Dystopian Fiction Research Articles

Opinion, Dialogue, Review

The Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera mobilizes recollections of childhood not only as an event in his adult life, but as a way of articulating a longing for new forms of social consciousness. Childhood itself is recalled both as narrative and source of narrative. As such it is a place and time of memory. It is not just a construct of writing, but a way of coming to terms with an enormous social experience. This article discusses the nature of childhood and its uses in Marechera's dystopian fiction. It demonstrates the ways in which Marechera's fiction revises sets of concepts that constitute ‘the child’ by portraying childhoods that point to the dissolution and reinvention of a symbolic order in a post-national African space.

BOOK REVIEW: Edited by Anne-Julia Zwierlein.UNMAPPED COUNTRIES: BIOLOGICAL VISIONS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE. London: Anthem Press, 2005.

Reviewed by: Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture Bernard Lightman (bio) Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, edited by Anne-Julia Zwierlein; pp. xi + 282. London: Anthem Press, 2005, £14.99, $27.50. This fine collection of sixteen essays originated in an international conference held at the Centre for British Studies at the University of Bamberg. The authors focus on the exchange between biology, literature, and culture in the nineteenth century; although some essays discuss German, Russian, or American figures, British novelists and scientists predominate. Anne-Julia Zwierlein has gathered together a strong international group of contributors composed of the right mix of well-known senior scholars, such as Janet Browne, Laura Otis, Sally Shuttleworth, and Kate Flint, and up-and-coming young Turks. Their expertise lies in a broad range of disciplines, including English, comparative literature, the history of science, the history of medicine, art history, and women's studies, and the result is a rich, interdisciplinary set of essays. The collection is divided into three parts. Part one, "Science and Literature," contains two essays that treat the role of the imagination in science as well as the issue of scientific authority. In "Evolution and Degeneration," part two, there are seven essays, dealing with such topics as the problematic immoral ideas in Charles Darwin's Descent of Man (1871), Darwin and feminism, Darwin's influence on utopian and dystopian fiction, Peter Kropotkin's theories about human sociability, the influence of evolutionary anthropology on fictional treatments of the unconscious, Darwinism in the art of Alfred Kubin, and debates over the significance of color in Homer. The seven essays in part three, "Physiology and Pathology," investigate the relationship between medicine and literature, including the notion of contagion in Rudolf Virchow and George Eliot; sensation novels and medical conceptions of women; medical and literary representations of childhood fear; and the discourse about parasites, surgery, and the senses in both science and literature. Edited collections of essays based on conferences are prone to a number of problems. The contributions can be uneven in quality. This cannot, however, be said of this particular collection: each of the essays has a sparkle and charm of its own. Some [End Page 358] collections lack coherence. But by focusing on nineteenth-century British biology, this work avoids trying to cover all of the sciences or all national contexts. Yet another common problem with edited conference volumes is the lag between the original event and the publication—many of these volumes take too long to be published, and their relevance to current scholarship can be compromised as a result. But again, the editor and the contributors are to be congratulated, as these papers from a 2004 conference have been edited and published relatively quickly. The project can be criticized for one shortcoming: the volume contains a large number of essays and they are relatively short in length. There were times when I wished that the authors had had more time to delve more deeply into their topics. Scholarly work in the field of Victorian science and literature has come a long, long way in the last twenty years. Inspired by the work of Gillian Beer, especially her Darwin's Plots (1983), and George Levine, in particular his Darwin and the Novelists (1988), the field has moved from a simplistic examination of the impact of science on literary texts to complex studies of the two-way traffic between scientific and literary discourse. Both were part of one culture during the Victorian era, notwithstanding the debates between T. H. Huxley and Matthew Arnold. But Zwierlein is critical of Beer and Levine for initiating the "focus on evolutionary theory which has dominated scholarly debates ever since" (1). She proposes to correct the overemphasis on evolutionary theory in past scholarship by giving equal weight in the collection to the Victorians' interest in networks of cells and nerves and to post-Romantic organicism. "The collection aims at demonstrating," she declares, "that the relation between literature, culture and biology in the nineteenth century is far more complex than the habitual reference to Darwin would have us believe" (7). Since parts two and three contain the same...

