and ownership have vanished. In all sexual liaisons the
partners are free to come and go. (587-8)
The cultural changes MacCarthy mentions here have occurred more quickly and more
markedly in places like the American intentional community Twin Oaks than in society
as a whole. Twin Oaks was founded in Louisa, Virginia in 1969 and is perhaps the most
successful of those communities which arose in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In her
1994 account, Is It Utopia Yet?, founding member Kat Kinkade explained the group's
preference for the word "community" over "commune" while providing a basic
description of their way of life:
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Garner, Royce Clifton. A Comparison of Morris' News from Nowhere and Life in the Twin Oaks Community, thesis, December 2007; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc5179/m1/5/?rotate=90: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .