Modern Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought: Narratives of World Politics

ISBN-13: 9780367584443 / Angielski / Miękka / 2020 / 230 str.

Adam Stock

Opis

Stock evaluates modern dystopian fiction as a historically responsive mode of political literature. The volume addresses the development of the narrative methods and generic conventions of dystopian fiction as a mode of socio-political critique across the first half of the twentieth century.

Spis treści

Introduction  Part I   1. "Troubles began quietly": tensions of emergence in E. M. Forster’s "The Machine Stops"  2. "Libraries Full of Kants": Heretics, history and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We  3. Experiments, with sex and drugs: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World  Part II  4. "It has happened to Europe before but never to me": allegory and English exceptionalism in 1930s dystopias  5. Nazism, myth and the pastoral in Katherine Burdekin’s dystopian fiction  6. Dystopia at its limits: World War II and history  Part III  7. Bodies and nobodies: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four  8. "Life in all its forms is strife": the Cold War nuclear threat and John Wyndham’s pessimistic liberal utopianism  Conclusion

O autorze

Adam Stock is a Lecturer in English Literature at York St John University, where his research is concerned with narrative and political thought. He uses interdisciplinary methods to explore how narrative and form can be mobilised to make political arguments; using this lens, his primary research interests are in Utopian Studies and Science Fiction. He also works on modernisms, particularly considering temporalities, provinciality and ruination. Some of his previous work has been funded by the AHRC (as Co-Investigator on the early career exploratory award Reconfiguring Ruins) and by the Leverhulme Trust (as Network Facilitator on the Imaginaries of the Future project). He has published articles and chapters on dystopian narratology and on writers including John Wyndham and George Orwell. He serves as Hon. Treasurer of the Utopian Studies Society (Europe).