research topics on dystopian literature

Dystopian Literature: Themes, Insights & Examples

What is dystopian literature, themes in dystopian literature, insights into dystopian literature, examples of dystopian literature, how to read and analyze dystopian literature, why dystopian literature matters, modern dystopian literature.

Imagine being in a world where everything seems to go wrong, and there's a constant sense of doom. This is the unique flavor of dystopian literature. By exploring themes of societal decay, oppressive governments, and the loss of humanity, dystopian literature serves as a mirror, reflecting our deepest fears and concerns about the future. In this article, we will explore the fascinating world of dystopian literature and delve into its most common themes. So, if you've ever been intrigued by books like '1984' or 'The Hunger Games', you're in for a treat.

At its core, dystopian literature is a genre of fiction that paints a picture of an imagined world where things are horribly wrong. Unlike its cousin, utopian literature, which imagines a perfect society, dystopian literature depicts a future where society has taken a turn for the worse. These stories often explore themes of oppressive governmental control, environmental devastation, and the loss of individual freedoms.

Dystopian literature often sets the stage in a future, post-apocalyptic world ravaged by war, disease, or some other catastrophic event. The societies depicted in these works are typically marked by inequality, injustice, and the callous use of technology. It's like looking at your worst nightmares through the lens of literature.

Whether it's the total loss of privacy in George Orwell's '1984', the haunting governmental control in Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale', or the deranged reality TV death match in Suzanne Collins' 'The Hunger Games', dystopian themes in literature push us to question our society and ourselves.

Now that you know what dystopian literature is, you might be wondering: what are the main dystopian themes in literature? Well, let's take a closer look.

While each dystopian story is unique and disturbing in its own right, there are certain themes that are commonly explored in this genre. Let's dive into some of these dystopian themes in literature.

• Loss of Individuality: One of the most prominent themes in dystopian literature is the loss of individuality. In many of these stories, citizens lose their identities and become part of a faceless mass. They're often stripped of their names, their personal histories, and even their ability to think independently.
• Oppressive Government Control: Another common theme is oppressive government control. In dystopian societies, governments have total control over their citizens' lives. They monitor their activities, control their thoughts, and even manipulate their perceptions of reality.
• Technological Control: The misuse of technology for control and manipulation is a common theme in dystopian literature. From surveillance and propaganda to genetic manipulation and AI, technology is often depicted as a tool for oppression.
• Social Stratification: Dystopian societies are often marked by stark social inequalities. Citizens are usually divided into strict social classes, with a small elite class enjoying privileges at the expense of the masses.
• Environmental Destruction: Many dystopian stories also explore the theme of environmental destruction. Whether it's due to nuclear war, climate change, or some other disaster, the environment in these stories is often in a state of ruin.

These themes are a stark reminder of the potential dangers of unchecked power, technological advancement, and societal inequality. They may be unsettling, but they force us to confront uncomfortable questions about our society and our future.

Dystopian literature does more than narrate a tale of a bleak and depressing future. It offers deep insights into human nature, our society, and the potential consequences of our actions. As we explore the dystopian themes in literature, let's take a moment to understand the insights they provide.

• Power Corrupts: A persistent insight we glean from dystopian literature is the idea that power can corrupt. An oppressive government or ruling class is a common feature in these stories, showing us how those in power can misuse it for their own benefit.
• Value of Freedom: Dystopian literature often portrays societies where personal freedoms are curtailed or nonexistent. This serves as a stark reminder of the importance of individual liberties and the lengths we should go to preserve them.
• Technology isn't Always Beneficial: While we often view technology as a tool for positive advancement, dystopian literature provides a contrasting view. It shows us a world where technology is misused, leading to loss of privacy, individuality, and in some cases, humanity itself.
• Social Equality Matters: The stark social stratification in dystopian societies offers a cautionary tale about the dangers of inequality. It reminds us of the need for a fair society where everyone has equal opportunities.
• Respect for Nature: The environmental destruction depicted in many dystopian stories underscores the importance of respecting and preserving our natural environment. It warns us of the potential consequences of neglecting our environment.

So, while dystopian themes in literature may be dark and disturbing, they serve as powerful tools to provoke thought, stimulate discussion, and inspire action on important societal issues.

