Oneiric architecture: A study in the ideology of modern utopian fiction

In this study I explore the ideological implications of the literary form of utopian fiction, and suggest connections between ideology and literary form in general. In the first chapter I define a fictional utopia as a "displaced critique" of society, then discuss various literary and social theories of utopias, each theory being as ideologically loaded as the utopias it treats. In chapter two I focus on Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and William Morris's News from Nowhere to determine how the relationship between the author and the reader sets the ideological tone of the utopian worlds depicted. In chapter three I discuss the interplay of genre conventions in Jack London's The Iron Heel, in particular the interaction between the potentially constraining quality of the historical novel and the potentially liberating quality of the romance. Chapter four on H. G. Wells's many utopias points to the repressive nature of Wells's increasingly monological or single-voiced style. In chapter five I argue that George Orwell's attitude towards and use of language, along with his notion of the autonomous individual, contribute to the ideological impasse embodied in Nineteen Eighty-Four. And in the final chapter I discuss the "feminization" of utopia, by which I mean the emphasis on the realm of the personal rather than the realm of the political, in novels by Ursula LeGuin, Doris Lessing, and Margaret Atwood.