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Eyewitness to Utopia: Illustrations in Utopian Literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Extract
The relationships between an author's text and an illustrator's images can pose fascinating questions about literature and art and how readers perceive both. This is especially true if the writer happens to be a Utopian author whose work appeared in America during the late nineteenth century when two different traditions combined with some delightfully unusual results.
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References
NOTES
1. For a discussion of this definition of a literary Utopia see Roemer, Kenneth M., “Defining America as Utopia” in America as Utopia: Collected EssaysGoogle Scholar, ed., Kenneth M. Roemer (New York: Burt Franklin, forthcoming).
2. See Roemer, Kenneth M., The Obsolete Necessity: America in Utopian Literature, 1888–1900 (Kent: Kent State Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 2–7.Google Scholar
3. Sargent, Lyman Tower, British and American Utopias 1516–1975. An Annotated Bibliography (Boston: G. K. Hall, forthcoming).Google Scholar See also “Primary Sources” in Roemer, , The Obsolete Necessity, pp. 186–209.Google Scholar
4. See Roemer, , The Obsolete Necessity, pp. 8–9, 186–209.Google Scholar Utilizing my definition of a literary utopia as a frame of reference, a dystopia describes imaginary alternatives that are much worse than the readers' culture (e.g., Brave New World). An anti-utopia attacks a specific concept of utopia and, by implication, projects an alternative Utopia (e.g., the numerous “answers” to Looking Backward). A partial utopia describes an imaginary alternative world, but that world is not fully realized in the narrative (e.g., Sheldon's In His Steps). However, if it does “exist,” either it is described in vague terms or the author's main intent is to offer entertainment rather than prescriptive, normative alternatives (e.g., Austyn, 's The Fallen Race).Google Scholar Quite a few of the plates in the portfolio are taken from partial Utopias, which, I suppose, reflects the visual “entertainment” intent of the publishers. The assumptions behind these illustrations do, however, illuminate attitudes found in both Utopian and partially Utopian works.
5. Howells, W. D., A Traveler from Altruria (New York, 1894), p. 281.Google Scholar
6. Bellamy, Edward, postscript to Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), p. 312.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7. See Roemer, Kenneth M., “‘Utopia Made Practical’: Compulsive Realism,” American Literary Realism, 7 (Summer 1974), 273–76.Google Scholar
8. Wells, H. G., A Modern UtopiaGoogle Scholar, as quoted in Gerber, Richard, Utopian Fantasy: A Study of English Utopian Fiction Since the End of the Nineteenth Century, 2d ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 130.Google Scholar
9. See notes 1, 2, and 3. The “nowhere somewhere” phrase is borrowed from the title of Morgan, Arthur E.'s Nowhere Was Somewhere (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1946).Google Scholar
10. I did, however, include several of the Utopian illustrations in The Obsolete Necessity. One of the few reviewers to mention the illustrations was the anonymous reviewer of Franklin H. North, 's satirical Utopia The Wakening of Noahville (1898).Google Scholar See “Saturday Review of Books and Art,” New York Times, 05 21, 1898, p. 344.Google Scholar
11. See Roemer, , The Obsolete Necessity, pp. 9–12.Google Scholar
12. See Roemer, Kenneth M., “Utopia and Victorian Culture” in America as Utopia.Google Scholar
13. In published and unpublished studies Barbara C. Quissell, Jean Pfaelzer, Lyman Tower Sargent, and I have examined this literary and cultural phenomenon. See the secondary source entries for these authors in Sargent, 's British and American Utopias.Google Scholar
14. See Thomas, John, “Utopia for an Urban Age: Henry George, Henry Demarest Lloyd, Edward Bellamy,” Perspectives in American History, 6 (1972), pp. 135–63Google Scholar; Segal, Howard P., “Leo Marx's ‘Middle Landscape’: A Critique, a Revision, and an Appreciation,” Reviews in American History, 5 (03 1977), 137–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roemer, , The Obsolete Necessity, pp. 153–70.Google Scholar
15. Thomas, Chauncey, The Crystal Button (Boston, 1891), pp. 77–87.Google Scholar
16. Gillette, King Camp, The Human Drift, introd., Roemer, Kenneth M. (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1976).Google Scholar
17. Ibid., pp. 94–107.
18. For recent treatments of these combinations see Shanley, Mary L. and Stillman, Peter, “From Camelot to Sand-belt: Political Power and the Quest for Utopia in Twain's Connecticut Yankee” (paper delivered at First Annual Conference on Utopian Studies, Troy, N.Y., 10 2, 1976)Google Scholar; and Roemer, , The Obsolete Necessity, pp. 30–32, 49–50, 68–70, and passim.Google Scholar
19. Smith, Henry Nash, Mark Twain's Fable of Progress (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1964), p. 65.Google Scholar
20. For example see: David, Beverly R., “The Pictorial Huck Finn: Mark Twain and His Illustrator, E. W. Kemble,” American Quarterly, 26 (10 1974), 331–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; David, Beverly R., “The Unexpurgated A Connecticut Yankee: Mark Twain and His Illustrator, Daniel Carter Beard,” Prospects, 1 (1975), 99–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cohen, Martin S., “The Novel in Woodcuts: A Handbook,” Journal of Modern Literature, 6 (04 1977), 171–95Google Scholar; Eaves, Morris, “Blake and the Artistic Machine,” PMLA, 92 (10 1977), 903–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schwoerer, Lois G., “Propaganda in the Revolution of 1688–89,” American Historical Review, 82 (10 1977), 843–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar