| This dissertation investigates the role played by authors' utopian aspirations in the dramatic shaping of new literary forms in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Characterized by the breakdown of old forms and genres and the emergence of new ones, this period is most often associated with the anxieties of cultural and national disintegration that we find in a novel such as Bram Stoker's Dracula. Simultaneously, though, English literature witnessed an unprecedented upsurge in novels in the utopian genre. My project seeks to reconcile this disparate state of affairs, whereby authors reacting to perceived social threats and decline sought for utopian alternatives, often doing so outside of the genre confines of the utopian novel itself. I examine the presence of utopianism in the work of four turn-of-the-century authors: Olive Schreiner, Sarah Grand, Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells. Schreiner and Grand participate in the development of the New Woman novel, and in my first two chapters I discuss how these authors sought to push beyond a criticism of social double-standards to imagining the dawn of a world of full gender equality. In doing so, they anticipate the formal features---fragmentation, psychological realism---that characterize Modernist works, and the concern with female public speaking that predominates in suffragette fiction. I subsequently look at utopianism's role in Shaw's shift from the novel to the dramatic form, and in his sometime friend and longstanding rival, H.G. Wells, pioneering of the genre of science fiction. This project finds utopianism to be a versatile imaginative force that spills beyond genre boundaries, and advances our growing understanding of the process of literary transformation at the turn of the century. |
