Reconfiguring the Other in late nineteenth-century British utopian literature

Work on non-canonical fin-de-siecle feminist utopian literature to date has focused on discovery and description as seen in the bibliographies of Sargent, Patai, and Suvin. This study examines non-canonical texts alongside canonical texts and moves beyond previous studies by exploring how English utopian writers redefine the cultural "Other" using the discourses of Empire, commerce, and science.; Mikhail Bakhtin and Homi Bhabha emphasize the dialogic function of language in constructing and altering cultural boundaries, and their work provides a theoretical base for this study. The writers in this study, Mary Bramston, Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett, Lady Florence Dixie, Amelia Garland Mears, William Morris, and H. G. Wells, imply that ideal societies will emerge only if nineteenth-century values and conventions are subverted. These writers attempt to put actual, as well as temporal, distance between Utopia and fin-de-siecle England.; Corbett's New Amazonia posits a future Ireland as Utopia; Mears's Mercia sees utopian ideas begun in a future England translated to a regenerated India. Bramston's "Island of Progress" presents a dystopian vision of a society that is physically removed from England but philosophically tied to late nineteenth-century science.; Other utopian writers of the 1890s expand the idea that the colonies can be the true sites of utopia by moving women and working classes of the fin de siecle to the center of their narrative. Morris's News from Nowhere and Dixie's Glorianna envision a utopian society built within the confines of England.; Finally, three scientific romances of H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, When the Sleeper Wakes, and The War of the Worlds, offer a pessimistic vision of change and the threat to English culture posed by the transformation of the Other. The positive effort to reconfigure the margins of society to be more inclusive becomes a darker vision that upholds the center of nineteenth-century culture. In Wells, change is represented from the point of view of white, middle-class men and the future becomes a hostile, darkly exotic, profoundly different place.