A World Neither Brave Nor New: Reading Dystopian Fiction after 9/11

A World Neither Brave Nor New: Reading Dystopian Fiction after 9/11

Re-enchanting the Enlightenment with Thinking and Unthinking Fictional Machines

Julia V. Douthwaite. The Wild Girl, Natural Man and the Monster. Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Pp. 314. $19.00 paper. Laurence Mall. Émile ou les figures de la fiction (Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, 2002:04, 334). Pp. 384 + x. $98.00. Eighteenth-Century writers did not limit themselves to portraying the world as a clock, or to admiring the ingenious automata engineered by the likes of Vaucanson, they also mastered the art of building fictional machines: textual agencements designed to "change the common way of thinking"—as the editors of the Encyclopédie famously purported to do—and ultimately to shape Western modernity. The two books reviewed below shed an important light on this crucial dimension of the French Enlightenment. In The Wild Girl, Natural Man and the Monster, Julia Douthwaite cleverly brings together texts that are rarely read in light of each other. Chapter 1 is devoted to some of the accounts left of the discovery and "domestication" of "wild children." Even if Peter of Hanover, Marie-Angélique Leblanc, or Victor de l'Aveyron have become quasi-celebrities of Enlightenment historiography, Julia Douthwaite manages to provide a very rich, concise and suggestive synthesis of the stakes raised by their "treatment" in the documents of the period. As could be expected in light of her previous book—the highly-recommended and universally praised Exotic Women: Literary Heroines and Cultural Strategies in Ancien Régime France—the author finely dissects the various dimensions of the staging of alterity at stake in such writings at the intersection [End Page 381] of so many dividing lines (Civilized/Savage, Human/Animal, Mind/Body, Male/Female, etc.). Chapter 2 (devoted to the motif of the animated statue found, among others, in Condillac and Bonnet) and chapter 3 (devoted to idyllic fictions of education, like those proposed in Rousseau's Emile, Beaurieu's L'Élève de la nature and Du Laurens' Irmice) are both located at the nexus of such intersections. Whether the writers observe the "sub-human" (represented by the wild child) or whether they portray the "human" (in their thought-experiments and narratives), the reader is led to visit the way the Enlightenment (in its French and British incarnations) produced a vision of mankind that was to shape the mind of the following centuries. The notion of "vision" is crucial here, since Julia Douthwaite calls on the finer tools of textual analysis to help us see how such texts have constructed a powerful imaginary, within which we still largely operate today. Chapter 4 moves on to analyse some of the real-life experiments that attempted to translate into practice the fictional and theoretical views proposed by Rousseau in Emile. As can be expected, raising the rational child within the constraints of reality was significantly less "idyllic" than fictionalising his ideal development. Hence a series of tragicomic failures, leading to criticisms of Rousseau, and to a rewriting of his theoretical narrative. The same "rewriting" is at the core of the fifth and last chapter, which contrasts the "utopian politics" fuelled by the hopes for "perfectibility" and "regeneration" at the time of the French Revolution with the "dystopian fictions" revealing the ugly side of modernity in novels by Edgeworth, Fenwick, Révéroni Saint-Cyr and Sade. As the result of their project of improving mankind, the Man-making machines dreamt by the Philosophes ended up producing monsters (Frankenstein), mad scientists (staged in Révéroni's Pauliska) and immoral abusers (to whom Sade would associate his name). In presumptuously attempting to tame the wild child of Nature, the Enlightement's perverse modernity (here again to draw on Pauliska's subtitle) only produced a wilder still, and much more dangerous, Beast: a Beast that will eat its own children during the Terror, de-humanize them during the industrial (and bio-genetic) revolution, undermine all of...