If you're interested in exploring dystopian themes in literature, here are a few examples that masterfully highlight these themes:

• "1984" by George Orwell: This classic piece of dystopian literature paints a grim picture of an omnipresent government that exercises total control over its citizens. It's a stark exploration of themes like authoritarianism, censorship, and state surveillance.
• "The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins: This popular series shows a world where children are forced to participate in deadly games for entertainment. The book explores themes such as social inequality, oppression, and the effects of war.
• "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley: This novel portrays a future society that's seemingly perfect, but at the cost of individuality and freedom. It delves into themes like the misuse of technology, loss of individual identity, and the dangers of a seemingly utopian society.
• "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury: In this dystopian world, books are banned and burned to suppress dissenting ideas. The novel explores themes like censorship, the value of knowledge, and the dangers of a complacent society.
• "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood: This haunting tale depicts a society where women are subjugated and used solely for reproduction. It presents themes such as gender inequality, religious extremism, and the loss of personal freedoms.

These examples are a great starting point if you're looking to delve deeper into dystopian literature. Each book offers a unique exploration of dystopian themes, providing a rich and thought-provoking reading experience.

As you begin your journey into the world of dystopian literature, here are a few tips to help you fully appreciate and understand the dystopian themes in literature:

• Look beyond the surface: Dystopian literature is rich in symbolism and allegory. Try to identify the underlying messages and critiques that the author is conveying through the dystopian setting. For instance, is the author commenting on current societal issues or warning about potential future outcomes?
• Understand the characters: Dystopian literature often features characters struggling against oppressive systems. Pay attention to their actions, motivations, and development throughout the story. What do their struggles reveal about the society they live in?
• Consider the societal structure: Dystopian societies often feature stark inequalities and oppressive systems. Analyze how this society operates and what it says about human nature and power dynamics.
• Reflect on the themes: Dystopian literature is known for exploring complex and often grim themes. After reading, take the time to reflect on these themes and what they mean in the context of the story and in relation to our own society. How does the author use these dystopian themes to comment on real-world issues?

Remember, analyzing dystopian literature is not about finding 'the correct answer', but about exploring the text's layers and interpreting its meaning. So, go ahead, grab a book, and start exploring the complex and captivating world of dystopian themes in literature!

Let's dive straight into it: why should you care about dystopian literature and its themes? Well, besides being captivating and thought-provoking, dystopian literature serves several important functions.

• It sparks critical thinking: By presenting readers with a society that's drastically different from our own, dystopian literature encourages us to question and reflect on societal norms, values, and structures. It prompts us to ask, "What if?" and consider different possibilities for our own society.
• It mirrors societal issues: Dystopian literature doesn't just invent new worlds — it often reflects our own. By pushing societal issues to their extremes, it helps us see the potential consequences of our actions. It's like a mirror held up to our society, reflecting what could happen if we continue down certain paths.
• It fosters empathy: Through its characters, dystopian literature allows us to experience life in a dystopian society. This can foster a sense of empathy and understanding for people who face oppression and hardship in the real world.
• It inspires change: By highlighting the dangers of certain paths, dystopian literature can inspire readers to strive for change in their own societies. It's not just about showing us what could go wrong — it's also about inspiring us to work towards what could go right.

So, next time you pick up a dystopian novel, remember: you're not just reading a story. You're engaging with a powerful tool for reflection, empathy, and change. That's the power of dystopian themes in literature.

Now that we've explored why dystopian literature matters, let's journey into the contemporary landscape of dystopian themes in literature. Today's authors continue the tradition of envisioning bleak futures, but with modern concerns at the forefront.

• Technology and control: With the rise of Big Data, social media, and surveillance technologies, modern dystopian literature often explores the theme of control through technology. Books like "The Circle" by Dave Eggers delve into the idea of a society where privacy no longer exists, and individual freedom is sacrificed for the illusion of safety and connection.
• Environmental disasters: As awareness of climate change and environmental issues grows, so does their presence in dystopian literature. Novels like "Parable of the Sower" by Octavia Butler and "The Water Will Come" by Jeff Goodell paint grim pictures of societies devastated by climate change and ecological destruction.
• Social inequality: Dystopian literature also shines a spotlight on social inequality. Suzanne Collins' "The Hunger Games", for instance, vividly portrays a society divided into wealth and poverty, where the poor are pitted against each other for the entertainment of the rich.
• Loss of humanity: In the face of advancing technology and societal changes, many modern dystopian works question what it means to be human. Books like "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro explore themes of humanity, identity, and morality in a dystopian future.

