Dystopian Novels Research Articles

The planet heals itself: The overkill of Homo sapiens in contemporary literature

Both in the perception of the academia and in the eyes of the public, the overflow of human civilisation on the Earth is considered potentially pernicious, not only for the planet but also for humanity itself. Literature has recently addressed the issue of threats posed by the overabundance and overindulgence of human population. Speculative dystopian fiction is perhaps the most appropriate genre to undertake the discussion of this topic. This paper analyses four selected contemporary dystopian novels by critically acclaimed writers, which develop the theme of the overflow of human civilisation and examine the menaces that it causes on several levels. The works analysed are as follows: Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (2003), Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2004), The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006) and Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson (2007). Each of the novels presents some form of a post-apocalyptic framework and can therefore be located within the context of ‘overflow’ of human race, which destroys its natural habitat and undermines its own civilisational advances. As I argue, the eradication of the human race is part of the self-purification process undertaken by the planet. By using different literary devices, the four writers suggest that although history repeats itself in circles, human beings are incapable of learning from past mistakes. In the article, I refer to Lovelock's metaphorical use of the concept of Gaia to discuss the ethical and political function of the dystopian literature.

디스토피아 소설에 나타난 유토피아적 충동 : 조지 오웰의 『1984』와 마가렛 앳우드의 『대리모 시녀이야기』

As a critical dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Owell and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood warn us of future dystopian society. Although both Oceania and Gilead are imagined communities, they resemble our modern society in many respects. Citizens in those totalitarian systems can not use language and body at their own disposal. Big Brother-style surveillance system watch an individual’s every moves and regulate their emotion as well. But protagonists in these novels try to write their own story confidentially and have a genuine relation with others. To be a human, their body and sexuality function against a social control and repression. And their desire of narrating stories and forbidden sexuality trigger desperate attempts to restore their lost past and identities through language and body. Although appropriation of language and body is means of totalitarian control of citizen, it could be a route for freedom and liberation from their dystopian reality. Even in dystopian novels, utopian impulse still exists and provokes in readers a determination to prevent nightmare future and to cherish what must not be lost.

"Typescript of the Second Origin" and Current YA Dystopian and Post-Apocalypse Fiction in English: Prefiguring the Female Hero

YA post-apocalypse and dystopian novels formulate alternative realities where traditional gender roles and conceptions of masculinity and femininity can be contested and/or re-invented. Manuel de Pedrolo’s novel Typescript of the Second Origin (1974) is a case in point since, in the aftermath of a devastating alien attack, the fate of the human species is left in the hands of a resourceful teenager, Alba. Through the application of sheer determination and common sense, Alba manages to survive apocalypse, keeps her male child companion alive long enough to be impregnated by him, and becomes the herald of a new, more equalitarian society. However, Pedrolo does not envision a new post-apocalyptic body and ultimately reduces Alba’s stature and sense of purpose to her ability to reproduce and become ‘the mother’ of humanity. Contemporary YA fiction written in the last decade also provides readers with powerful teenage heroines who, like Alba, face dangers, defeat enemies and confront threats. This article analyses some contemporary dystopian and post-apocalypse trilogies for young adults, especially Rick Yancey’s ‘The 5th Wave’ trilogy (2013-2016), alongside Pedrolo’s Typescript to explore the extent of the authors’ success in the creation of young heroines as agents of change able to resist the limitations of gender and re-create the worlds in which they live in more progressive terms. The article argues that, in spite of the changes in the presentation of female heroism, contemporary YA dystopia and post-apocalypse narratives fall short of articulating a fully feminist discourse and, like Pedrolo’s novel, ultimately fail to envision female futures.

