Couverture / Jaquette

The first monograph devoted to the concept of dystopia: redefining the central concepts and chronology of the genre, and offering a theoretical overview and prehistory of the concept; an account of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes as dystopias; and a brief history of the literary dystopia from the early nineteenth century to the present.

Note biographique

Born in France, and educated in Canada and the UK, Gregory Claeys is Professor of the History of Political Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. A historian of British radicalism and socialism from 1750 to the present, he is the author of eight books and editor of some fifty volumes, mostly of primary sources. He has written studies of Robert Owen and Owenism, Thomas Paine, and John Stuart Mill, as well as of utopianism. He has been visiting professor at the Australian National University, Keio University, Tokyo, the University of Hanoi, and Peking University.

Table des matières

• Part One: The Theory and Pre-History of Dystopia


• 1: Rethinking the Political Dystopia: the Group and the Crowd


• 2: Monstrosity and the Origin of Dystopian Space


• Part Two: Totalitarianism and Dystopia


• 3: The Caveman's Century: The Development of Totalitarianism from Jacobinism to Stalinism


• 4: Totalitarianism from Hitler to Pol Pot


• Part Three: The Literary Revolt against Collectivism


• 5: Mechanism, Collectivism, and Humanity: The Origins of Dystopian Literature, 1810-1945


• 6: The Huxleyan Conundrum: Brave New World as Anti-Utopia


• 7: Vaporising the Soviet Myth: Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four


• 8: The Post-Totalitarian Dystopia, 1950-2015


• Conclusion: Dystopia in the 21st Century


• Bibliography


• Index

Détails