TY - BOOK ID - 145821859 TI - Modern utopian fictions from H. G. Wells to Iris Murdoch PY - 2007 PB - Washington : Catholic University of America Press, DB - UniCat KW - Utopies KW - Dystopies KW - Littérature anglaise KW - Dans la littérature KW - 20e siècle KW - Histoire et critique UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:145821859 AB - Criticism on utopian subjects has generally neglected the literary or fictional dimension of utopia. The reason for such neglect may be that earlier utopian fictions tended to be written by what one would nowadays call social 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 social sciences rather than by critics trained in literature. To an appreciable degree this still tends to be the case today. 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's 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. ER -