Modern dystopian themes in literature reflect our current anxieties and fears. But remember, they also serve as a call to action. They remind us that the future is not set in stone — it's something we have a hand in shaping. So, what kind of future do you want to help create?

If you're fascinated by the world of dystopian literature and want to gain a deeper understanding of its themes and insights, don't miss Rabih Salloum's workshop, ' Navigating Life VI .' This workshop offers a unique perspective on dystopian themes and will help you appreciate the genre in a whole new light.

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A Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction

Here are the plots of some new dystopian novels, set in the near future. The world got too hot, so a wealthy celebrity persuaded a small number of very rich people to move to a makeshift satellite that, from orbit, leaches the last nourishment the earth has to give, leaving everyone else to starve. The people on the satellite have lost their genitals, through some kind of instant mutation or super-quick evolution, but there is a lot of sex anyway, since it’s become fashionable to have surgical procedures to give yourself a variety of appendages and openings, along with decorative skin grafts and tattoos, there being so little else to do. There are no children, but the celebrity who rules the satellite has been trying to create them by torturing women from the earth’s surface. (“We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power,” the novel’s narrator says.) Or: North Korea deployed a brain-damaging chemical weapon that made everyone in the United States, or at least everyone in L.A., an idiot, except for a few people who were on a boat the day the scourge came, but the idiots, who are otherwise remarkably sweet, round up and kill those people, out of fear. Led by a man known only as the Chief, the idiots build a wall around downtown to keep out the Drifters and the stupidest people, the Shamblers, who don’t know how to tie shoes or button buttons; they wander around, naked and barefoot. Thanks, in part, to the difficulty of clothing, there is a lot of sex, random and unsatisfying, but there are very few children, because no one knows how to take care of them. (The jacket copy bills this novel as “the first book of the Trump era.”)

Or: Machines replaced humans, doing all the work and providing all the food, and, even though if you leave the city it is hotter everywhere else, some huffy young people do, because they are so bored, not to mention that they are mad at their parents, who do annoying things like run giant corporations. The runaways are called walkaways. (I gather they’re not in a terribly big hurry.) They talk about revolution, take a lot of baths, upload their brains onto computers, and have a lot of sex, but, to be honest, they are very boring. Or: Even after the coasts were lost to the floods when the ice caps melted, the American South, defying a new federal law, refused to give up fossil fuels, and seceded, which led to a civil war, which had been going on for decades, and was about to be over, on Reunification Day, except that a woman from Louisiana who lost her whole family in the war went to the celebration and released a poison that killed a hundred million people, which doesn’t seem like the tragedy it might have been, because in this future world, as in all the others, there’s not much to live for, what with the petty tyrants, the rotten weather, and the crappy sex. It will not give too much away if I say that none of these novels have a happy ending (though one has a twist). Then again, none of them have a happy beginning, either.

Dystopias follow utopias the way thunder follows lightning. This year, the thunder is roaring. But people are so grumpy, what with the petty tyrants and such, that it’s easy to forget how recently lightning struck. “Whether we measure our progress in terms of wiredness, open-mindedness, or optimism, the country is moving in the right direction, and faster, perhaps, than even we would have believed,” a reporter for Wired wrote in May, 2000. “We are, as a nation, better educated, more tolerant, and more connected because of—not in spite of—the convergence of the internet and public life. Partisanship, religion, geography, race, gender, and other traditional political divisions are giving way to a new standard—wiredness—as an organizing principle.” Nor was the utopianism merely technological, or callow. In January, 2008, Barack Obama gave a speech in New Hampshire, about the American creed:

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can. It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can. It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness: Yes, we can. . . . Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can repair this world. Yes, we can.

