FROM DAYDREAM TO NIGHTMARE: UTOPIAN FICTION IN THE LATE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES

Utopian fiction has historically been characterized by its concern with sociopolitical issues, and the genre at the turn of the century offers itself as a particular link in the tradition of radical social protest in American fiction. This linkage becomes clear once problems of definition and literary classification are delineated. After the genre is specified by its literary conventions, the major shifts in attitude and content can be demonstrated. Through an examination of twelve utopian novels published in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and up to World War II in this century, this study notes the major literary and political changes in the genre. World War I is found to be a dividing line between pre-war socialist eutopias and post-war anti-socialist dystopias.; Six pre-war eutopias are analyzed for literary convention and sociopolitical thought: Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Ignatius Donnelly's Caesar's Column, William Dean Howells' A Traveler from Altruria, H. G. Wells' When the Sleeper Wakes, and Jack London's The Iron Heel. All are found to be optimistic statements of one variety or another of nineteenth-century socialist thinking on social reconstruction.; World War I and the Russian Revolution are seen as an historical breaking point in the genre. Specifically, Charlotte Gilman's Herland is taken as characteristic of this break between eutopia and dystopia.; Five novels published after the war are taken as examples of the pessimistic shift in the genre: Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, Ayn Rand's Anthem, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, B. F. Skinner's Walden Two, and George Orwell's 1984. All are found to be a rejection of the communal idealism of the pre-war novels. All are found to be dark expressions of post-war individualism.