‘Belonging’ in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction: New Communities Created by Children

In lieu of abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article: In this paper I will discuss the role that young adults play in the creation of new communities governed by young people in four dystopian novels set during the fragmentation of society in the near future. I will focus on novels narrated by or focalised through the perspective of young female protagonists, as these narratives offer intriguing explorations of young women's utopian capacity for leadership and for re-visioning traditional power relations and social structures. In their exploration of their own subjectivities, the young female protagonists must address the claims of individual self-actualisation while re-assessing the validity and appeal of traditional hierarchical systems of authority located in a radically changed and hostile world. Novels such as Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now (2004), O.T. Nelson’s The Girl Who Owned a City (1995), Marcus Sedgwick’s Floodland (2000) and Gary Kilworth’s The Electric Kid (1994) explore how the impact of the abrupt absence of parental control and adult surveillance results in the young protagonists’forced creation and development of new concepts of community, family and ‘belonging’. Inherited hierarchical systems of individual identity and the larger social and political world are challenged during the characters' struggles for survival in these novels as the young protagonists display considerable courage, creativity and ‘heroic’ attributes in their efforts to survive and also to protect other younger children in their care. As such, these dystopian stories offer opportunities to explore gender role stereotypes and their reformulation by young people during situations which require both the conventional ‘masculine’ qualities such as leadership, bravery and endurance and also ‘feminine’ attributes such as nurturing, collaborative teamwork and compassion.

Series and Systems: Russian and American Dystopian Satires of the Cold War

One of most striking aspects of literature written during the Cold War is the prevalence of dystopian and/or anti-utopian works. As the prefixes of both terms imply, the genres that attempt to discredit utopias have generally been perceived in opposition to their model texts, i.e., utopias posit an ideal society, whereas dystopias posit a terrible society resulting from specific utopian premises. Although numerous contemporary critics have explained the relationship between utopia and dystopia in terms that transcend such straightforward divisions, the dystopian fiction of the Cold War suggests that there is still some utility in considering (though not adopting) the more simplistic definition, both because utopian language generally contains a simple good/bad logical dichotomy and because the culture and politics of both the Soviet Union and the United States during this period frequently relied on such simple binary utopian sentiment. In my view, the prevalence of dystopian and anti-utopian sentiment in Russian and American fiction is a parodic-satirical response intended to subvert the rampant utopian mindsets of both the superpowers during the Cold War. The authors of the works examined here do not support either side in this ideological struggle, but rather attempt to invalidate the conflict's overarching logical context.

Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults (review)

