Nationality of Utopia

<p>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. <i>The Nationality of Utopia</i> investigates utopia’s capacity to deconstruct and redeploy national discourse in ways that surpass fear and nostalgia.</p>