Author: Maxim Shadurski
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000682870
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
Since its generic inception in 1516, utopia has produced visions of alterity which renegotiate, subvert, and transcend existing places. Early in the twentieth century, H. G. Wells linked utopia to the World State, whose post-national, post-Westphalian emergence he predicated on English national discourse. This critical study examines how the discursive representations of England’s geography, continuity, and character become foundational to the Wellsian utopia and elicit competing response from Wells’s contemporaries, particularly Robert Hugh Benson and Aldous Huxley, with further ramifications throughout the twentieth century. Contextualized alongside modern theories of nationalism and utopia, as well as read jointly with contemporary projections of England as place, reactions to Wells demonstrate a shift from disavowal to retrieval of England, on the one hand, and from endorsement to rejection of the World State, on the other. Attempts to salvage the residual traces of English culture from their degradation in the World State have taken increasing precedence over the imagination of a post-national order. This trend continues in the work of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, J. G. Ballard, and Julian Barnes, whose future scenarios warn against a world without England. The Nationality of Utopia investigates utopia’s capacity to deconstruct and redeploy national discourse in ways that surpass fear and nostalgia.
Author: H. G. Wells
Publisher: tredition
ISBN: 3347637275
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
A Modern Utopia - H. G. Wells - A Modern Utopia is a dystopian book by H. G. Wells. In his preface, Wells says that A Modern Utopia would be the last of a series of volumes on social problems. This book is a tale of two travelers who fall into a space-warp and suddenly find themselves upon a Utopian Earth controlled by a single World Government. It is told to us by a sketchily described character known only as the Owner of the Voice. Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer. Prolific in many genres, he wrote dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, history, satire, biography and autobiography. His work also included two books on recreational war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is sometimes called the "father of science fiction. During his own lifetime, however, he was most prominent as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering. Brian Aldiss referred to Wells as the "Shakespeare of science fiction", while American writer Charles Fort referred to him as a "wild talent". Wells rendered his works convincing by instilling commonplace detail alongside a single extraordinary assumption per work – dubbed "Wells's law" – leading Joseph Conrad to hail him in 1898 as "O Realist of the Fantastic!". His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), which was his first novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898) and the military science fiction The War in the Air (1907). Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.
Author: Thomas More
Publisher: e-artnow
ISBN: 8027303583
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 105
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Book Description
Utopia is a work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More published in 1516 in Latin. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. Many aspects of More's description of Utopia are reminiscent of life in monasteries.
Author: Samuel Moyn
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674256522
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.
Author: Ruzbeh Babaee
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527524760
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 135
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Book Description
Why would we think of utopia? Utopian thoughts are necessary to instigate social change. Without a utopian vision, something inspiring, there is no chance of social development, and the more transparent the vision, the higher the chance of its achievement. The significance of utopian thought in the contemporary world is undeniable. We are faced with ecological issues so huge that the survival of the human species might be in doubt, as well as the threats posed by overpopulation, war, terrorism, new and sometimes unbelievably dangerous technologies, cybernetic crimes, and religious extremism. Thus, a way out is obviously required and utopian thought can assist in the search for this. My Utopia is a collection of creative writing demonstrating that utopian thinking is beyond any gender, race, age, color, nationality, and border limitations. Everybody can also think of his or her utopian world regardless of the restrictions of time and place. Everyone who faces a crisis of life and faith will enjoy reading this book. The short fiction, short essays and poems in this book will be of great interest to everybody who believes in the power of literature in forcing change. This collection will give the reader ideas about how to change his or her life for a more promising future.
Author: Kyu Hwang
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
ISBN: 1466928603
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 653
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Book Description
The book is a hybrid of fiction and projection, comprehensively including predictions on the future world. Fictional parts of the novel used to vividly portray fictitious figures carrying out national policy to impact on the world order. The prevalent land grab in the Third World now will develop into putting a whole nation on sale if a fortune will be offered to the citizens of target country. Thus, China will use its immense foreign currency reserve to annex a small country like Solomon Islands in the beginning stage, and then expand further into Eurasia. Likewise, other world powers will expand territories by the will of incorporated citizens. In result, political map of the world will differ much from current world. And rivalry in Asia will ignite spread of nuclear arsenals to satisfy their national pride but deep economic integration within the continent will set aside Cold War mentality for mutual prosperity. The gloomy prospect of food & energy will exacerbate the anxiety of contemporaries until awakened leading countries devoting to reverse the nightmare. After the mid-21st century, the haunting effects of climate change and peak oil will capitulate to the ingenuity and will of people, thereby next generation will access closely to a utopian world.