Rejecting the Gender Binaries in Hunger Games Trilogy

Suzanne Collins, in Hunger Games trilogy, challenges the traditional gender roles by creating mavericks—characters that do not fit into just one gender box but possess both masculine and feminine characteristics. Dystopian novels are all cautionary in nature; alarming us about the gloomy tomorrow if we do not correct our behavior at present. Even though Collins has set her stage in a dystopian world, her gender politics find resonance in the contemporary world. Keywords: Hunger Games trilogy, Gender, Young Adults

The origin and evolution of the term “clone”

In biology, the term “clone” is most widely used to designate genetically identical cells or organisms that are asexually descended from a common progenitor. The concept of clonality in hematology-oncology has received much attention in recent years, as the advent of next-generation sequencing platforms has provided new tools for detection of clonal populations in patients, and experiments on primary cells have provided fascinating new insights into the clonal architecture of human malignancies. The term “clone” is used more loosely by the general public to mean any close or identical copy. Cloning of humans has been a staple of science fiction films and dystopian novels since Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was published in 1932. Here I trace the origin and evolution of the word clone, from its first use as an agricultural and botanical term in 1903, to its widespread adoption in biology, adaptation by artists, and contemporary use in hematology-oncology.

Monsters of Men: Masculinity and the Other in Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking Series

ABSTRACTTo date, studies of gender issues in young adult dystopian novels have been dominated by a focus on constructions of female subjectivity, girlhood, and the potential for female empowerment. However, little critical attention has been correspondingly dedicated to examining how regimes of masculinity, traditional privileges of male power, and male adolescence are represented and mediated in dystopian fiction for teenagers. Patrick Ness’s exploration of normative and transgressive embodiments of masculinity in his dystopian Chaos Walking series for young adults powerfully addresses tensions between power and vulnerability, autonomy and conformity, and concepts of boyhood and manhood. Through their experiences with the possibilities of telepathy, biotechnology, and interspecies relationships, Ness’s protagonists must negotiate with the simultaneous attraction of the fragmented self and its threat to the regulation of conventional manhood, as male characters struggle to sustain their inherited understanding of themselves and the relation between self and other. Through his problematizing of the boundaries between traditional hegemonic and Other, human and alien codes, and his emphasis on the importance of non-hierarchical and inclusive co-existence, Ness proposes a receptive, expansive, and egalitarian paradigm of masculinity.

Dystopian Narratives: Encounters with the Perverse Sadomasochistic Universe

ABSTRACTIn a number of dystopian novels that I explore, including Orwell’s (1949) 1984 and Huxley’s (1932) Brave New World, I identify themes of soul murder, destruction of differences, murder of reality, and attacks on the parental couple as a generative twosome. In my view, dystopian fiction captures, thus, many facets of the perverse sadomasochistic core. I demonstrate that the leaders of dystopian societies are fueled by a desire to debase and eventually eliminate the feeding mother, the Oedipal father, and the creative parental couple by becoming god-like creators of a new and idealized fecal universe. Although dystopian narratives tend to locate the catastrophe in a future social disaster, they represent a psychological breakdown that has already occurred in the past and is, therefore, present in the individual’s internal world. The dystopian narrative enables this internal catastrophe to be projected into a future plot and a cast of characters that stand for both victims and perpetrators in the internal object world. I offer a psychoanalytic perspective, which can help our understanding of the increasing popularity of dystopian fiction among the young adult readership.

