Utopian and Dystopian Fiction
The utopia and its offshoot, the dystopia, are genres of literature that explore social and political structures. Utopian fiction is the creation of an ideal world, or utopia, as the setting for a novel. Dystopian fiction is the opposite: creation of a nightmare world, or dystopia. Many novels combine both, often as a metaphor for the different directions humanity can take in its choices, ending up with one of two possible futures.
Works
- Utopia / Thomas More [1515]
- The City of the Sun / Tommaso Campanella [1623]
- The New Atlantis / Francis Bacon [1627]
- The Commonwealth of Oceana / Harrington, James [1656]
- The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World / Margaret Cavendish [1668]
- Gulliver's travels into several remote nations of the world / Jonathan Swift [1726]
- Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia [1759]
- A Description of Millenium Hall and the Country Adjacent / Sarah Scott [1762]
- Three Hundred Years Hence / Mary Griffith [1836]
- The Blithedale Romance / Nathaniel Hawthorne [1852]
- Man's Rights; or, How would you like it? / Annie Denton Cridge [1870]
- The Coming Race / Edward Bulwer-Lytton [1871]
- Erewhon ; or, Over the Range / Samuel Butler [1872]
- Mizora : A Prophecy. A mss. found among the private papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch; being a true and faithful account of her journey to the interior of the Earth, with a careful description of the country and its inhabitants, their customs, manners and government. / Mary E. Bradley Lane [1880]
- The Fixed Period / Anthony Trollope [1882]
- After London ; or Wild England / Richard Jefferies [1885]
- Looking Backward. 2000 to 1887 / Edward Bellamy [1887]
- A Crystal Age / William Henry Hudson [1887]
- A Week in the Future / Catherine Helen Spence [1888]
- A Dream of John Ball / William Morris [1888]
- New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future / Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett [1889]
- News from Nowhere / William Morris [1890]
- Unveiling a Parallel / Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant [1893]
- 2894, or The Fossil Man (A Midwinter Night's Dream) / Walter Browne [1894]
- The Time Machine / H. G. Wells [1896]
- When the Sleeper Wakes / H. G. Wells [1898]
- The Iron Heel / Jack London [1907]
- Herland / Charlotte Perkins Gilman [1915]
- The Heads of Cerberus / Francis Stevens [1919]
- We / Yevgeny Zamyatin [1921]
- Men Like Gods / H. G. Wells [1923]
- The Shape of Things to Come / H. G. Wells [1933]
- Lost Horizon / James Hilton [1933]
- Animal Farm / George Orwell [1945]
- Nineteen eighty-four / George Orwell [1949]