Reviewed by: Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults C.W. Sullivan III (bio) Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults. Ed. Carrie Hintz and Elaine Ostry. Children's Literature and Culture Series, Routledge, 2003. The Children's Literature and Culture series from Routledge, edited by lack Zipes, is known for its excellent and tightly-focused critical volumes, and Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults is a fine addition to that series. This volume features a foreword by Zipes, a substantial and thoroughly-documented introduction by the editors, ten essays by children's literature scholars, four essays by fiction writers, an interview with Lois Lowry focusing on The Giver and Gathering Blue, a substantial annotated bibliography of young adult utopian and dystopian fiction, and an oddly-placed afterword by Lyman Tower Sargent, a noted utopian literature scholar. After wrestling with various definitions early in their introduction, Hintz and Ostry settle on the following: [End Page 384] "We use 'utopia' . . . to signify a non-existent society that is posited as significantly better than that of the reader" and dystopia as a society "in which the ideals for improvement have gone tragically amok" (3). Further, they establish the critical stance for this volume by arguing, "Utopian writing for children and young adults examines the roots of social behavior and encourages the child to question his or her own society" (1). The rest of the introduction deals with reasons for studying utopian literature for children and young adults, the ability of such literature to teach readers about society, about themselves, and about the nature of technological advance. The introduction concludes with a brief explanation of the major sections of the book and the essays in those sections. As with any collection of scholarly essays, they vary in terms of both style and relevance (or, perhaps, usefulness to the reader, be he or she critic or student), and while all of the essays have something to offer, I was particularly taken by certain ones. Fred Erisman's "American Boys' Series Books and the Utopia of the Air" is a first-rate discussion focusing on those series in which the airplane played a major role. Quoting passages from such books as Rex Lee, Ace of the Airmail (1929), Erisman argues that these books envisioned a future in which "the merits of aviation will awaken the merits of boys who read of it, making them 'the men whose destiny it would be to lead the country toward the day when flying had taken its rightful place in the world,' and leading these young men to produce a better world for all" (39). Erisman concludes, "Most important of all, [these books] look to a time when mankind itself will be liberated and exalted through the transcendence offered by that technology" (46). In "Sarah Fielding's Childhood Utopia," Sara Gadeken points out that the first English children's novel, Sarah Fielding's The Governess, or Little Female Academy (1749), was a utopian novel. The girls at the Academy, Gadeken argues, come there from another culture, a male-dominated culture in which the girls had been taught "to suppose that happiness consists of outdoing everyone else and then reveling in the envy and frustration this causes others" (57). Fielding, Gadeken continues, posits a "selfhood that . . . sees the individual not as independent but part of a larger whole" (61), in this case, the Academy. Gadeken also rescues Fielding from the mistaken charge that she was idealizing marriage and advocating "submissiveness and domesticity" (67). Brian facques' Redwall is unmasked in Holly V. Blackford's "The Writing on the Wall of Redwall." Blackford points out that, initially, Redwall appears to be a utopia in which the mice heal the sick and assist the needy in "an ideal of an independent animal kingdom that knows no violence" (89). In fact, the mice have taken a vow not to harm other creatures. As Blackford points out, however, this utopian veil is just that, and the world of the mice changes quickly and dramatically as Matthias "becomes" the warrior mouse, Martin, and his "rise to power overturns the social order of the peaceful utopia" (96). [End Page 385...

Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial (review)

Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial (review)

Feminist Implications of Anti-leisure in Dystopian Fiction

This essay provides a feminist perspective on dystopian anti-leisure. Dystopias are futuristic anti-utopias where leisure is distorted and individuals are manipulated to further the agenda of the politically powerful (Rabkin, 1983). The purpose of this essay is to illustrate how women in dystopian societies are subjected to anti-leisure as evidenced by the devaluation of their personal leisure spaces. A feminist definition of leisure is used to guide a poststructuralist feminist analysis of four dystopian novels: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano and George Orwell's 1984. Synopsis and discussion are then employed to demonstrate how two binary oppositions of female disempowerment are evidenced in the novels and to consider how these same forces operate in reality to jeopardize women's personal leisure spaces.

Psychopathology, Inner Space and the Automotive Death Drive: J.G. Ballard

This paper uses a detailed reading of the 1973 novel Crash!, a work of dystopian science fiction by British author J.G. Ballard, to outline a new theory of psychopathology in a thoroughly technologised culture. The paper proposes that, in the light of the evidence of the novel, it may be possible to reconceptualise both trauma and the somatic relationship to pathology, through the mediation of a saturated technoculture, at least in the sense of a closer investigation of the relationship between perversity and aesthetic expression. The argument concludes that there is a privileged relationship between such extreme forms of pathological symptom as are presented in the novel, and the aesthetic form itself, which leads to a more productive understanding of psychopathology.

Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial by Erika Gottlieb

REVIEWS Erika Gottlieb. Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Uni­ versity Press, 2001. 323. $12.95 paper, $75.00 cloth. In September 1945, Isaiah Berlin visited Moscow. It was the first time he had been in Russia since he had fled to England with his family in the face of secret police persecution in 1920. His Russian was still fluent, and in the brief thaw immediately after the end of World War II, he was able to meet and talk with some of the major Russian writers and intellectuals. He found them all gripped by fear. As Berlin’s biographer Michael Ignatieff relates: From his first night in Moscow [...] Isaiah was exposed to the atmosphere of gloom, shame and terror among ‘the scared’ ones who had managed to survive the Yezhovshchina, the whole-scale extermination of the Russian intelligentsia in 1937. In addition to the millions of ordinary people sent to labour camps or simply shot, the regime had exterminated the cultural élite [...]. By the time the killing and deporta­ tion were done, there was a vacant stillness in Russian culture, like a forest after an all-consuming fire. (136-37) The thaw soon ended, and Soviet writers were plunged back into isolation from the West until the Cold War was over. This is the climate in which the Eastern dystopian fiction that Erika Gottlieb discusses was written. As she points out, this litera­ ture is quite different from Western dystopias. Orwell, Huxley, Atwood, and the others were writing their books as a warn­ ing; Koestler, Grossman, Ribakov, and many others were writ­ ing about a fait accompli, with little hope that things would improve. More than half of Gottlieb’s book is devoted to the East­ ern writers — largely because most of those whom she discuss­ es are unknown to most Western readers. She has, necessarily, to devote a good deal of space to plot summary. This some­ times makes for heavy and, often, gloomy going. The atm o­ sphere of terror under which most of these novels were writ­ ten does not make for pleasant reading, particularly since the reader is haunted by the fact that the writers — often with great courage — wrote with the knowledge that their work could lead 761 ESC 28, 2002 to arrest, summ ary conviction, and either death or long impris­ onment in the Gulags Gottlieb claims that dystopian fiction “is a post Christian genre” and th at the hell on earth of dystopian societies “is not that far removed from Dante’s medieval dream-vision of Dis, the city of hell” (3). The purpose of both Dante and Western dystopian fiction writers is to warn readers against the sin of giving in to tem ptation — of sin on the one hand and totalitari­ anism on the other. Dystopian fiction, of course, moves beyond Dante’s hell to a state in which the core of individual mind and personality is destroyed by the elimination of love and family ties. “Ultimately,” Gottlieb writes, “by being relentlessly bom­ barded by state propaganda while also being deprived of pri­ vacy, and intim ate relationships, we may be deprived of the core of our being, our personal memory of the past” (12). After a brief survey of nineteenth-century precursors to mod­ ern dystopian fiction — especially the Grand Inquisitor section of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov — Gottlieb moves to an analysis of Zam iatin’s We, the precursor of all the Western novels that Gottlieb deals with: Huxley’s Brave New World, Or­ well’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Vonnegut ’s Player Piano, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. We was one of the earliest attacks on the cult of the machine and technology that was adopted by Lenin after the Bolsheviks came to power. Henry Ford’s production line and Taylor’s time and motion studies became the bases of Lenin’s desire to trans­ form the Soviet Union into an efficient industrial state. D-503, the protagonist of We, is a m athematician and space-ship de­ signer who is perfectly content in his subservience to this ma­ chine state until...

Dystopian fiction east and west: universe of terror and trial

Gottlieb juxtaposes the Western dystopian genre with Eastern and Central European versions, introducing a selection of works from Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. She demonstrates that authors who write about and under totalitarian dictatorship find the worst of all possible worlds not in a hypothetical future but in the historical reality of the writer's present or recent past. Against such a background the writer assumes the role of witness, protesting against a nightmare world that is but should not be. She introduces the works of Victor Serge, Vassily Grossmam, Alexander Zinoviev, Tibor Dery, Arthur Koestler, Vaclav Havel, and Istvan Klima, as well as a host of others, all well-known in their own countries, presenting them within a framework established through an original and comprehensive exploration of the patterns underlying the more familiar Western works of dystopian fiction.

Anti-leisure in dystopian fiction: the literature of leisure in the worst of all possible worlds

Literary utopias, i.e. designs for the theoretically perfect society, have been common in Western literature since Plato's The Republic . A variation on this genre which emerged in the nineteenth century is the anti-utopia, or dystopia, in which an author depicts the worst of all possible societies. Dystopias usually exaggerate contemporary social trends and in doing so, offer serious social criticism. This essay examines the treatment of leisure in four widely-read dystopian novels. The leisure described in these novels we call anti-leisure. It is not leisure's opposite, work, but leisure perverted to achieve the perpetuation of tyranny. Such leisure regulates identity, prevents individual thought, impedes self-sufficiency, encourages immoderation, and distracts citizens from social injustice through various compulsory activities. Such novels encourage the re-examination of theories of leisure from a humanistic standpoint.

