Download or read book The Representation Of Women In Utopian And Dystopian Literature written by Katharina Kirchhoff and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 43 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bachelor Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,8, University of Leipzig, language: English, abstract: The purpose of this study is to analyse the representation of women in utopian and dystopian literature. The research question of this paper is: To what extent is the representation of women and their status in the fictional societies determined by gender relations in the context of the distribution of power? To explore this question the historical context in which s/he wrote the novel is also assumed to be important. The approach applied to this thesis is based on gender and literary studies. In order to analyse the representation of women, this thesis offers a coherent structure consisting of four important steps. Firstly, each novel will be introduced with a brief paragraph on the historical background. Secondly, the power relations of the society have to be observed. Thirdly, the resulting gender relations will be analysed. Finally, in the context of the prior three steps of this thesis, the representation of women will be observed. In addition, I will use traditional female stereotypes in literature as a criterion for the analysis of the representation of women. The novels chosen for this purpose are Herland, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1915, followed by the dystopia Brave New World, written by Aldous Huxley in 1932. The final novel will be the dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale, written by Margarete Atwood in 1985. The last section of this thesis will compare the results of the analyses and clarify in how far power and gender relations determine the representation of women in utopian and dystopian literature in the light of the historical context of the novel.
Download or read book Role of Women in Utopian and Dystopian Novels written by Jelena Vukadinovic and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2009-05 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, RWTH Aachen University, language: English, abstract: Being a great lover of mythological tales since childhood, I have early discovered that certain traits and patterns of behaviour were usually ascribed to certain gender roles. Yet even within the roles of the respective genders, considerable differences were to be found. Those who shared many characteristics tended to end in similar ways. Strong and capable Penthesilea ends dead on the battlefield of Troy and her corpse is raped by Achilles. Atalanta, who beats male heroes in great adventures is tricked into marriage against her will, by an offended goddess and a man who is not her equal. Helen's beauty has the power to launch thousand ships. Yet Helen herself is only a toy for men and gods. Penelope sits and weaves for twenty years waiting for her husband to return from a Trojan war while he is pursued and seduced by enchantresses. The more I read, in mythology and other fiction, the more often I discovered some endlessly repeating characteristics and patterns of behaviour of diverse roles. During my studies I became very interested in gender roles in Anglo-American literature, again particularly in those of female characters. Female roles in literature were always the more interesting to me when read from the background of the historical period in which they were created. Some of those fictional characters reflected the roles women were expected to fill at that particular age and geographical area. Others again were bad examples and warnings of what happens to women who do not fit into socially accepted roles. Once in a while a heroine would rise above the expected roles yet in the end she would return to the domestic area in which she was expected to be, or she would be destroyed. Of course there were always exceptions. Yet the first permanent and recognisable change of such roles in literature beco
Download or read book The Handmaid s Tale A Feminist Dystopia written by Sandra Schäder and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2018-09-13 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject Literature - Comparative Literature, grade: 1,7, http://www.uni-jena.de/, language: English, abstract: Even in our contemporary society men and women are not equal, and social, political and economic discrimination based on gender exists, and there are several countries where women get oppressed and discriminated systematically by the regime. Only now, on the 24th of June 2018, did Saudi Arabia enact a law which annulled the prohibition of women driving. Thus, feminist movements are of great importance to finally achieve equality between the sexes. However, in our present society exist two extremes and both of them pose danger to this equalization. On the one hand, there are people who still do not take feminism and gender equality seriously and even override these social changes. This leads to the necessity of examining feminism and feminist criticism in literature to raise awareness that women are individual beings and no replaceable objects that should be dominated by men. On the other hand, radical feminism with radical beliefs to create a ‘women’s utopia’ can end up being used by anti-feminist organizations or even regimes for their own purposes. Therefore, it is important to examine how current feminist tendencies are criticized in literature by showing what they might lead to. This paper reads Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as a feminist dystopia which provides feminist criticism through the representation of women’s oppression and their display as ‘Others’ in the patriarchal society Gilead. It will be shown that Atwood simultaneously criticizes current feminist tendencies through satire to raise awareness of how radical utopian feminist dreams can end up in dystopias.
