Showing papers on "Dystopia published in 1975"
TL;DR: Bellamy's Looting Backward as discussed by the authors is remembered as one of the few American novels with indisputable effect upon the practical world of events, and scholars have frequently described the growth of the Nationalist Clubs, Bellamy's involvement in the larger Populist movement, and the public controversy aroused by his book and prolonged by the flood of Utopian and dystopian imitations it excited.
Abstract: A LONG WITH Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Jungle, Edward LI. Bellamy's Looting Backward is remembered as one of the few American novels with indisputable effect upon the practical world of events. Scholars have frequently described the growth of the Nationalist Clubs, Bellamy's involvement in the larger Populist movement, and the public controversy aroused by his book and prolonged by the flood of Utopian and dystopian imitations it excited. Indeed the polemical reputation of Looting Backward has apparently caused readers to neglect the more elemental fact that it is a novel. That is, Bellamy's contemporaries and most later critics have regarded the book as a blueprint for reform, extracting usable ideas and casually dismissing the narrative, characters, setting, and language as irrelevant decoration.' Such an attitude, of course, is justified. At his best, Bellamy was barely a journeyman storyteller, and at his worst, he could perpetrate the unremitting didacticism of Equality.2 Paradoxically, however, critical preoccupation with Bellamy's overt philosophy tends to distort the very ideas it seeks to illuminate. More specifically, abstracting Bellamy's "theory" from the narrative often blinds critics to the regressiveness of Bellamy's thought. While plans to centralize production and distribution or to control individualistic excess by means
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