| How did Golden Age British and American utopian creators imagine print culture in their idealized worlds? This study undertakes a detailed survey of the print cultures of five British and American literary utopias from the period 1887 to 1905 (including W.H. Hudson's A Crystal Age, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, William Morris's News from Nowhere, William Dean Howells's Altrurian series, and H.G. Wells's A Modern Utopia) to identify ideals, themes, commonalities, and differences in key aspects of print culture: reading, readers, and reception; authors, authorship, and authority: print politics, production, and distribution; and print aesthetics and literature. Ultimately, these late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century utopian works provide us not only with interesting idealized images of print and its place in the "good life," they also provide passionate and detailed critiques of the capitalistic, mechanized, mass-market contemporary print culture surrounding their creators. Hudson, Bellamy, Howells, Morris, and Wells were reacting to sweeping changes in late-century print culture, and all five offered a utopian vision of what print culture might be—an imaginary, pre-industrial literary paradise, free from the filth, competition, speed, and aggressiveness that, they believed, aesthetically and morally blighted real life print culture. Utopia served as a fictional space where moral and social anxieties about late-century Anglo-American print culture more broadly could be peacefully resolved. |