Author: Eric D. Weitz
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400866227
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 381
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Book Description
Why did the twentieth century witness unprecedented organized genocide? Can we learn why genocide is perpetrated by comparing different cases of genocide? Is the Holocaust unique, or does it share causes and features with other cases of state-sponsored mass murder? Can genocide be prevented? Blending gripping narrative with trenchant analysis, Eric Weitz investigates four of the twentieth century's major eruptions of genocide: the Soviet Union under Stalin, Nazi Germany, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and the former Yugoslavia. Drawing on historical sources as well as trial records, memoirs, novels, and poems, Weitz explains the prevalence of genocide in the twentieth century--and shows how and why it became so systematic and deadly. Weitz depicts the searing brutality of each genocide and traces its origins back to those most powerful categories of the modern world: race and nation. He demonstrates how, in each of the cases, a strong state pursuing utopia promoted a particular mix of extreme national and racial ideologies. In moments of intense crisis, these states targeted certain national and racial groups, believing that only the annihilation of these "enemies" would enable the dominant group to flourish. And in each instance, large segments of the population were enticed to join in the often ritualistic actions that destroyed their neighbors. This book offers some of the most absorbing accounts ever written of the population purges forever associated with the names Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Milosevic. A controversial and richly textured comparison of these four modern cases, it identifies the social and political forces that produce genocide.
Author: Michael Booth
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1250061970
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
The Christian Science Monitor's #1 Best Book of the Year A witty, informative, and popular travelogue about the Scandinavian countries and how they may not be as happy or as perfect as we assume, “The Almost Nearly Perfect People offers up the ideal mixture of intriguing and revealing facts” (Laura Miller, Salon). Journalist Michael Booth has lived among the Scandinavians for more than ten years, and he has grown increasingly frustrated with the rose-tinted view of this part of the world offered up by the Western media. In this timely book he leaves his adopted home of Denmark and embarks on a journey through all five of the Nordic countries to discover who these curious tribes are, the secrets of their success, and, most intriguing of all, what they think of one another. Why are the Danes so happy, despite having the highest taxes? Do the Finns really have the best education system? Are the Icelanders as feral as they sometimes appear? How are the Norwegians spending their fantastic oil wealth? And why do all of them hate the Swedes? In The Almost Nearly Perfect People Michael Booth explains who the Scandinavians are, how they differ and why, and what their quirks and foibles are, and he explores why these societies have become so successful and models for the world. Along the way a more nuanced, often darker picture emerges of a region plagued by taboos, characterized by suffocating parochialism, and populated by extremists of various shades. They may very well be almost nearly perfect, but it isn’t easy being Scandinavian.
Author: Maia Ramnath
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520950399
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
In Haj to Utopia, Maia Ramnath tells the dramatic story of Ghadar, the Indian anticolonial movement that attempted overthrow of the British Empire. Founded by South Asian immigrants in California, Ghadar—which is translated as "mutiny"—quickly became a global presence in East Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and East Africa. Ramnath brings this epic struggle to life as she traces Ghadar’s origins to the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, its establishment of headquarters in Berkeley, California, and its fostering by anarchists in London, Paris, and Berlin. Linking Britain’s declaration of war on Germany in 1914 to Ghadar’s declaration of war on Britain, Ramnath vividly recounts how 8,000 rebels were deployed from around the world to take up the battle in Hindustan. Haj to Utopia demonstrates how far-flung freedom fighters managed to articulate a radical new world order out of seemingly contradictory ideas.
Author: Thomas Molnar
Publisher: University Press of Amer
ISBN: 9780819176684
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
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