Museum Catalogue Record: William Morris’s News From Nowhere

Museum Catalogue Record: William Morris’s News From Nowhere Madeleine Seys (bio) Object: The Utopian Museum Material: William Morris’s News From Nowhere; or, An Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance Date: 1890 history The victorian period saw the rise of the museum and the novel as dominant cultural and intellectual forms. Both museums and novels used reason and description to categorize and organize facts and artifacts in order to tell stories, connecting earlier events to the culture and politics of the Victorian period. Novels and museums are, alike, repositories for narrative. In Victorian museum practice, catalogues such as the British Museum’s [End Page 30] Catalogue of Printed Books: Homer (1890) document the provenance, description, and condition of an artifact in constructing a narrative of its history and significance. These categories were codified in museum collection accession practice throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A similar logic to that which informs the museum catalogue is evident in the structure of the nineteenth-century novel. Here, background information provides a narrative’s history and provenance, build-up utilizes description as a literary technique, the novel’s climax is a complication of that description (as is an artifact’s condition), and its resolution concludes the narrative and assesses the novel’s significance. As Mieke Bal states, “Collecting is an essential human feature that originates in the need to tell stories” (103); the museum and the novel both represent and explore this need. William Morris’s 1890 novel, News from Nowhere, bears witness to the influence of the museum as a cultural site, as a collection, and as a form of storytelling in Victorian literature. Morris presents his novel, subtitled An Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance, as a collection of textual artifacts, in the form of chapters, through which he describes and explores a utopian future. The museum is an important literal and symbolic site in News from Nowhere. It is crucial to the novel’s narrative strategy and utopian function and provides a framework for analyzing it. The museum is also a significant cultural site and narrative metaphor in other late-Victorian utopian and dystopian novels, including H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett’s New Amazonia (1899). Barbara J. Black’s On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums examines the utopian impulse of Victorian collecting culture and how literature responds to this impulse in its representations of the future. She argues that Morris’s museum in News From Nowhere represents a “social criticism targeted at the future of a society committed to imperialism and industrialism” (168). Instead of being a “guarded national treasury, the museum plays back the history of its own institutional inception” (167). In this essay, I use the museum catalogue as a form for exploring Morris’s utopian representation of the Victorian period, taking history, provenance, description, condition, and significance as subheadings to structure my analysis. In doing so, I continue this process of self-consciously examining the museum as an object of and subject for narrative and history. Like Morris, I look at the Victorian period, in this case its literature, through the epistemologies of the museum. As a short form of analysis that explores the connection between objects and narratives, and the significance of the past (provenance) in understanding the present (significance), the museum catalogue record is the ideal form for literary analysis that is attentive to the historical, material, and poetic aspects of the Victorian novel. provenance From the Greek, museum means the “seat of the muses” (Siegel 3); in its modern usage, these muses are material rather than mythic, and the museum [End Page 31] is an institution for the collection, protection, preservation, and exhibition of objects of historical and artistic value (Siegel 3; Maleuvre 9). During the Victorian period, the museum emerged as an object of and a subject for the defining intellectual and cultural activities of collecting, categorization, and exhibition. In the years that have followed, the Victorian period itself has become an object to exhibit in museums, with both institutions and their artifacts functioning as icons of this era. In 1967, Germaine Bazin described...

'Who Controls the Past Controls the Future: Who Controls the Present Controls the Past': Nostalgia as a Phenomenon in Dystopian Novels

Does nostalgia facilitate a critique of the status quo, or is it merely a form of escapism? Reading dystopian fiction through the lens of nostalgia enables one to tackle these questions and also to rethink the relevance of classical dystopian novels which tend to be criticised merely as defeatist and anti-utopian. This paper is divided into two parts; the first provides a theoretical framework of the concept of nostalgia, and the second an analysis of dystopian novels, namely, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood and Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro. The main point of my theoretical standpoint of nostalgia is twofold. First, nostalgia is a mood rather than an attitude, and thus has to be understood as a phenomenon. Secondly, nostalgia should be distinguished from what Jeff Malpas calls mythophilia, which is a form of mythmaking. In consequence, the paper avoids categorising nostalgia either as positive or negative. In the analysis of each dystopian novel, on the other hand, it examines underlying problems regarding phenomena such as nostalgia as a means of resistance and survival and also stresses how nostalgia can easily be conflated with mythophilia, which can often be detected in hegemonic discourses in dystopian fiction. Finally, the paper interrogates what it actually means to be homeless in the modern age.

Children of Oryx, Children of Crake, Children of Men: Redefining the Post/Transhuman in Margaret Atwood’s “ustopian” MaddAddam Trilogy

One of the main pillars of posthuman and transhuman thought is the use of technology as a means to ameliorate human life by helping overcome the flaws and limitations of the biological body. The effect of such trends has been central to the development of contemporary, third-turn dystopian novels in English, published in the past thirty or so years. However, one important aspect of such narratives is also their list of transgressive characteristics, distancing them from their modern, second-turn counterparts. The following article aims to discuss how transgressive the ideas of dystopia and transhumanism that form Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy are, essentially discussing whatever lies at the core of the human condition.

