ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the ways that the tangibility, resonance, and the nonhuman aspects of William Morris’s invented worlds became part of the DNA of fantasy’s current worldwide ascendancy. Ideas about the nonhuman that persist in modern-day fantasy and speculative fiction are more shaped by William Morris’s response to the Darwinian climate than is immediately apparent—albeit in some indirect and often counterintuitive ways. Faced with the challenge of how to think about a nonhuman world that undermines, or at least surrounds, the realm of seemingly autonomous human purposiveness, Morris’s prose romances imagine a world in which the activity of characters accommodates and responds to its nonhuman surroundings. The infinitude of hope available in Morris’s romances stems from his depiction of a world that refuses the idea of gaps between one character’s conception of the world and another’s.