Download or read book Swastika Night written by Katharine Burdekin and published by Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 1985 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a "feudal Europe seven centuries into post-Hitlerian society, Burdekin's novel explores the connection between gender and political power and anticipates modern feminist science fiction."--Cover.
Download or read book Women s Utopian and Dystopian Fiction written by Sharon R. Wilson and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-07-18 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women’s Utopian and Dystopian Fiction explores the genres of utopian and dystopian recent fiction. It is about how this literature of both imagined perfection and disaster creates new worlds and critiques gender roles, traditions, and values. Essays range in subject matter from Charlotte Perkins Gilman, P. D. James, Joanna Russ, and Marge Piercy, to Ursula Le Guin, Fay Weldon, and Toni Morrison. Two of the three sections focus on Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood. Examining especially the twentieth century, including second-wave feminism, writers from Tunisia, Turkey, Italy, Korea, the US, and England give both an historical and a global perspective. Utopian and dystopian elements are explored in the Nobel-Prize-winning Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, the little-known Mara and Dann, and The Cleft; and new perspectives are offered on Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
Download or read book The Postworld In Between Utopia and Dystopia written by Katarzyna Ostalska and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-29 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays offers global perspectives on feminist utopia and dystopia in speculative literature, film, and art, working from a range of intersectional approaches to examine key works and genres in both their specific cultural context and a wider, global, epistemological, critical background. The international, diverse contributions, including a Foreword by Gregory Claeys, draw upon posthumanism, speculative realism, speculative feminism, object-oriented ontology, new materialisms, and post-Anthropocene studies to propose alternative perspectives on gender, environment, as well as alternate futures and pasts rendered in fiction. Instead of binary divisions into utopia vs dystopia, the collection explores genres transcending this dichotomy, scrutinising the oeuvre of both established and emerging writers, directors, and critics. This is a rich and unique collection suitable for scholars and students studying feminist literature, media cultural studies, and women’s and gender studies.
Download or read book Worlds Apart written by Dunja M. Mohr and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2005-06-15 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary critics and scholars have written extensively on the demise of the "utopian spirit" in the modern novel. What has often been overlooked is the emergence of a new hybrid subgenre, particularly in science fiction and fantasy, which incorporates utopian strategies within the dystopian narrative, particularly in the feminist dystopias of the 1980s and 1990s. The author names this new subgenre "transgressive utopian dystopias." Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue trilogy, Suzy McKee Charna's Holdfast series, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale are thoroughly analyzed within the context of this this new subgenre of "transgressive utopian dystopias." Analysis focuses particularly on how these works cover the interrelated categories of gender, race and class, along with their relationship to classic literary dualism and the dystopian narrative. Without completely dissolving the dualistic order, the feminist dystopias studied here contest the notions of unambiguity and authenticity that are generally part of the canon.
Download or read book Mothers and Masters in Contemporary Utopian and Dystopian Literature written by Mary Elizabeth Theis and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Because advances made by science and technology far outstripped improvements in human nature, utopian dreams of perfect societies in the twentieth century quickly metamorphosed into dystopian nightmares, which undermined individual identity and threatened the integrity of the family. Armed with technological and scientific tools, totalizing social systems found in literature abolish the distinction between public and private life and thus penetrate and corrupt the very core of all utopian blueprints and visions: the education of future generations. At the heart of the family, mothers as parents transmit their diverse cultural traditions while socializing their children and thus compete with ideologically driven systems that usurp their role as educators. Mothers and Masters in Contemporary Utopian and Dystopian Literature focuses, therefore, on the thematic importance of this and other maternal roles for generic metamorphosis: the shift to dystopia invariably is signaled by the inversion of traditional maternal roles. The longevity of the utopian-dystopian literary tradition and persistence of the maternal model of human relationships serve as points of reference in this post-modern age of relative cultural values. Meta-utopian exploration of this thematic tension between utopia and dystopia reminds us that «no place» may not be home, but we need to keep going there.
