UTOPIAN FICTION: A GENRE UNTO ITSELF FEMALE UTOPIAS—A SUBGENRE OF SAME
Plato’s Republic 380
BC
Utopia Thomas More 1516
The City of the Sun Thomas Campanella 1602
New Atlantis Francis Bacon 1627
Gulliver’s Travels (satire) Jonathan Swift 1726
Candide (satire) Voltaire 1759
Erewhon Samuel Butler 1872
Herland Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1909-17 (1915)
We (Russian: Мы) Yevgeny Zamyatin 1921
The Trial Franz Kafka 1925
Brave New World Aldous Huxley 1932
*Woman on the Edge of Time Marge Piercy 1976
1984 George Orwell 1949
The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret
Atwood 1985
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Utopia – refers to Greek Outopia
(No Place) & Eutopia (good place)
Characteristics: Social thought
experiment based on a few simple changes. Lack of precise placement and
rigorous examination of the how (why not always sci-fi).
Herland—self-serialized.
Frankenstein—published anonymously.
Possible Subject of First/Last
Paper—
In Frankenstein and/or Herland, which assumptions about “human
nature” are questioned, which assumptions are left alone? Choose passages that
illustrate insight and blindness in the authors’ world-creating.
In F. and/or H., how do the author’s represent the action(s) of
parenting? What importance do they place on the different tasks/goals involved?
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Further reading:
For a non-Western perspective akin to Herland from roughly the same time, read "Sultana's Dream" by Roquia Hussain--a Bengali woman writing of a woman-controlled city state she arrived at in a dream.
A comparison of Herland and "The Sultana's Dream" would work for a paper subject as well.
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