Bluefeather Fellini by Max Evans

120 Western American Literature Billy’s father, Pawnee Killer, accepts his son as they both participate in a battle against the government, but the latter part of the narrative focuses more directly on the historical aspects of the Ghost Dance than on Billy’s own individual plight. As is true of the finest examples of the western novel, these works’greatest achievement rests in the verisimilitude of their settings, the richness of their depiction of western characters, and their treatment of several of the West’s archetypal themes, most notably the quest for justice. Hackenberry and Worcester’s portrayals of the rugged landscape of the Dakota Territory and Brooks’ of the vastness of Texas are poignant and vivid, while Hackenberry’s Goodwin and Brooks’Henry Dollar are heroic yet human embodiments of law in a lawless land. None of these works is flawless. Yet, on balance, each tells an interesting story, revealing once again the powerful hold that the frontier West continues to exert on the American imagination. CHRISTOPHER S. BUSCH Hillsdale College BluefeatherFellini. By Max Evans. (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1993. 340 pages, $19.95.) The novel beginswith half-Taos Indian and half-Italian Bluefeather Fellini meeting Sam Grinder, a churlish and toothless old prospector who can chew tobacco and drink beer at the same time. Together they search for a rich vein of gold in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. In the course of the picaresque novel, which ranges through the 1930s and 40s, Bluefeather Fellini prospects for gold; briefly features as afavorite of salon culture in Taos; wanders through Texas, Arizona, and Nevada prospecting, drinking, dancing, and sexing; turns gentleman gambler and settles for a time in Tonopah with awoman who owns a burlesque company; kills a man in self defense during a high stakes poker game; leaves for Breen, Colorado, where he meets and marries Mary Schmidt O’Kelly, “the most beautiful, intelligent, kindliest and best baker of pies in the entire world”;successfullyworks the King Tut gold mine with Mary, only to kill her accidentally with a dislodged rock; and then departs Colorado after blast­ ing the mine entrance closed. And that is only Part One. BluefeatherFellini is clearly the product of Evans’s life-long association with the Southwest as a cowboy, rancher, mining speculator, trader, artist, and writer. Those familiar with the author’s previous works, which include The Rounders, TheHi Lo Country, and My Pardner, know Evans’s considerable enthu­ siasm for the region’s physical and cultural terrain. Yet the scope of the novel expands beyond the Southwest to take in the grim reality ofWorld War II. Part Two dramatizes the role of the Ninth Regiment in the allied assault on Reviews 121 occupied France in 1944. Evans does not let up in describing the grisly destruction ofwar. Part Three finds the protagonist back in New Mexico. There he meets a doctor and his aunt, “a weirdly gorgeous young woman”who supposedly is ninety-six years old. The three attempt to mass produce a wondrous health cure made from sage oil. The ending of the novel suggests further adventures for Blue. This is a memorable and rambunctious novel that is full of eccentricities. What it lacks in depth of characterization is compensated for in the sheer range of the story. MARTIN PADGET University ofCalifornia, San Diego Parable ofthe Sower. By Octavia E. Butler. (New York and London: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993. 299 pages, $19.95.) Los Angeles is most hated of our cities because it makes our fears most visible. Here is its nightmare future: civil order collapses, and with it much of our technology. Mobs and drug-crazed criminals rule by night, and fires burn uncontrolled. Water, fuel, and food are nearly unobtainable; some homeless resort to cannibalism. Citizens with even modest property try to protect them­ selves within fortified communities, which become targets for siege. Groups of survivors try to escape, but only spread the chaos. This is a horrifying vision, but not difficult to believe in: perhaps easier than any other. Octavia E. Butler enters a now recognizable tradition of Los Angeles dystopian fiction with thisvery intelligent and finely crafted novel. Butler, who grew up in...

