Modern utopian fictions from H.G. Wells to Iris Murdoch

Abstract

Criticism on utopian subjects has generally neglected the literary or fictional dimension of utopia. reason for such neglect may be that earlier utopian fictions tended to be written by what one would nowadays call scientists, e.g., Plato or Sir Thomas More. That is also why earlier discussions of utopian fiction were usually written by critics trained in the sciences rather than by critics trained in literature. To an appreciable degree, this still tends to be the case today. Now, however, there is an additional difficulty, for the scientists are critiquing utopias written by people who are primarily literary, for example, Krishan Kumar on Wells or Bernard Crick on Orwell. Inevitably much of importance - of literary importance - is simply disregarded, and so our understanding of modern is correspondingly diminished. This book aims to put the fiction back into utopian fictions. While tracing the development of fiction in the writing of modern utopias, especially in Britain, it seeks to demonstrate in specific ways how those utopias have become increasingly literary - possibly as a reaction not only against the social scientification of modern utopias but also in reaction against the modern attempt to institute utopia in reality, notably in the former Soviet Union but also in consumerist, late-twentieth-century America. After an introductory discussion of how we understand - and how we should understand - modern utopian fictions, the book provides several examples of how those understandings affect our appreciation of utopian fiction. There are chapters on H. G. Wells' Time Machine; Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara; Aldous Huxley's Brave New World; George Orwell's Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four; William Golding's Lord of the Flies; and Iris Murdoch's The Bell.