Download or read book Feminist Utopias written by Frances Bartkowski and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The utopias envisioned by Edward Bellamy and other novelists late in the nineteenth century were generally blueprints of government. As satellites of men, women were expected to share in the general improvement of society. The resurgence of the feminist movement since the late 1960s has produced a very different kind of utopian literature. Frances Bartkowski explores a body of work that is striking and vital because it reflects the hopes, fears, and desires of women who have glimpsed the possibilities of a bright new world freed from stifling patriarchal structures. Feminist Utopias is a comparative study of the utopian fiction of nine women writers in the United States, France, and Canada. Except for Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), the prototype for feminist literary utopias, all of the works were published between 1969 and 1986. Bartkowski discusses Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères, Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, Suzy McKee Charnas's Motherlines, Christine Rochefort's Archaos, ou le jardin étincelant, E. M. Broner's A Weave of Women, Louky Bersianik's The Eugelionne, and two dystopian novels, Charnas's Walk to the End of the World and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid’s Tale.
Download or read book Feminist Dystopias and Ecofeminist Representation written by Nicole Cooke and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this paper, I argue that the genre of feminist dystopian fiction, which has grown and evolved rapidly as a response to women's anger, and which often aims to critique patriarchal attempts to control female reproduction, often inadvertently reinforces a kind of biological essentialism that links women inherently to nature--a tendency that has been largely overlooked by literary critics. I take up this argument through an analysis of two feminist dystopian novels: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985), and Naomi Alderman's more recent work The Power (2016). I argue that The Handmaid's Tale has been praised as a critique of patriarchy, yet critics have overlooked its descriptions and imagery that insistently connect women to nature, an inadvertent reinforcement of biological essentialism that often stems from myths which view women and nature as involving a mutually beneficial relationship. I read Naomi Alderman's The Power--a novel Alderman dedicates to Atwood--as both an intertextual response to and critique of these ideals in The Handmaid's Tale, arguing that Alderman depicts a dystopian world in which women's relationship to nature can be profoundly destructive. I argue that by depicting a world that threatens the reproductive rights of men, Alderman suggests that biological essentialism is too often used as a means to maintain dominant power structures. At stake in this argument is an enriched understanding not only of Atwood and Alderman but also of the power and limitations of the genre of the feminist dystopian novel.
Download or read book Utopia and Its Discontents written by Sebastian Mitchell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia and Its Discontents traces literary representations of ideal communities from Plato to the 21st century. Each chapter offers close readings of key utopian and anti-utopian texts to demonstrate how they construct, challenge and explore the ideas and forms of earlier utopian writings and the social and political ideals of their own periods. In this original and insightful study, Sebastian Mitchell demonstrates how literary utopias are often as much about the past as they are about the present and the future. Utopia and Its Discontents concludes by arguing against the idea that the utopian has been eclipsed by the dystopian in contemporary culture. Topics covered include: - Early political and philosophical authors, such as Plato and Thomas More - Literary works, from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four - Speculative-fiction writers such as H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley and Margaret Atwood - Ecological and feminist texts by Ernest Callenbach, Ursula Le Guin and Marge Piercy - Twenty-first century utopianism This is an essential study for scholars and students of utopian literature.
Download or read book Articulating the Elsewhere written by I. de Fatima Souza Cavalcanti and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Charlotte Perkins Gilman s Herland and the Feminist Utopian Reversal of Gender Hierarchies written by Mona Zaqqa and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2021-11-04 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bachelor Thesis from the year 2019 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,8, University of Bonn, language: English, abstract: This paper examines how Gilman contrasts her imagined utopia with reality, and thereby creates a reversal of gender hierarchies. It elaborates primarily on the topics of education, labour distribution and motherhood – which will be consecutively investigated with regard to their utopian representation in Gilman's "Herland", as well as the author's theoretical work regarding each subject. The reformist mindset that followed the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the US-economy during the turn of the 20th century led to a re-emergence of utopian literature (Bartkowski 7). Following the success of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888), utopian novels gained in importance and popularity as a medium for discussing issues resulting from the radical changes occurring at the time. Not only did they reflect the country's prevalent dissatisfaction with deficient political, economic and social conditions, but they also provided a platform for writers to explore alternative structures beyond the limits of reality. For feminist writers, the utopia enabled them to envision emancipation from patriarchal structures and challenge prevailing gender hierarchies. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is ranked among the most influential voices of the feminist reform movement of the Fin de Siècle, and is best known for her utopian novel "Herland" (1915). She herein thematizes the issue of gender inequality through an isolated and thriving all-female society and pictures the possibilities that would arise for women without the limitations of patriarchy.