Signposting the Way to the City of Night: Recent Russian Dystopian Fiction

Signposting the Way to the City of Night: Recent Russian Dystopian Fiction

Dystopian literature: a theory and research guide

Introduction A Guide to Selected Modern Cultural Criticism with Relevance to Dystopian Literature A Guide to Selected Utopian Fictions Dystopian Fiction A Guide to Selected Dystopian Drama A Guide to Selected Dystopian Films Bibliography Index

The Flight from the Good Life: Fahrenheit 451 in the Context of Postwar American Dystopias

Surveying the American scene in 1958, Aldous Huxley recorded his dismay over the speed with which Brave New World was becoming realized in contemporary developments: “The nightmare of total organization, which I had situated in the seventh century After Ford, has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting us, just around the next corner.” Having struck a keynote of urgency Huxley then lines up a series of oppositions between limited disorder, individuality and freedom on the one hand, and order, automatism and subjection on the other in order to express his liberal anxieties that political and social organization might hypertrophy. Huxley sums up an abiding fear which runs through American dystopian fiction of the 1950s that individuals will lose their identity and become the two-dimensional stereotypes indicated in two catch-phrases of the period: the “organization man” and the “man in the grey flannel suit. ” William H. Whyte's 1956 study diagnoses the demise of the Protestant ethic in American life and its replacement by a corporate one which privileges “belongingness. ” The result might be, he warns, not a world controlled by self-evident enemies familiar from Nineteen Eighty-Four, but an antiseptic regime presided over by a “mild-looking group of therapists who, like the Grand Inquisitor, would be doing what they did to help you.”

<i>Vineland</i> and Dystopian Fiction

Pynchon's <em>Vineland </em>(1990) presents a vivid and chilling picture of contemporary America as a land of lost hopes and broken dreams, a place where huge, impersonal forces have subtly gained the power to dictate the courses of individual lives. It therefore has much in common with the modern tradition of dystopian fiction, as its setting in 1984 indicates, including, in addition to George Orwell's 1984 (1949), Yevgeny Zamyatin's <em>We </em>(1924) and Aldous Huxley's <em>Brave New World </em>(1932). All these dystopian fictions involve an opposition between rationality (usually the cold rationality of official control) and irrationality (typically the irrational passion of human feeling). This conflict between society and individual, or reason and passion, figures in dystopian fictions in a variety of ways. For example, the authoritarian governments depicted by authors of dystopian fiction tend to regard sexuality as a focus for social control of individual lives, just as those who rebel against such governments often consider sexual emancipation an important part of their rebellions. Dystopian governments also frequently proscribe practices (like the taking of mind-altering drugs) that might lead to alternative states of consciousness or ways of viewing reality. The treatment of the rationality-irrationality and society-individual oppositions by Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell and Pynchon can be usefully illuminated within the framework of theories of modern culture like those proposed by Michel Foucault. Indeed, the treatment of this issue in dystopian fiction resonates with a number of modern theoretical debates concerning the merits of reason as the paradigm of modern society.

