Literary Contextual Information Flashcards
Dystopian Novel Pre - ‘Nineteen Eighty - Four’ (1949)
- Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift (1726).
- The Last Man, Mary Shelley (1826).
- The Time Machine, HG Wells (1895).
- The War of the Worlds, HG Wells (1898).
- The Iron Heel, Jack London (1908).
- We, Yevgeny Zamyatin (1914)
- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (1932).
- Animal Farm, George Orwell (1945).
Dystopian Novel Post - ‘Nineteen Eighty - Four’ (1949) AND Pre - ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ (1985)
- The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham (1951)
- Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury (1953).
- A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess (1962).
- The Drowned World, JG, Ballard (1962).
- Memoirs of a Survivor, Doris Lessing (1974).
- The Long Walk, Stephen King (1979).
Dystopian Novel Post - ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ (1985)
- The Children of Men, PD James (1992)
- Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood (2003)
- Never Let Me Go, Kazou Ishiguro (2005)
- The Road, Cormac McCarthy (2006)
‘Utopia’
The term was originally coined in 1516 by Sir Thomas Moore from the Greek ‘ou-topos’ = ‘no-place’.
Gulliver’s Travels
Dystopian literature is widely considered to have originated in 1726 with Jonathan Swift’s publication.
In the most famous sequence of the novel, Gulliver travels to the land of the Houyhnhnms, a race of talking horses. In the world, the Houyhnhnms rule over the Yahoos, a degenerate race physically similar to our own. By depicting the Yahoos so similarly to human beings, Swift brings into question the values and morality of the human race.
Although this was the first major dystopian text, it was not until the late 19th century that this genre increased in volume & popularity.
Postmodernism
Follows on from the modernist movement of the early 20th century, in which writers attempted to challenge the previously accepted structural conventions of literature. Post-modernism is useful when looking at dystopia because writers of this genre, often present, chaotic, disordered words that is reflected in the use of language, form, and structure. Some of the key features of postmodernism are:
- METAFICTION = An authors exploration within a text of how language in the process of writing creates meaning, e.g. when a fictional narrator repeatedly reflects on their own choice of words/details/etc…
- INTERTEXTUALITY = allusions to other literary text = post-modernists believe there is no logical progression to the history of literature, and that all literature overlaps contextually & thematically
- INTERCHANGING TIMEFRAMES = rapid transition from one time frame to another = supports postmodernist argument against form
The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard
SUMMARY:
“Global warming has melted the ice caps and primordial jungles have overrun a tropical London. Biologist Dr. Robert Kearns and his team of scientists confront a cityscape in which nature is on the rampage and giant lizards, dragonflies, and insects compete for domination.”
NOTES:
• Plot centres around a male protagonist - a biologist who is part of a team researching the ongoing climate changes
• Most of the world is largely uninhabitable
• The main protagonist becomes more and more inward-looking
• The focus of the story is narrow and concentrates on the protagonist and two other scientists and their increasingly dream-like existence
• They slowly lose themselves in their landscape
• A leader of a group of survivors is introduced, who is a dominating and controlling character
• The novel explores themes of humans versus nature, and surrealism and escapism
• The story often blurs the boundaries between reality and dreams
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
SUMMARY:
In a technologically-advanced future humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetised to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order. The novel examines a futuristic society, called the World State, which centres around science and efficiency - emotions and individuality are conditioned out of children at a young age.
NOTES:
- Good example of the idea of nature vs technology - “the air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters”.
BRAVE NEW WORLD & THT:
• The novel warns of the dangers of giving the state control over new and powerful technologies
• It features rigid control of reproduction through technological and medical intervention
• Individual identity is stripped and humans are categorised at embryo stage into one of five castes
• The State works to remove strong emotions, desires and human relationships from society
• The protagonist is male and in the end he succumbs to the World State ideology and kills himself
• It has more elements of science fiction than The Handmaid’s Tale
• The novel was a key influence on Orwell
• However, in BNW, people are controlled by inflicting pleasure, whereas in 1984 people are controlled by inflicting pain
The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
“A brilliant scientist constructs a machine which propels him to the year AD 802,701 where he finds himself on an idyllic Earth inhabited by the small, incredibly beautiful Eloi. Yet all is not as it seems, and beneath the earth a terrifying, cannibal race are lying in wait.”
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
SUMMARY:
“Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.”
NOTES:
• The novel is set after a biological apocalypse in which the borders of Mexico and Canada are sealed off
• The main protagonist is a pregnant, Native American woman
• The story consists of her reflections as she waits to give birth
• Human evolution has reversed, so the species has begun to biologically regress to an infertile state
• The US government and radical religious groups try to take control of human reproduction
• The novel highlights the fragility of human rights and political institutions
- the countryside as an escape from totalitarianism / control
- influenced by atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 = apocalyptic ending
- absorbed in tv screens “parlor walls” - lack of thinking = like drugs to keep them satisfied = They symbolize the shallow, superficial entertainment that distracts citizens from critical thinking and meaningful connections.
- books banned because everyone was offended about different things
- mechanical hound / attack machine
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
“A bleak vision of a post-apocalyptic America: a land where no hope remains. A man and his son walk alone towards the coast, and this is the moving story of their journey.”
The Parable of the Sower, Octavia E. Butler
“The time is 2025. The place is California, where small walled communities must protect themselves from hordes of desperate scavengers and roaming bands of people addicted to a drug that activates an orgasmic desire to burn, rape, and murder.”
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
“In Burgess’s nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends’ social pathology.”
Pays close attention to the nature of VIOLENCE and the motivation behind it = believed it result of human nature and any attempts to change the way we think is immoral!
The Children of Men, P.D. James
SUMMARY:
“The human race has become infertile, and the last generation to be born is now adult. Civilisation itself is crumbling as suicide and despair become commonplace, but a band of unlikely revolutionaries may hold the key to survival for the human race.”
NOTES:
• The novel is set in 2021, years after the onset of a mass infertility epidemic
• Science has to discover a cure otherwise the human race will go extinct
• The novel switches between first and third person narration - some chapters written from the point of view of a male protagonist, and others from an omniscient narrator
• There is a resistance group active in trying to get the government to abolish the practice of group euthanasia, coercive semen testing and gynaecological exams
• The government is run as a dictatorship with armed forces ensuring control = the novel shows fear and paranoia of the state
The Memoirs of a Survivor, Doris Lessing
SUMMARY:
This was the sixth of many novels Lessing published, some initially under a pseudonym. In 2007 at the age of 88 she received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Memoirs of a Survivor has been classed as ‘feminist science fiction’; Lessing suggested that it is deeply personal, even ‘an attempt at autobiography’.
