The opposite of a Utopia – a dystopia is a model or vision of a world in which lives go badly. In political thought writers have conjured up dystopias in order to warn their readers of the dangers of certain particular social or political developments, or placed dystopia into their overarching model as a kind of hypothetical realisation of some aspect of human nature. Three different dystopic visions are Hobbes’s state of nature, Orwell’s totalitarian picture in 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Each dystopic vision tells us something about the world in which we actually live, and provides us with warnings about our predicament: in this way, we can construct critical dystopias, just as we can construct critical utopias, such as Rousseau’s egalitarian participative democracy – as measuring sticks by which to evaluate our own societies.
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Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature What do literary dystopias reflect about the times? In Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase, contributors address this amorphous but pervasive genre, using diverse critical methodologies to examine how North America is conveyed or portrayed in a perceived age of crisis, accelerated uncertainty, and political volatility. Drawing from contemporary novels such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road , Neil Gaiman's American Gods , and the work of Margaret Atwood and William Gibson (to name a few), this book examines dystopian literature produced by North American authors between the signing of NAFTA (1994) and the tenth anniversary of 9/11 (2011). As the texts illustrate, awareness of and deep concern about perceived vulnerabilitiesâends of water, oil, food, capitalism, empires, stable climates, ways of life, non-human species, and entire human civilizationsâhave become central to public discourseover the same period. By asking questions such as "What are the distinctive qualities of post-NAFTA North American dystopian literature?" and "What does this literature reflect about the tensions and contradictions of the inchoate continental community of North America?" Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase serves to resituate dystopian writing within a particular geo-social setting and introduce a productive means to understand both North American dystopian writing and its relevant engagements with a restricted, mapped reality.
Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults From the jaded, wired teenagers of M.T. Anderson's Feed to the spirited young rebels of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy, the protagonists of Young Adult dystopias are introducing a new generation of readers to the pleasures and challenges of dystopian imaginings. As the dark universes of YA dystopias continue to flood the market,Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers offers a critical evaluation of the literary and political potentials of this widespread publishing phenomenon.
Dark Horizons : Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination A collection of essays on Anglo-American science fiction and film and the dystopian imagination superbly edited by Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, this volume sheds critical light on the propensity of many writers, filmmakers, and critics to depict dystopian views of the world during the dark times of the 1980s, 1990s, and the onset of the twenty-first century. Most of the essayists are leading scholars of utopian studies, and they cover a range of topics and works with perspicacity while carefully delineating notions of the utopian, eutopian, and dystopian.
Dystopia(n) Matters : On the Page, on Screen, on Stage The volume is divided into two parts, separated by an Intermezzo. The first part, Dystopia Matters, benefits from the contribution of reputed scholars of the field of Utopian Studies, who were asked to make a statement explaining why dystopia is important. The Intermezzo completes this part and offers the reader an informed discussion of the concepts of utopia, dystopia and anti-utopia whilst providing ground for the case studies presented in the second part, in the sections devoted to literature, film, and theatre. In one way or another, despite the variety of approaches, all contributors argue for the idea that, if dystopia has invaded most forms of contemporary discourse, its sibling, utopia, has not been eradicated from the scene. Furthermore, the studies show that the tension between the two concepts is instrumental to our cautious, conscious, and tentative construction of the future.
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.
Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction Responding to the increasingly powerful presence of dystopian literature for young adults, this volume focuses on novels featuring a female protagonist who contends with societal and governmental threats at the same time that she is navigating the treacherous waters of young adulthood. The contributors relate the liminal nature of the female protagonist to liminality as a unifying feature of dystopian literature, literature for and about young women, and cultural expectations of adolescent womanhood. Divided into three sections, the collection investigates cultural assumptions and expectations of adolescent women, considers the various means of resistance and rebellion made available to and explored by female protagonists, and examines how the adolescent female protagonist is situated with respect to the groups and environments that surround her. In a series of thought-provoking essays on a wide range of writers that includes Libba Bray, Scott Westerfeld, Tahereh Mafi, Veronica Roth, Marissa Meyer, Ally Condie, and Suzanne Collins, the collection makes a convincing case for how this rebellious figure interrogates the competing constructions of adolescent womanhood in late-twentieth- and early twenty-first-century culture.
Imagining Surveillance : Utopian and Dystopian Literature and Film Critically assesses how literary and cinematic utopias and dystopias have imagined and evaluated surveillance. Imagining Surveillance presents the first full length study of the depiction and assessment of surveillance in literature and film. Focusing on the utopian genre (which includespositive and negative worlds), this book offers an in depth account of the ways in which the most creative writers, filmmakers and thinkers have envisioned alternative worlds in which surveillance in various forms plays a key concern. Ranging from Thomas More's genre defining Utopia to Spike Jones'provocative film Her, Imagining Surveillance explores the long history of surveillance in creative texts well before and after George Orwell's iconic Nineteen Eighty Four. It fits that key novel into a five hundred year narrative that includes some of the most provocative and inventive accounts ofsurveillance as it is and as it might be in the future. The book explains the sustained use of these works by surveillance scholars, but goes much further and deeper in explicating their brilliant and challenging diversity. With chapters on surveillance studies, surveillance in utopias before Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four itself, and utopian texts postOrwell that deal with visibility, spaces, identity, technology and the shape of things to come, Imagining Surveillance sits firmly in the emerging cultural studies of surveillance. The first sustained account of the representation of surveillance in utopian and dystopian literature and film; chartssurveillance's historical development and creative responses to that development; provides a detailed critical account of the ways that surveillance studies has utilised utopias to formulate its ideas and offers new readings of literary texts and films from More's Utopia through George Orwell'sNineteen Eighty Four to Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam trilogy and films from Fritz Lang's Metropolis to Niel Blomkamp's Elysium.
Worlds Gone Awry : Essays on Dystopian Fiction Dystopian fiction captivates us by depicting future worlds at once eerily similar and shockingly foreign to our own. This collection of new essays presents some of the most recent scholarship on a genre whose popularity has surged dramatically since the 1990s. Contributors explore such novels as The Lord of the Flies, The Heart Goes Last, The Giver and The Strain Trilogy as social critique, revealing how they appeal to the same impulse as utopian fiction: the desire for an idealized yet illusory society in which evil is purged and justice prevails.
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