Nancy Ihab

The Outsider: in Utopian and Dystopian Novels Nancy Ihab

This book deals with the role of the outsider in the American novelist Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1889) and the two British novelists H. G. Wells's and Aldous Huxley's The Time Machine (1895) and Brave New World (1932) respectively. The outsiders in the three novels travel to another civilization far more mechanized than their own. They are able to see the horrifying effects of the so called Utopian societies as well as the difference between the rich and the poor in the nineteenth century world. The utopia of Looking Backward and the dystopias of the Time Machine and Brave New World, give different views of the effects of excessive mechanization on man, and reveal the close link between utopias and dystopias in pointing out the errors of those societies. Once acknowledged as utopias, a dream that would come true, is in fact a hidden and hideous dystopia.