This thesis examines the forms of utopianism which developed in U.S. fiction after the Civil War, from Mark Twain to Jack London. It covers the genres and subgenres of the utopia of reform, the fiction of occult utopianism, the lost-race romance, the post-catastrophe utopia, and the dystopia. Its central argument is that utopianism provides a means of developing alternative horizons of historiosophy and of building images of otherness, as it is also an argumentative apparatus which allows utopists to comment on their empirical society, as the other side of otherness. Nineteenth-century U.S. utopian fiction conveyed, through an increasing deconstruction of the utopian genre, conflicting interpretations of such elements of American myth-history as the stock image of America as a new Eden and paradise of abundance, the American Dream, and Manifest Destiny. This helps explain the fragmentation of the utopian genre within literary discourse and its cooptation by modern science fiction as it developed after the first decade of the twentieth century.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.71888 |
| Date | January 1983 |
| Creators | Khouri, Nadia, 1943- |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 000186388, proquestno: AAINK66625, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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