Modern Utopian Fictions from H. G. Wells to Iris Murdoch by Peter Edgerly Firchow

by Peter Edgerly Firchow

While tracing the development of fiction in the writing of modern utopias, the author seeks to demonstrate in specific ways how those utopias have become increasingly literary. After an introductory discussion of how we understand-and how we should understand-modern utopian fictions, the book provides several examples of the ways in which those understandings affect our appreciation of utopian fiction. There are chapters on H. G. Wells's Time Machine; Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara; Aldous Huxley's Brave New World; George Orwell's Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four; William Golding's Lord of the Flies; and Iris Murdoch's The Bell.

Paperback

First published March 21, 2007

About the author

Peter Edgerly Firchow (1937–2008) was an American literary scholar and educator. He wrote extensively on the relationship between British and German literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and he was a leading scholar of the British writer Aldous Huxley. He served as a faculty member in the University of Minnesota English Department from 1967 to 2008 and as director of the university's Comparative Literature program from 1972 to 1978.