5/1/2023 0 Comments Utopia stories![]() Big Brother and the daily Two Minutes Hate set the tone for an all-pervasive self-censorship. George Orwell was influenced by We when he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a novel about Oceania, a state at perpetual war, its population controlled through propaganda. The 1921 novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin portrays a post-apocalyptic future in which society is entirely based on logic and modeled after mechanical systems. Samuel Butler's Erewhon can be seen as a dystopia because of the way sick people are punished as criminals while thieves are "cured" in hospitals, which the inhabitants of Erewhon see as natural and right, i.e., utopian (as mocked in Voltaire's Candide).ĭystopias usually extrapolate elements of contemporary society, and thus can be read as political warnings.Įschatological literature may portray dystopias. Dystopian literature serves to "provide fresh perspectives on problematic social and political practices that might otherwise be taken for granted or considered natural and inevitable". Most authors of dystopian fiction explore at least one reason why things are that way, often as an analogy for similar issues in the real world. See also: List of dystopian literature List of dystopian comics List of dystopian films and List of dystopian music, TV programs, and gamesĪ dystopia is a society characterized by a focus on that which is contrary to the author's ethos, such as mass poverty, public mistrust and suspicion, a police state or oppression. One example of the utopian genre's meaning and purpose is described in Fredric Jameson's Archeologies of the Future (2005), which addresses many utopian varieties defined by their program or impulse. This, like much of utopian literature, can be seen as satire Butler inverts illness and crime, with punishment for the former and treatment for the latter. Other examples include Samuel Johnson's The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759) and Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872), which uses an anagram of "nowhere" as its title. Later, Tommaso Campanella was influenced by Plato’s work and wrote The City of the Sun (1623), which describes a modern utopian society built on equality. The Greek root of the name "Hythloday" suggests an 'expert in nonsense'.Īn earlier example of a Utopian work from classical antiquity is Plato's The Republic, in which he outlines what he sees as the ideal society and its political system. The whimsical nature of the text can be confirmed by the narrator of Utopia's second book, Raphael Hythloday. As the title suggests, the work presents an ambiguous and ironic projection of the ideal state. More's book, written in Latin, sets out a vision of an ideal society. ![]() The word utopia resembles both the Greek words outopos ("no place"), and eutopos ("good place"). The word utopia was first used in direct context by Sir Thomas More in his 1516 work Utopia. See also: List of utopian literature and Category:Utopian fiction Some of these trends have created distinct subgenres such as ecotopian fiction, climate fiction, young adult dystopian novels, and feminist dystopian novels. This increase is partially associated with the rise in popularity of genre fiction, science fiction and young adult fiction more generally, but also larger scale social change that brought awareness of larger societal or global issues, such as technology, climate change, and growing human population. More than 400 utopian works in the English language were published prior to the year 1900, with more than a thousand others appearing during the 20th century. Both utopias and dystopias are commonly found in science fiction and other types of speculative fiction. Some novels combine both genres, often as a metaphor for the different directions humanity can take depending on its choices, ending up with one of two possible futures. Dystopian fiction offers the opposite: the portrayal of a setting that completely disagrees with the author's ethos. ![]() Utopian fiction portrays a setting that agrees with the author's ethos, having various attributes of another reality intended to appeal to readers. Utopian and dystopian fiction are genres of speculative fiction that explore social and political structures. Genres of literature that explore social and political structures
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