Dystopia

About: Dystopia is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2146 publications have been published within this topic receiving 15163 citations. The topic is also known as: cacotopia.

Pregnancy as protest in interwar British women's writing: an antecedent alternative to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

Abstract: Accounts that take Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) as representative of interwar reproductive dystopia fail to recognise that the novel expresses both an interest and an anxiety about the possibility of new reproductive technologies to transform sex, gender, and the family that were widely shared by writers in different genres and perhaps expressed best by those likely to be most affected: women. This article explores three earlier works-Charlotte Haldane's Man's World (1926), Vera Brittain's Halcyon, or the Future of Monogamy (1929), and Naomi Mitchison's Comments on Birth Control (1930)-in which pregnancy, instead of figuring as illness or debility, becomes a form of resistance to the status quo. These works engage with biomedicine, however, rather than abjuring it. Through a reading of these works, this article argues that the intersection of medical humanities and science fiction (SF) can enrich both: medical humanities can push SF to go beyond the canon, and SF can challenge any characterisation of literature in the medical humanities as purely fantastical by demonstrating how it responds to the hopes and anxieties of a particular time.

Atwood’s Reinventions: So Many Atwoods

Abstract: In The Malahat Review (1977), Canadian critic Robert Fulford described Margaret Atwood as “endlessly Protean,” predicting “There are many more Atwoods to come.” Now at eighty, over forty years later, Atwood is an international literary celebrity with more than fifty books to her credit and translated into more than forty languages. This essay focuses on the later Atwood and her apparent reinvention since 2000, where we have seen a marked shift away from realistic fiction towards popular fiction genres, especially dystopias and graphic novels. Atwood has also become increasingly engaged with digital technology as creative writer and cultural critic. As this reading of her post-2000 fiction through her extensive back catalogue across five decades will show, these developments represent a new synthesis of her perennial social, ethical and environmental concerns, refigured through new narrative possibilities as she reaches out to an ever-widening readership, astutely recognising “the need for literary culture to keep up with the times.”

Feminist Dystopian Consciousness in Margaret Atwood's the Handmaid's Tale

Abstract: Margaret Atwood's famous dystopian novel, The Handmaid's tale, was written in 1985 during the emergence of the opposition to the feminist movement. The struggle that occurred between both parties of the women's rights issue excited Atwood, as an active advocate of this movement, to write this novel to alert women of what the female gender may mislay if the feminist movement were defeated. She has attempted to warn her readers through the life of Offred; a handmaid who expresses her dystopian feminist consciousness by taking the role of a storyteller and being the narrator and controller of her own story. The core aim of this article would be to focus on how Offred combines her feminist consciousness, memories, and language as liberty instruments to detect her way towards freedom? How can this consciousness be the seed which grows into the sapling of self-expression she cultivates and nourishes through the novel?