Utopian and Dystopian Literature

Utopian and Dystopian Literature

Utopian

Plato’s Republic (But is it utopian?)

St. Augustine, The City of God (413-426)

Sir Thomas Moore, Utopia (1516)

Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis (1627)

James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656)          

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman Herland

H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1905)     \

B.F. Skinner, Walden Two (1948)          

Dystopian

Plato’s Republic (But is it utopian? Or a warning against “justice” as a moral and political criterion—elsewhere in Plato, and keeping with Socrates, Aristotle, Locke and Jefferson, “eudemonia” is the moral and political criterion.)

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels Book III

Jack London, The Iron Heel (1907)

Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots, 1920),  War with the Newts (1936)

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (1932)

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)

Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925)

George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945)

George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (1945)

Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading (1938), Bend Sinister (1947)

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962)