Abstract
Anna Bugajska’s recent book Engineering Youth: The Evantropian Project in Young Adult Dystopias (2019) is an important and thought-provoking inquiry into the field of young adult literary criticism. While for the average reader, young adult narratives may be associated with juvenile tales created with an intent to provide escapist entertainment, a true connoisseur of youth literature is well aware of an immense didactic potential of this genre. Bugajska certainly belongs to the latter category as she diligently engages with young adult dystopias to highlight the immense critical power of these texts. In the following review article, the author of the paper is going to offer a brief commentary on the critical perspective that Bugajska employs to explore the notion of evantropia. The first section of this review discusses Bugajska’s volume as a part of utopian intellectual tradition, the second section postulates that ideas presented in Engineering Youth enrich literary criticism in the field of speculative fiction and children’s and young adult literature, the third section briefly discusses the layout of the volume and the content of each chapter, the fourth section presents an overview of selected core ideas that Bugajska presents in her work and in the last section the author of the paper offers his final thoughts on Engineering Youth.
Highlights
I n her thought-provoking book Engineering Youth: The Evantropian Project in Young Adult Dystopias, Anna Bugajska (2019) seems to indicate that current young adult dystopian fiction is often written with an intent to persuade young readers into appreciating, and perhaps even accepting a world radically transformed by biotechnology 1 and biopolitics
Robert Gadowski stands at the crossroads, with one road leading to a utopian dreamland of endless possibilities, while the other taking a drastic dystopian turn
She is able to skillfully navigate through the conundrum of literary theories, political ideas, social ideologies, and techno-scientific novelties that all converge on the pages of contemporary young adult dystopian literature
Summary
I n her thought-provoking book Engineering Youth: The Evantropian Project in Young Adult Dystopias, Anna Bugajska (2019) seems to indicate that current young adult dystopian fiction is often written with an intent to persuade young readers into appreciating, and perhaps even accepting a world radically transformed by biotechnology 1 and biopolitics. 2 In such a world humanity. The inconvenient truth that could be distilled from history is that to establish utopia in the real world one has to do it with complete disregard for moral and social repercussions This dramatic realisation has found its expression in dystopian literature of the 20th century with the seminal examples of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932) and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949). The idea of individual freedom, or rather morphological freedom 6 to manipulate one’s own body, is contrasted with the collectivist impulse to treat the body of the citizens as a subject to the policies of the state It seems that Engineering Youth posits an interesting inquiry into the viability of utopian collectivism in the times of a nascent of unabashed individualism that is facilitated by new technological inventions
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
