Changing world projections : a study on society's transformation of the genre of Utopia

Abstract

The Utopia and Anti-Utopia have each been prevalent at certain times in literary history. This dissertation aims to present the reasons for the success of either form at their time of flourishing and to discover whether there is place for the genre in postmodern society. Chapter One attempts to illustrate the way society has influenced the genre of Utopia since its conception by presenting a portrait of the genre in its prime. Beginning with Thomas More's Utopia, which served as the model upon which many of early Utopian works were based, the chapter follows the genre's development over four centuries, before it mutated into the Anti-Utopia. This particular transformation was the most notable in the genre and Chapter Two seeks to present the societal changes which ultimately led to the rise of the Anti-Utopian novel. As two of the greatest Anti-Utopian works produced, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1931) and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four(1949) will serve to illustrate the concerns of the Anti-Utopiast in their effective treatment of two central Anti-Utopian themes; technological progress and totalitarianism, respectively. Following Anti-Utopia's domination of the first half of the twentieth century the genre developed into a subgenre of Science Fiction. Hence, Chapter Three will conclude the study with an investigation of the evolution of the form in the postmodern age and where it stands in the twenty-first century. Texts including Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) will facilitate this examination.