The Body and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Body and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century EnglandRandall McGowenRandall McGowen Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 59, Number 4Dec., 1987 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/243281 Views: 60Total views on this site Citations: 22Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1987 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Ahmad Nurozi, Dadan Muttaqien, The Effectiveness of Crime Prevention with Corporal Punishment in Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam, Millah 20, no.22 (Feb 2021): 223–244.https://doi.org/10.20885/millah.vol20.iss2.art2Francine Rochford Moral Ambivalence and the Executioner’s Hood: Averting the Retributive Gaze in Dystopian Fiction, (Feb 2020): 527–538.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36059-7_32Tawny Paul The Poverty of Disaster, 15 (Sep 2019).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108690546Simon Devereaux Inexperienced Humanitarians? William Wilberforce, William Pitt, and the Execution Crisis of the 1780s, Law and History Review 33, no.0404 (Oct 2015): 839–885.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248015000449David Lemmings Crime and the Administration of Criminal Law: Problems, Solutions and Participation, (Jan 2011): 81–125.https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230354401_4Simon Devereaux The Historiography of the English State During ‘The Long Eighteenth Century’ Part Two - Fiscal-Military and Nationalist Perspectives, History Compass 8, no.88 (Aug 2010): 843–865.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00706.xDavid Nash, Anne-Marie Kilday Private Passions and Public Penance: Popular Shaming Rituals in Pre-Modern Britain, (Jan 2010): 26–46.https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230309098_2David Garland A culturalist theory of punishment?, Punishment & Society 11, no.22 (Apr 2009): 259–268.https://doi.org/10.1177/1462474508104428Sarah Covington Law’s Breakages, (Jan 2009): 55–81.https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101098_3Simon Devereaux From Sessions to Newspaper? Criminal Trial Reporting, the Nature of Crime, and the London Press, 1770–1800, The London Journal 32, no.11 (Jul 2013): 1–27.https://doi.org/10.1179/174963207X172939Bruce P. Smith English Criminal Justice Administration, 1650–1850: A Historiographic Essay, Law and History Review 25, no.33 (Aug 2010): 593–634.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248000004284JOANNA CRUICKSHANK "Appear as Crucified for Me": Sight, Suffering, and Spiritual Transformation in the Hymns of Charles Wesley, Journal of Religious History 30, no.33 (Oct 2006): 311–330.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9809.2006.00496.xDavid Garland Penal Excess and Surplus Meaning: Public Torture Lynchings in Twentieth-Century America, Law <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&"/> Society Review 39, no.44 (Dec 2005): 793–834.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5893.2005.00245.xSimon Devereaux The Abolition of the Burning of Women in England Reconsidered1, Crime, Histoire & Sociétés 9, no.22 (Dec 2005): 73–98.https://doi.org/10.4000/chs.293John Michael Roberts From populist to political dialogue in the public sphere, Cultural Studies 18, no.66 (Nov 2004): 884–910.https://doi.org/10.1080/0950238042000306918Andrew T. Harris Policing and Public Order in the City of London, 1784–1815, The London Journal 28, no.22 (Jul 2013): 1–20.https://doi.org/10.1179/ldn.2003.28.2.1Garthine Walker Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England, 3 (Jul 2009).https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511496110Clodagh Tait Dying Well: Experiences of Death, (Jan 2002): 7–29.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403913951_2Martin J. Wiener Alice Arden to Bill Sikes: Changing Nightmares of Intimate Violence in England, 1558–1869, The Journal of British Studies 40, no.0202 (Jan 2014): 184–212.https://doi.org/10.1086/386240BARRY VAUGHAN Punishment and Conditional Citizenship, Punishment & Society 2, no.11 (Aug 2016): 23–39.https://doi.org/10.1177/14624740022227845Diane Purkiss Blood, sacrifice, marriage: why iphigeneia and mariam have to die, Women's Writing 6, no.11 (Dec 2006): 27–45.https://doi.org/10.1080/09699089900200054Maria R. Boes Public Appearance and Criminal Judicial Practices in Early Modern Germany, Social Science History 20, no.22 (Jan 2016): 259–279.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0145553200021623

A Survey of Australian Utopian and Dystopian Fiction

Literary perceptions of Australia's past and future have undergone close scrutiny at various periods in this country's history. The perspectives of fiction are of course a vital indication of historical and contemporary attitudes to our natural and social environments. One genre that is particularly revealing in this regard is Utopian literature. It has always been part of the Australian tradition, though a minor strand. It has been slighter in terms of comparative publication here than in other English-speaking countries, and less volatile in terms of relative optimism and pessimism. It nevertheless has been adopted by many Australian writers as a vehicle for works of social inspiration and, in the alternative form of the dystopia, forecasts of social disintegration.