Chapter 10 - Utopian Fiction

Summary

This chapter opens by pointing to the popularity of utopian fantasies, or ‘prophetic romances’, at the fin-de-siècle, before exploring some of the possible socio-economic and political reasons for this situation, not the least of which was the impact of the Paris Commune on the late nineteenth-century anti-socialist imaginary. The chapter proceeds to an outline of the US journalist Edward Bellamy’s best-selling utopian fiction, Looking Backward (1888), undoubtedly the most influential of these publications on both sides of the Atlantic. In his review of this book, Morris offers a critique of Bellamy’s ‘temperament’ – which he suggests is typical of late nineteenth-century bourgeois ideology in so far as it is decidedly ‘modern’ – as ‘unhistoric and unartistic’. The chapter concludes, then, by claiming that the distinctiveness of Morris’s contribution both to the tradition of utopian fiction and to contemporaneous debates about socialism lies in his characteristic insistence on a future society that is historic, artistic and, finally, erotic.