That was the lightning, the flash of hope, the promise of perfectibility. The argument of dystopianism is that perfection comes at the cost of freedom. Every new lament about the end of the republic, every column about the collapse of civilization, every new novel of doom: these are its answering thunder. Rumble, thud, rumble, ka-boom, KA-BOOM !

A utopia is a paradise, a dystopia a paradise lost. Before utopias and dystopias became imagined futures, they were imagined pasts, or imagined places, like the Garden of Eden. “I have found a continent more densely peopled and abounding in animals than our Europe or Asia or Africa, and, in addition, a climate milder and more delightful than in any other region known to us,” Amerigo Vespucci wrote, in extravagant letters describing his voyages across the Atlantic, published in 1503 as “Mundus Novus_,”_ a new world. In 1516, Thomas More published a fictional account of a sailor on one of Vespucci’s ships who had travelled just a bit farther, to the island of Utopia, where he found a perfect republic. (More coined the term: “utopia” means “nowhere.”) “Gulliver’s Travels” (1726) is a satire of the utopianism of the Enlightenment. On the island of Laputa, Gulliver visits the Academy of Lagado, where the sages, the first progressives, are busy trying to make pincushions out of marble, breeding naked sheep, and improving the language by getting rid of all the words. The word “dystopia,” meaning “an unhappy country,” was coined in the seventeen-forties, as the historian Gregory Claeys points out in a shrewd new study, “Dystopia: A Natural History” (Oxford). In its modern definition, a dystopia can be apocalyptic, or post-apocalyptic, or neither, but it has to be anti-utopian, a utopia turned upside down, a world in which people tried to build a republic of perfection only to find that they had created a republic of misery. “A Trip to the Island of Equality,” a 1792 reply to Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man,” is a dystopia (on the island, the pursuit of equality has reduced everyone to living in caves), but Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel, “The Last Man,” in which the last human being dies in the year 2100 of a dreadful plague, is not dystopian; it’s merely apocalyptic.

The dystopian novel emerged in response to the first utopian novels, like Edward Bellamy’s best-selling 1888 fantasy, “Looking Backward,” about a socialist utopia in the year 2000. “Looking Backward” was so successful that it produced a dozen anti-socialist, anti-utopian replies, including “Looking Further Backward” (in which China invades the United States, which has been weakened by its embrace of socialism) and “Looking Further Forward” (in which socialism is so unquestionable that a history professor who refutes it is demoted to the rank of janitor). In 1887, a year before Bellamy, the American writer Anna Bowman Dodd published “The Republic of the Future,” a socialist dystopia set in New York in 2050, in which women and men are equal, children are reared by the state, machines handle all the work, and most people, having nothing else to do, spend much of their time at the gym, obsessed with fitness. Dodd describes this world as “the very acme of dreariness.” What is a dystopia? The gym. (That’s still true. In a 2011 episode of “Black Mirror,” life on earth in an energy-scarce future has been reduced to an interminable spin class.)

Utopians believe in progress; dystopians don’t. They fight this argument out in competing visions of the future, utopians offering promises, dystopians issuing warnings. In 1895, in “The Time Machine,” H. G. Wells introduced the remarkably handy device of travelling through time by way of a clock. After that, time travel proved convenient, but even Wells didn’t always use a machine. In his 1899 novel, “When the Sleeper Awakes,” his hero simply oversleeps his way to the twenty-first century, where he finds a world in which people are enslaved by propaganda, and “helpless in the hands of the demagogue.” That’s one problem with dystopian fiction: forewarned is not always forearmed.

Sleeping through the warning signs is another problem. “I was asleep before,” the heroine of “The Handmaid’s Tale” says in the new Hulu production of Margaret Atwood’s 1986 novel. “That’s how we let it happen.” But what about when everyone’s awake, and there are plenty of warnings, but no one does anything about them? “NK3,” by Michael Tolkin (Atlantic), is an intricate and cleverly constructed account of the aftermath of a North Korean chemical attack; the NK3 of the title has entirely destroyed its victims’ memories and has vastly diminished their capacity to reason. This puts the novel’s characters in the same position as the readers of all dystopian fiction: they’re left to try to piece together not a whodunnit but a howdidithappen. Seth Kaplan, who’d been a pediatric oncologist, pages through periodicals left in a seat back on a Singapore Airlines jet, on the ground at LAX. The periodicals, like the plane, hadn’t moved since the plague arrived. “It confused Seth that the plague was front-page news in some but not all of the papers,” Tolkin writes. “They still printed reviews of movies and books, articles about new cars, ways to make inexpensive costumes for Halloween.” Everyone had been awake, but they’d been busy shopping for cars and picking out movies and cutting eyeholes in paper bags.

This spring’s blighted crop of dystopian novels is pessimistic about technology, about the economy, about politics, and about the planet, making it a more abundant harvest of unhappiness than most other heydays of downheartedness. The Internet did not stitch us all together. Economic growth has led to widening economic inequality and a looming environmental crisis. Democracy appears to be yielding to authoritarianism. “Hopes, dashed” is, lately, a long list, and getting longer. The plane is grounded, seat backs in the upright position, and we are dying, slowly, of stupidity.

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Pick your present-day dilemma; there’s a new dystopian novel to match it. Worried about political polarization? In “American War” (Knopf), Omar El Akkad traces the United States’ descent from gridlock to barbarism as the states of the former Confederacy (or, at least, the parts that aren’t underwater) refuse to abide by the Sustainable Future Act, and secede in 2074. Troubled by the new Jim Crow? Ben H. Winters’s “Underground Airlines” (Little, Brown) is set in an early-twenty-first-century United States in which slavery abides, made crueller, and more inescapable, by the giant, unregulated slave-owning corporations that deploy the surveillance powers of modern technology, so that even escaping to the North (on underground airlines) hardly offers much hope, since free blacks in cities like Chicago live in segregated neighborhoods with no decent housing or schooling or work and it’s the very poverty in which they live that defeats arguments for abolition by hardening ideas about race. As the book’s narrator, a fugitive slave, explains, “Black gets to mean poor and poor to mean dangerous and all the words get murked together and become one dark idea, a cloud of smoke, the smokestack fumes drifting like filthy air across the rest of the nation.”

Radical pessimism is a dismal trend. The despair, this particular publishing season, comes in many forms, including the grotesque. In “The Book of Joan” (Harper), Lidia Yuknavitch’s narrator, Christine Pizan, is forty-nine, and about to die, because she’s living on a satellite orbiting the earth, where everyone is executed at the age of fifty; the wet in their bodies constitutes the colony’s water supply. (Dystopia, here, is menopause.) Her body has aged: “If hormones have any meaning left for any of us, it is latent at best.” She examines herself in the mirror: “I have a slight rise where each breast began, and a kind of mound where my pubic bone should be, but that’s it. Nothing else of woman is left.” Yuknavitch’s Pizan is a resurrection of the medieval French scholar and historian Christine de Pisan, who in 1405 wrote the allegorical “Book of the City of Ladies,” and, in 1429, “The Song of Joan of Arc,” an account of the life of the martyr. In the year 2049, Yuknavitch’s Pizan writes on her body, by a torturous process of self-mutilation, the story of a twenty-first-century Joan, who is trying to save the planet from Jean de Men (another historical allusion), the insane celebrity who has become its ruler. In the end, de Men himself is revealed to be “not a man but what is left of a woman,” with “all the traces: sad, stitched-up sacks of flesh where breasts had once been, as if someone tried too hard to erase their existence. And a bulbous sagging gash sutured over and over where . . . life had perhaps happened in the past, or not, and worse, several dangling attempts at half-formed penises, sewn and abandoned, distended and limp.”

Equal rights for women, emancipation, Reconstruction, civil rights: so many hopes, dashed; so many causes, lost. Pisan pictured a city of women; Lincoln believed in union; King had a dream. Yuknavitch and El Akkad and Winters unspool the reels of those dreams, and recut them as nightmares. This move isn’t new, or daring; it is, instead, very old. The question is whether it’s all used up, as parched as a post-apocalyptic desert, as barren as an old woman, as addled as an old man.