Download or read book Heroes and Villains written by Angela Carter and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2011-02-03 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sharp-eyed Marianne lives in a white tower made of steel and concrete with her father and the other Professors. Outside, where the land is thickly wooded and wild beasts roam, live the Barbarians, who raid and pillage in order to survive. Marianne is strictly forbidden to leave her civilized world but, fascinated by these savage outsiders, decides to escape. There, beyond the wire fences, she will discover a decaying paradise, encounter the tattooed Barbarian boy Jewel and go beyond the darkest limits of her imagination. Playful, sensuous, violent and gripping, Heroes and Villains is an ambiguous and deliriously rich blend of post-apocalyptic fiction, gothic fantasy, literary allusion and twisted romance.
Download or read book Women s Utopias in British and American Fiction written by Nan Bowman Albinski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-21 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopian writing offers a fascinating panorama of social visions; and the related forms of dystopia and anti-utopian satire extend this into the range of social nightmares. Originally published in 1988, this comparative study of utopian fiction by British and American women writers demonstrates the continuity of a well-established, but little-known, tradition, emphasising its range and diversity, and providing ample evidence of women’s aspirations and documenting the restrictions and exclusions in private and public life that their novels challenge. Historically, the growth of each national tradition is traced in relation to social and political movements, particularly the suffrage movement and contemporary feminism. Comparatively, the quite different responses of British and American women to what are in many instances the same social problems are examine in the light of changing expectations. Definitions of human nature and gender relationships are assessed on a nature/culture continuum as a means of understanding this change. Women’s attitudes to their social and political roles, their working lives, to sexuality, marriage and the family are reflected in their visions of fruitful change; and so also is the impact of two world wars, socialism and fascism, the debate on peaceful uses of nuclear energy and fears of a nuclear holocaust.
Download or read book Futurescapes written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book testifies to the growing interest in the many spaces of utopia. It intends to ‘map out’ on utopian and science-fiction discourses some of the new and revisionist models of spatial analysis applied in Literary and Cultural Studies in recent years. The aim of the volume is to side-step the established generic binary of utopia and dystopia or science fiction and thus to open the analysis of utopian literature to new lines of inquiry. The essays collected here propose to think of utopias not so much as fictional texts about future change and transformation but as vital elements in a cultural process through which social, spatial and subjective identities are formed. Utopias can thus be read as textual systems implying a distinct spatial and temporal dimension; as ‘spatial practices’ that tend to naturalize a cultural and social construction – that of the ‘good life’, the radically improved welfare state, the Christian paradise, the counter-society, etc. – and make that representation operational by interpellating their readers in some determinate relation to their givenness as sites of political and individual improvement. This volume is of interest for all scholars and students of literature who wish to explore the ways in which utopias of the past and recent present have circulated as media of cultural exchange and homogenization, as sites of cultural and linguistic appropriation and as foci for the spatial formation of national and regional identities in the English-speaking world.
Download or read book The Blazing World and Other Writings written by Margaret Cavendish and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 1994-03-31 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Flamboyant, theatrical and ambitious, Margaret Cavendish was one of the seventeenth century's most striking figures: a woman who ventured into the male spheres of politics, science, philosophy and literature. The Blazing World is a highly original work: part Utopian fiction, part feminist text, it tells of a lady shipwrecked on the Blazing World where she is made Empress and uses her power to ensure that it is free of war, religious division and unfair sexual discrimination. This volume also includes The Contract, a romance in which love and law work harmoniously together, and Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, which explores the power and freedom a woman can achieve in the disguise of a man.
