(DOWNLOAD) "National Pasts and Imperial Futures: Temporality, Economics, And Empire in William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890) and Julius Vogel's Anno Domini 2000 (1889) (Critical Essay)" by Utopian Studies ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: National Pasts and Imperial Futures: Temporality, Economics, And Empire in William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890) and Julius Vogel's Anno Domini 2000 (1889) (Critical Essay)
- Author : Utopian Studies
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 259 KB
Description
I The massive outpouring of utopian fiction during the late Victorian period has met with an uneven response from literary critics. (1) Few of those texts have been deemed to meet a literary standard that would justify sustained attention and, compounding this process of exclusion, the utopian genre itself has remained peripheral to mainstream accounts of Victorian literary history. (2) The contrasting fates of two virtually contemporaneous Victorian utopian novels, Anno Domini 2000; or, Woman's Destiny (1889) and News from Nowhere, or, An Epoch of Rest: Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance (1890), provides one fascinating example of this uneven response. The latter, written by prominent artist and socialist William Morris, is one of the most famous of Victorian utopias and--to give only some examples--has been recently cited in critical discussions ranging from Victorian socialist feminism (Boos and Boos), to a "freshly complicated view of the relationship between Victorian and Modernist aesthetics" (Buzard 446), to nineteenth-century theories of reading (Arata). The former novel, by former Premier of New Zealand Sir Julius Vogel, has by contrast sunk virtually without a trace because it has been deemed to lack literary or aesthetic merit. One survey of New Zealand literature labels it "so crude in conception and in workmanship as to be on the level of a cheap pulp-magazine story" (Reid 45), and Roger Robinson describes it as "that unenviable kind of book that many have heard of [in New Zealand] but almost no one has read" (11). Neglected by Victorianists, most recent attention paid to Anno Domini 2000 has treated it as a work of science fiction and focused on its prediction of the future: Peter Brigg arranges Vogel's scientific, cultural and political predictions on a "spectrum of prediction" ranging from "closer to what has emerged" to "verg[ing] on the absurd" (357) while Robinson's edition of the novel bears the legend "THE UTOPIAN NOVEL THAT GOT THE FUTURE RIGHT." (3)