| Sumario: | Dream Revisionaries charts the evolution of women's utopianwriting in Britain and the United States between 1869 and 1920. This periodsaw the emergence of a new kind of utopian text--one that redefinedwomen's roles in society and questioned the very foundations ofthe social order on both sides of the Atlantic. During the period understudy, more than one hundred remarkably diverse utopian narratives writtenby women were published on both sides of the Atlantic: feminist and antifeminist,socialist and capitalist; placed in Kentucky, in London, at the North Pole,or on Mars; set in the past, present, future, or outside of time altogether.The value of these narratives is incalculable, for they provide insightinto how a homogeneous group of women (sharing an Anglo-Saxon heritageand middle-class status) at a particular historical moment imagined whatmen and women might be like if freed from the tyranny of custom and contemporaryvalues. Dream Revisionaries examines the literary, social, and historicalcatalysts for this sudden efflorescence of women's utopianwriting. It delineates the historical contours of mainstream utopian fiction,examines the place of women in canonical texts, and demonstrates how theutopian responses of women in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuriespaved the way for the late 19th-century texts discussed in this study.Lewes observes how women's utopian fiction facilitated thecreation of political and social manifestos that responded to the late19th-century historical environment and how nationality sometimes complicatedand even overrode the authors' apparent commonalities. This volumedemonstrates how the genre was used to reconcile historically opposed feministideologies and compares texts of the 1870s and 1970s, showing that thesupposedly "new" type of women's utopian writing inmany ways resembled that of a century earlier. Finally, it provides aninvaluable annotated bibliography covering three centuries of women'sutopian writing -- Amazon
|
|---|
