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Perfect Worlds: Utopian Fiction in China and the West
Author(s): Douwe Fokkema (Author)
- Publisher: Routledge
- Publication Date: August 12, 2011
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 448 pages
- ISBN-10: 9089643508
- ISBN-13: 9789089643506
Book Description
Perfect Worlds offers an extensive historical analysis of utopian narratives in the Chinese and Euro-American traditions. This fine comparative study discusses also the rise of dystopian writing - a negative expression of the utopian impulse - in Europe and America (including the classic works by Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell, Bradbury, Atwood) as well as in China (Lao She, Wang Shuo and others).The author observes that the utopian imagination thrives in a context of secularisation. It appears that in the twentieth century the distinction between utopia and dystopia became blurred as a result of the increasing autonomy of the reader. Fokkema argues that in modern times utopianism in China and in the West developed in opposite directions, each appropriating attitudes from the other culture which were originally considered alien.
From the Back Cover
Perfect Worlds offers an extensive historical analysis of utopian narratives in the Chinese and Euro-American traditions. This comparative study discusses, among other things, More’s criticism of Plato, the European orientalist search for utopia in China, Wells’s Modern Utopia and his talk with Stalin, Chinese writers constructing their Confucianist utopia, traces of Daoism in Mao Zedong’s utopianism and politics and finally the rise of dystopian writing – a negative expression of the utopian impulse – in Europe and America as well as in China.
About the Author
Douwe Fokkema is Professor emeritus of Comparative Literature, Utrecht University, the Netherlands.
