Utopian Literature and Science: From the Scientific Revolution to Brave New World and Beyond

by Patrick Parrinder

Overview

Scientific progress is usually seen as a precondition of modern utopias, but science and utopia are frequently at odds. Ranging from Galileo's observations with the telescope to current ideas of the post-human and the human-animal boundary, this study brings a fresh perspective to the paradoxes of utopian thinking since Plato.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781137456779
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	07/26/2015
Edition description:	1st ed. 2015
Pages:	222
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

Patrick Parrinder is a leading authority on H.G Wells and his book Shadows of the Future won the 1996 University of California Eaton Award. He is author of Nation and Novel (2006) and General Editor of the ongoing 12-volume Oxford History of the Novel in English. A Fellow of the English Association, he is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Reading.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
PART I: SCIENCES OF OBSERVATION AND INTERVENTION
2. Beyond the Telescope: From Astronomy to (Dystopian) Fiction
3. A Sylph under the Microscope: Science and Romance
4. Satanism and Genetics: Haldane's Daedalus and Its Begetters
PART II: THE HUMAN ANIMAL
5. Eugenics, Utopia, Eudemonics: Bellamy, Galton and Morris
6. Strains of the Non-Human: The Coming Race, A Crystal Age, Erewhon
7. Gorilla Warfare: Darwin, Freud, and the Stone Age Romance
8. From Human to Animal: Wells and Kafka
PART III: MODERN UTOPIAS AND POST-HUMAN WORLDS
9. War is Peace: Conscription and Mobilisation in the Modern Utopia
10. Towards the Singularity?—apek's R.U.R. and its Times
11. Olaf Stapledon and the Shape of Things to Come
12. The Expulsion of the Poets
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

This book presents an always absorbing clutch of essays, full of illumination and interesting sidelights on the utopian tradition, from which every reader will learn something new.” (Roger Luckhurst, English Literature in Transition, Vol. 60 (3), 2017)

“From Martians and moon-men to utopian inhabitants of a variety of species, Patrick Parrinder’s monograph is rich in the early history of speculative writing. The book is particularly notable for showing the centrality of science fictional utopian speculation to the mainstream of Western imagination from Kepler, Bruno and Galileo through to the mid-twentieth century. … In reframing the historical relationship between utopian thinking and science, Parrinder also offers important challenges to the scholarly community of utopian studies.” (Adam Sk, Review of English Studies, Vol. 67 (281), September, 2016)

From the Publisher