"Realists of a Larger Reality": On New Science Fiction

<div class="quote-intro">Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.<p class="quote-intro-author">—Ursula K. Le Guin</p></div>Le Guin is undoubtedly right about resistance in the "real" world, but in reading, only some books offer a call to resistance and the possibilities of a new reality. Among the books considered here, some come to us as "literary fiction"; others are marked as belonging to another, historically denigrated, form, "science fiction" or "fantasy." This could be a distinction without a difference: two are near-future dystopian novels about corporate capitalism in the United States (both by well-established white authors); two are collections of near-future short stories that set out to critique the human powers that structure our world (written by both established and new voices, primarily writers of color). But the books that embrace rather than evade their status as science fiction or fantasy are the ones able to imagine the resistance and change that Le Guin invokes.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-11" title="Vol. 67, No. 11: April 2016" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Sexual Content in Young Adult Literature: Reading Between the Sheets by Bryan Gillis and Joanna Simpson

Reviewed by: Sexual Content in Young Adult Literature: Reading Between the Sheets by Bryan Gillis and Joanna Simpson Christine N. Stamper (bio) Sexual Content in Young Adult Literature: Reading Between the Sheets. By Bryan Gillis and Joanna Simpson. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Bryan Gillis and Joanna Simpson’s survey of young adult novels with sexual content serves as a comprehensive overview of how and why sexuality and sex acts are used within books for adolescent readers. The authors state their hope that the book “provide[s] parents, teachers, and librarians with a better understanding of the role that sex in young adult fiction plays in the socioemotional and academic development of adolescents” (ix). In looking at specific novels, genres, and time periods, Gillis and Simpson’s analysis is often punctuated with quotations from authors about how and why they include scenes that contain explicit sex or emotionally charged intimate situations. While this approach certainly gives insight into the scenes that Gillis and Simpson analyze in their study, it also serves to illustrate (perhaps to concerned parent readers) that the sexual content in adolescent literature is not included without intention and character/plot development. Rather, sex is often used in these novels as a space for character growth and maturation, providing fictional models for teens to explore safely. The book opens with two chapters that contextualize why the use of sexual content in novels matters for real-world teenagers, looking at identity formation within adolescents and, briefly, at the history of public school sex education in the United States. These chapters are brief but informative, summarizing how identities (including normative gender roles) are socially constructed, and how the US came to have the abstinence-only sex ed currently provided in many schools. Gillis and Simpson then turn their attention to literature, looking at sexual content within the Western canon that is often taught in high schools. This chapter highlights the sex present in works by authors that many expect high schools to be teaching to teenagers, such as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Hawthorne, and Homer. Looking at pedagogy, the authors argue that teachers are often able to avoid discussing sex when using these works, which are linguistically difficult for their students; however, removing the sexual content from these novels does them a disservice: “If we are requiring students to read adult content, then we should treat them as adults or choose alternative texts” (34). The authors then shift to young adult literature from the 1950s through the 1980s. Here they illustrate how sex was often punished with awful consequences, such as pregnancy, unfulfilling marriages, or being forced to leave school. However, they then look at prolific authors at the time—such as Judy Blume and Norma Klein—who redefined gender roles and included female characters who showed sexual agency and desire, [End Page 465] which had previously been virtually absent in literature for teens. In the next three chapters, Gillis and Simpson examine contemporary young adult literature by genre, dividing the field into dystopian novels, romance novels, and contemporary realistic fiction and giving a brief history of each of them, both within and outside of adolescent literature, along with short analyses of representative novels. Within the dystopia chapter, they investigate several of their own subcategories, including government-controlled sex, disease-induced sexual abstinence, and sex and romance in dystopian series. These categories all serve the same purpose of examining how sex, romance, and love are governed within these repressive societies. The authors posit that “Dystopian YAL is popular because these stories create worlds that challenge the protagonists to question the status quo,” and expressing their sexuality is one way in which characters can rebel against authoritarianism (98). Similarly, the romance chapter is divided into paranormal romance and realistic romance, discussing how in this category sexual content must be emotionally linked to character and plot development. Whether the romance takes place in supernatural worlds or in familiar settings, it is the “honesty [of sexual relationships] that draws readers in and keeps them reading. A lack of honesty, particularly emotional honesty, is what has led to the failure of school sex education programs across the country” (121). It is also this honesty that allows...

