Dystopia and Class: The Strange Case of Dystopian Fiction

Patricia McManus

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceeding with ISSN or ISBNChapterpeer-review

Abstract

The genealogy of dystopian fiction is a deep one but there is a moment when such fiction takes its recognizably modern shape as the story of a future worse than the present. With one foot in the commercially successful fiction of popular speculation, and the other in specifically “literary” warnings about the withering of “civilized” sensibility, the dystopia begins its twentieth-century life as a Janus-faced sub-genre of the novel. This essay will historicize the articulation of class antagonisms in the type of dystopia scholars term the “classical dystopia.”
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationRoutledge Companion to Literature and Class
EditorsGloria Macmillan
Place of PublicationAbingdon
PublisherRoutledge
Chapter29
Number of pages13
Edition1
ISBN (Electronic)9781003008354
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Sept 2021

Publication series

NameRoutledge Handbooks
PublisherRoutledge

Keywords

  • Dystopia
  • Class
  • Politics
  • Language
  • Power
  • Narrative
  • form

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