18 books like Utopian fantasy
Journey through Utopia
In this title, originally published in 1950, the author has set out to give a description and a critical assessment of the most important (not necessarily the most famous) Utopian writings since Plato first gave, in his Republic, a literary form to the dreams of a Golden Age and of ideal societies which had doubtless been haunting man since the beginning of the conscious discussion of social…
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Partial visions
What would a good world for women look like? How would we get there from where we are and how would we have to change ourselves in the process? This book examines a critical moment in recent American and western European history when the utopian dimension of political movements was particularly generative and feminism was at their core. The imaginative literature that emerged out of American,…
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The fool of quality
First published in 1906, The Fool of Quality; a picaresque and sentimental novel by the Irish writer Henry Brooke, is the only one of his works which has enjoyed any great reputation. The somewhat shapeless plot is an account of the doings of young Harry Clinton, who, rejected by his decadent and aristocratic father, is educated on enlightened principles by his philanthropic uncle. Thus equipped…
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Ecotopia
Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston is a utopian novel by Ernest Callenbach, published in 1975. The society described in the book is one of the first ecological utopias and was influential on the counterculture and the green movement in the 1970s and thereafter. The author himself claimed that the society he depicted in the book is not a true utopia (in the sense of a perfect…
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Class in Turn-Of-the-Century Novels of Gissing, James, Hardy and Wells
"This book argues that, due to political and ideological shifts in the last decades of the nineteenth century-a time when the class system in England was in a state of flux-a new depiction of social class was possible in the English novel. Late-century writers such as Gissing, James, Hardy and Wells question the middle-class Victorian views of class that had dominated the novel for decades. By…
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Tragedy
Tarentum (Modern Day Taranto) believed to depict scenes from Greek tragedy: at left Electra and Orestes, who murder their mother Clytemnestra in order to avenge their father, Agamemnon; Clytemnestra was motivated by Agamemnon taking the princess Cassandra as concubine, and by Agamemnon sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia.At right is Oedipus and Antigone; Oedipus was abandoned as an infant and…
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Works of Patrick Branwell Brontë
This volume, first published in 1999, contains all of Patrick Branwell Brontë’s known writings, excluding his letters, from 1837 to 1848. This title primarily covers and depicts the end of the Angrian conflict, Branwell’s abandonment of the Angrian saga, and his attempts to establish himself as a published poet and a man of letters. All of the texts in this edition are based on Neufeldt’s own…
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Women musicians in Victorian fiction, 1860-1900
This title was first publushed in 2000. Phyllis Weliver investigates representations of female musicians in British novels from 1860 to 1900 with regard to changing gender roles, musical practices and scientific discourses. During this time women were portrayed in complex and nuanced ways as they played and sang in family drawing rooms. Women in the 19th century were judged on their manners,…
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Routledge Revivals
First published in 1953, this translation of part of the Arabian Nights by A. J. Arberry offers four famous stories in modern idiom: Aladdin, Judar, Aboukir and Abousir, and the Amorous Goldsmith. The introduction provides a brief analysis of earlier translations of the tales and explains their value as indicators of the society in which they were written.This work will be of interest to those…
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In the days of the comet
H. G. Wells, in his 1906 In the Days of the Comet uses the vapors of a comet to trigger a deep and lasting change in humanity's perspective on themselves and the world. In the build-up to a great war, poor student William Leadford struggles against the harsh conditions the lower-class live under. He also falls in love with a middle-class girl named Nettie. But when he discovers that Nettie has…
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Language of Natural Description in Eighteenth-Century Poetry
Originally published in 1949, this title was written in order to help establish a better understanding of the ‘stock diction’ of eighteenth-century English poetry, and, in particular, of the diction commonly used in the description of nature. The language characteristic of so much of the poetry of this period had been severely criticized for a long time. But in the twenty or thirty years prior to…
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Poetics of Arabic Autobiography
This book examines the poetics of autobiographical masterpieces written in Arabic by Leila Abouzeid, Hanan al-Shaykh, Samuel Shimon, Abd al-Rahman Munif, Salim Barakat, Mohamed Choukri and Hanna Abu Hanna. These literary works articulate the life story of each author in ways that undermine the expectation that the "self"—the "auto" of autobiography—would be the dominant narrative focus. Although…
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Stemming the torrent
"In this new study, Gesa Stedman mines the vein of emotion in Victorian writing to unearth new insights into the ways literature responded to the dramatic social and political changes then taking place." "Through an examination of the history of key Victorian emotion words, the major topics that dominate the discourses on emotions in this era, and the central fictional and non-fictional 'paradigm…
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Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth
Unfinished Tales is a collection of narratives ranging in time from the Elder Days of Middle-earth to the end of the War of the Ring, and provides those who have read The Lord of the Rings with a whole collection of background and new stories from the twentieth century’s most acclaimed popular author.
The book concentrates on the realm of Middle-earth and comprises such elements as Gandalf’s…
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Modern Retellings of Chivalric Texts
Published in 1999, the ten essays in this collection identify and examine reworkings of identifiable source texts from the medieval or Renaissance periods. The reasons for the modern adaptations depend variously on an individual author’s personal perspectives, the worldview of his or her society, and the individual’s place in it. The various chapters therefore address issues such as why a…
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William Makepeace Thackeray Library
First published in 1996, The William Makepeace Thackeray Library is a collection of works written by and about the novelist. William Makepeace Thackeray spent part of virtually every year of his writing life in Paris and he wrote continually on France and French culture. This volume contains a selection of Thackeray’s travel writing, the majority of which centres around his time spent in France,…
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Pastoral
Terry Gifford clarifies the different uses of pastoral, and traces the history of the genre from its classical origins in the poetic dialogues of supposed shepherds, to Elizabethan dramas such as The Winters Tale, through the pastoral poetry of Pope, Wordsworth and Clare, to the more recent rural novels and contemporary American nature writing. Beginning with constructions of Arcadia, the book…
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Practical criticism
Practical Criticism, as conceived by Richards, pays attention to very small units of language in short lyric poems in a way that leads directly to the New Critics' emphasis on 'the poem in itself', and their associated rejection of the analysis of any kind of historical or political context.
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