Critiques

Critiques Claudia Nelson Like our spring issue, ChLAQ 40.2 does not have an official theme, but the articles included here nonetheless share an interest in works in which children serve as the vehicles for social critique. The genres they examine range from comic strips to picture books to young adult dystopian novels and beyond, but together, these articles indicate ways in which literature for children and young adults may interrogate particular social constructs and seek to replace them with others. We begin with Lara Saguisag’s “Family Amusements: Buster Brown and the Place of Humor in the Early Twentieth-Century Home.” In contrast to critics who see Buster Brown primarily as a subversive text, Saguisag argues that it instructs readers in using humor to shore up the family, an institution widely perceived as under threat during the strip’s heyday. In doing so, however, Buster Brown supported not the family in general but the companionate family in particular, a model inimical to hierarchy. Buster and his parents thus function simultaneously to critique patriarchy and to support what was increasingly offered as an alternative to it. The main title of Vanessa Joosen’s “Second Childhoods and Intergenerational Dialogues: How Children’s Literature Studies and Age Studies Can Supplement Each Other” speaks to the kind of child-adult exchanges going on both within Buster Brown and in the strip’s crossover appeal, but Joosen’s focus is not on the Progressive Era US but rather on present-day Europe. Using a sample of four award-winning Dutch and British texts, Joosen examines “how old age and intergenerational relationships are constructed” in these works, asking “how insights from age studies can contribute to interpreting and contextualizing these fictional constructs.” Much as Buster Brown, in Saguisag’s reading, privileges both the playful child and the adult who is willing to play along with him, Joosen sees in her selected texts a validating of playful child and playful elder that comes at the expense of authority situated in the (implicitly joyless) middle-aged. Continuing this focus on the potential social power of play, David Aitchison turns to the concept of “puerility” in “Little Saboteurs, Puerile Politics: The [End Page 101] Child, the Childlike, and the Principled Life in Carl Hiaasen’s Ecotage Novels for Young Adults.” Aitchison reads Hiaasen’s Hoot, Flush, and Scat as indicative of how today’s environmentalist discourse offers “a certain political possibility for the child and the childlike: a license to react strongly, respond playfully, and get into trouble in the name of protecting the environment.” Simultaneously, Aitchison suggests, it is important to recognize that this discourse exists in the context of “a deeply politicized fear of childishness,” so that Hiaasen’s novels may productively be understood as “rethink[ing] what it means for children to be responsible.” Although Suzanne Collins’s protagonist Katniss Everdeen is famously involved in events designated “games” by her culture, the Hunger Games do not invite the reader to see them as play. We can, however, readily see the discourse of the Games as enabling social criticism, not least because Collins traces how this discourse contributes to the revolution of which Katniss is the public face. Kathryn Strong Hansen’s contribution, “The Metamorphosis of Katniss Everdeen: The Hunger Games, Myth, and Femininity,” combines an examination of Collins’s use of Greek myth with a gender studies approach. Tracing the presence in the trilogy of two feminine archetypes upon which Katniss is invited to model herself, namely Artemis and Philomela, Hansen argues that ultimately Katniss must reject both in order “to create a form of femininity that allows her to break free from her past and to change her society.” The article section of this issue concludes with a consideration of another contemporary dystopian novel for young adults. Amy Elliot’s “Power in Our Words: Finding Community and Mitigating Trauma in James Dashner’s The Maze Runner” argues that Dashner’s popular novel, the first installment of a trilogy later augmented by a prequel, seeks to school its adolescent readers in a crucial emotional skill by “convey[ing] the nature of trauma and suggest[ing] productive responses to help mitigate grief.” In Elliot’s reading...

