Huxley's Brave new world: essays

Abstract

Aldous Huxley was one of the most prophetic intellectuals of the twentieth century, and his best-known work was a novel of ideas that warned of a terrible future then 600 years away. Though Brave New World, was published less than a century ago in 1932, many elements of the novel's dystopic future now seem an eerily familiar part of life in the 21st century.These essays reiterate the influence of Brave New World as a literary and philosophical document and describe how Huxley forecast the problems of late capitalism. The topics include the anti-utopian ideals represented by Brave New World's rigid caste system, the novel's influence on the philosophy of 'culture industry' philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, the Nietzschean birth of tragedy in the novel's penultimate scene, and the relationship of the novel to other dystopian works including Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.