Online ISBN:
9780191738517
Print ISBN:
9780199606597
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
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Simon J. James
Simon J. James
Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature, Department of English Studies, Durham University
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Oxford Academic
Published:
2 February 2012
Online ISBN:
9780191738517
Print ISBN:
9780199606597
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
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James, Simon J., Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity and the End of Culture (
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Abstract
H. G. Wells is one of the most widely read writers of the twentieth century, but until now the aesthetics of his work have not been investigated in detail. Maps of Utopia tells the story of Wells’s writing career over six decades, during which he produced popular science, educational theory, history, politics, prophecy, and utopia as well as realist, experimental, and science fiction. This book asks what Wells thought literature was, and what he thought it was for. H. G. Wells formulated a literary aesthetics based on scientific principles, designed to improve the world both in the present and for future generations. Unlike Henry James, with whom he famously argued, Wells was not content simply to let literary art be, for its own sake: he wanted to make art instrumental in improving the lives of its readers, by bringing about the founding the World State that he predicted was man’s only alternative to self‐destruction. Such aproject differed radically from the aims of Wells’s late‐Victorian and his Modernist contemporaries—with consequences for the nature both of Wells’s writing and for his subsequent critical reception. Maps of Utopia begins with the late‐Victorian debate about the uses of effect of reading, especially reading fiction, that followed the mass literacy of the 1870–1 Education Acts. It considers Wells’s best‐known scientific romances, such as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, and important social novels such as Tono‐Bungay. It also examines less well‐known texts such as The Sea Lady, Boon, and Wells’s journalism and political writings. This study closes with his cinematic collaboration The Shape of Things to Come, and The Outline of History, Wells’s best‐selling book inhis own lifetime.
Keywords: aesthetics, culture, novel, science fiction, H. G. Wells, Victorian literature, modernity, Utopia, war, realism
Subject
Literary Studies (20th Century onwards) Literary Studies (19th Century) Literary Studies (American) Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
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