The Rule of Three by E. Walters

Walters, Eric. The Rule of Three. Toronto: Penguin Canada Books Inc., 2014. PrintWith all the dystopian novels written over the last ten, years Eric Walters has composed a refreshing and believable look at how a community survives after the world has been changed by a computer virus which has immobilized any vehicle, utility, or device that requires computer technology. The villains the community members have to face are not zombies or other fantasy creatures but humans. How long will this disaster last? They don’t know.The “rule of three” is an idea that we can live for three seconds without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food. Keeping this in mind, the protagonist, sixteen-year-old Adam Daley, his mom, the police chief, and neighbour Herb, an ex-spy, must come up with ways to keep their community of Eden Mills safe and self-reliant. Three days after the outage, people begin to panic because the basics of life – water and food – become either inaccessible or depleted. The protection of one’s own family becomes the priority and mob mentality and the survival of the fittest become paramount obstacles that Eden Mills residents must endure. There is a fight for power both figuratively and literally. They must get energy to survive and also have the physical, mental, and social power to live.In some ways, The Rule of Three takes an idealistic view of how a community could band together to survive after a disastrous event. I would hope that if this happened in any community that citizens would have the same attitude and skills. Following Eric Walter’s style, the characters are realistic, relatable, and believable. Like We All Fall Down and many of Walters’ other books, reluctant readers would find the book both readable and interesting. Readers looking for high vocabulary and intricate plot may find this read disappointing. The Rule of Three has suspense, drama, likable characters, and even a little romance; ages 13 and up would enjoy this novel. I am looking forward to the sequel The Rule of Three: The Fight for Power.Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Marylou DicksonTeaching Division III English Language Arts and impacting students’ abilities to improve their literacy practices are passions of Marylou Dickson. She is a teacher in the Edmonton Public School Board and is also a doctoral student at the University of Alberta researching adolescent literacy. When not teaching or studying, you can find Marylou and her husband Al watching movies, enjoying friends, and/or working on their homestead.

Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers ed. by Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad, Carrie Hintz (review)

Reviewed by: Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers ed. by Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad, Carrie Hintz Robert Gadowski, PhD Candidate Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers. Ed. by Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad, and Carrie Hintz. Series: Children’s Literature and Culture; 93. New York: Routledge, 2013. 214pages. ISBN: 978-0-415-63693-3. In recent years, dystopian narrative has blossomed from a somewhat timid bud to a full-grown branch of young adult literature. There is no denying that the issue of the imminent future is of the utmost importance to young people, as evidenced by their choices of what kinds of novels to buy, read, and contemplate on. However, one might get a nervous feeling once the dominant schema of these narratives is exposed. The leading trend in contemporary YA novels has taken a dystopian turn with the future full of fears, problems, struggles, and injustices—all of which might be said to have their origins in the present time. In this respect, YA dystopias offer not only a glimpse into the future but also a good view on the state of contemporary culture and society. Moreover, the complexity of the field makes it possible to generate in-depth discussions on the implications and challenges of the genre. A book that aims to go beyond the mere surface of YA dystopias is Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers, edited in 2013 by Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad, and Carrie Hintz. By offering an extensive collection of critical essays on the most popular YA dystopian novels to date, the authors of the book fulfill their main goal, which is to “enable a prismatic understanding of the genre as a political, cultural, and aesthetic phenomenon” (9). The book comprises four main units, each divided into three chapters. The main parts are as follows: part I is “Freedom and Constraint: Adolescent Liberty and Self-Determination,” which examines the notion of freedom and autonomy in the light of the limitations imposed by place, character, or class; part II is “Society and Environment: Building a Better World,” which tackles the issue of the degradation of natural environment and the interconnectedness of this problem with the young people’s growing self-awareness and their outlook on nature; part III is “Radical or Conservative? Polemics of the Future,” which seeks to reconcile the “big themes” of race or technology with the emerging literary framework of YA dystopian fiction; and finally, part IV is “Biotechnologies of the Self: Humanity in a Posthuman Age,” which extrapolates on the forthcoming post- and trans-humanist worlds with special emphasis on bio-ethics and questions of identity and self-knowledge. While I mostly enjoyed the content and ideas behind each of the above-mentioned parts, it seems that the topic of liberty, indeed to some degree the chief characteristic of all YA dystopias, could have been enriched with an overview of freedom as a cultural idea. As dystopias take place in diametrically different societies, cultural notions like freedom acquire new facets while abandoning others. A delineation of “purely dys-topian” freedom might have been interesting. Nevertheless, with such a wide array of topics on display, there was a danger that this scholarly endeavor might collapse under its own weight or that it could favour some chapters or perspectives over the others, thus creating a dissonant feeling of the whole. Neither of these things ring true in this case. At no point does the reader feel overwhelmed by the information or analyses, and each chapter reads well as a stand-alone article. In this respect, I feel that the book proves itself to be pragmatic and well-adjusted to the demands of a common reader. On the other hand, the editors skillfully introduce some dialectic discussion, which highlights even more the ideas presented. As the genre is in constant flux, to curb it into generalizations and norms would be to miss the point. On the whole, the authors seem to balance on the thin line that separates a scholar who simply lays down ideas and a scholar who assumes a commanding voice as a writer. In my view, the book succeeds...

Body Technologies: Posthuman Figurations in Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl and Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods

Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl and Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods are two dystopian novels that ponder the relationship between body and self in the context of technological societies. They interrogate the ways in which technology, in the form of genetic experimentation and robotics, affects identity, reinforcing gender difference but also proposing appealing interpretations of interbreeding, same-sex relationships, and cyborg politics.

Dystopian future visions in Afrikaans novels published after 1999: A relationship between past and future

Viljoen identifies an engagement with history and “dystopic views” as separate trends in recent Afrikaans literature. In investigating characteristics of recent Afrikaans dystopian futurist novels it becomes apparent that the past also plays an important role in the visions of the future that is created. The past is an important premise in dystopian literature in general. It can be linked to the protagonist’s search for identity and meaning in the dystopian space. This article explores the relationship between the past and future in Afrikaans dystopian futurist novels published after 1999. Specific reference is made to the following dystopian novels by established Afrikaans writers: Oemkontoe van die nasie (2001) by P. J. Haasbroek, Raka die roman (2005) by Koos Kombuis and Horrelpoot (2006) by Eben Venter. The self-published dystopian novels Die Nege kerse van Magriet (2006) by Barend P. J. Erasmus and Beslissing in die Karoo (2011) by Sebastiaan Biehl, which lie outside the mainstream of Afrikaans literature, are also discussed. These novels by Erasmus and Biehl are written from an extreme right-wing perspective and differ from the more mainstream novels in their portrayal of a future South Africa. In this paper I explore the role of references to South African history in the construction of the future in the Afrikaans dystopian novels published after 1999. I discuss how the Afrikaner characters use the past in their search for identity in a postcolonial and post-apartheid context.

Good Readers and Good Liberals

This article offers an interpretation of Vladimir Nabokov’s unique contribution to political theory as seen primarily through the lens of his novel Invitation to a Beheading. Although most frequently interpreted as an indictment of totalitarianism, the novel depicts a form of cruelty practiced not only by totalitarians, but also by the rulers and citizens of milder political orders, including liberalism. The novel suggests that such cruelty is more insidious than that familiar to readers of dystopian novels precisely because of its universality. This article demonstrates that Nabokov’s contribution to liberalism may be found in the surprising coherence between his aesthetic principles and his art, both of which critique the imposition of “general ideas” on either persons or books. What emerges is a picture of aesthetic liberalism in which Nabokov’s model for the ideal liberal citizen is neither the sensitive artist nor the apolitical aesthete, but rather the careful reader.

Da centralidade política à centralidade do corpo transumano: movimentos da terceira virada distópica na literatura

Much has been discussed the political character of dystopian novels of the so-called second turn (from the end of the 19th century to the 1950s), which are seen especially as forms of strong critique to totalitarian political regimes. However, a new trend of dystopian novels, over the past 30 years, have discussed the impact of the desire created by late Capitalism over the transfiguration of the body, which has been central to the construction of post-human and transhuman ideas. This paper aims at discussing the changes found in dystopian literatures in English throughout the 20th century in order to propose a third dystopian turn in literature, from the writings of Fredric Jameson about science fiction and utopia, in the last 30 years, centering on the multiple transfigurations of the body created from the imposition of desire by late Capitalism and its impact on the post-human and transhuman modes of thought. To do so, a number of examples from novels belonging to such a trend are briefly discussed in order to create a critical panorama to support the proposal.

I sing the body dystopic: Utopia and posthuman corporeality in P.D. James’s The Children of Men

The resurgence of novels dealing with dystopian cosmogonies since the 1990s may reveal a new trend in Utopian Studies. If classical dystopia was defined by the imposition of collective political and social structures upon the individual and out of which there was no escape (as constructed, mainly, by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four), these contemporary dystopian novels critically construct posthuman societies where the focus is on the development of the dystopian body, which questions and reinvents the very definitions of humanity. This article aims at examining the effects of posthuman critique upon the construction of the dystopian body in P.D. James's novel The Children of Men.