A utopia is a planned society; planned societies are often disastrous; that’s why utopias contain their own dystopias. Most early-twentieth-century dystopian novels took the form of political parables, critiques of planned societies, from both the left and the right. The utopianism of Communists, eugenicists, New Dealers, and Fascists produced the Russian novelist Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We” in 1924, Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” in 1935, Ayn Rand’s “Anthem” in 1937, and George Orwell’s “1984” in 1949. After the war, after the death camps, after the bomb, dystopian fiction thrived, like a weed that favors shade. “A decreasing percentage of the imaginary worlds are utopias,” the literary scholar Chad Walsh observed in 1962. “An increasing percentage are nightmares.”

Much postwar pessimism had to do with the superficiality of mass culture in an age of affluence, and with the fear that the banality and conformity of consumer society had reduced people to robots. “I drive my car to supermarket,” John Updike wrote in 1954. “The way I take is superhigh, / A superlot is where I park it, / And Super Suds are what I buy.” Supersudsy television boosterism is the utopianism attacked by Kurt Vonnegut in “Player Piano” (1952) and by Ray Bradbury in “Fahrenheit 451” (1953). Cold War dystopianism came in as many flavors as soda pop or superheroes and in as many sizes as nuclear warheads. But, in a deeper sense, the mid-century overtaking of utopianism by dystopianism marked the rise of modern conservatism: a rejection of the idea of the liberal state. Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” appeared in 1957, and climbed up the Times best-seller list. It has sold more than eight million copies.

The second half of the twentieth century, of course, also produced liberal-minded dystopias, chiefly concerned with issuing warnings about pollution and climate change, nuclear weapons and corporate monopolies, technological totalitarianism and the fragility of rights secured from the state. There were, for instance, feminist dystopias. The utopianism of the Moral Majority, founded in 1979, lies behind “The Handmaid’s Tale” (a book that is, among other things, an updating of Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”). But rights-based dystopianism also led to the creation of a subgenre of dystopian fiction: bleak futures for bobby-soxers. Dystopianism turns out to have a natural affinity with American adolescence. And this, I think, is where the life of the genre got squeezed out, like a beetle burned up on an asphalt driveway by a boy wielding a magnifying glass on a sunny day. It sizzles, and then it smokes, and then it just lies there, dead as a bug.

Dystopias featuring teen-age characters have been a staple of high-school life since “The Lord of the Flies” came out, in 1954. But the genre only really took off in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, when distrust of adult institutions and adult authority flourished, and the publishing industry began producing fiction packaged for “young adults,” ages twelve to eighteen. Some of these books are pretty good. M. T. Anderson’s 2002 Y.A. novel, “Feed,” is a smart and fierce answer to the “Don’t Be Evil” utopianism of Google, founded in 1996. All of them are characterized by a withering contempt for adults and by an unshakable suspicion of authority. “The Hunger Games” trilogy, whose first installment appeared in 2008, has to do with economic inequality, but, like all Y.A. dystopian fiction, it’s also addressed to readers who feel betrayed by a world that looked so much better to them when they were just a bit younger. “I grew up a little, and I gradually began to figure out that pretty much everyone had been lying to me about pretty much everything ,” the high-school-age narrator writes at the beginning of Ernest Cline’s best-selling 2011 Y.A. novel, “Ready Player One.”

Lately, even dystopian fiction marketed to adults has an adolescent sensibility, pouty and hostile. Cory Doctorow’s new novel, “Walkaway” (Tor), begins late at night at a party in a derelict factory with a main character named Hubert: “At twenty-seven, he had seven years on the next oldest partier.” The story goes on in this way, with Doctorow inviting grownup readers to hang out with adolescents, looking for immortality, while supplying neologisms like “spum” instead of “spam” to remind us that we’re in a world that’s close to our own, but weird. “My father spies on me,” the novel’s young heroine complains. “Walkaway” comes with an endorsement from Edward Snowden. Doctorow’s earlier novel, a Y.A. book called “Little Brother,” told the story of four teen-agers and their fight for Internet privacy rights. With “Walkaway,” Doctorow pounds the same nails with the same bludgeon. His walkaways are trying to turn a dystopia into a utopia by writing better computer code than their enemies. “A pod of mercs and an infotech goon pwnd everything using some zeroday they’d bought from scumbag default infowar researchers” is the sort of thing they say. “They took over the drone fleet, and while we dewormed it, seized the mechas.”

Every dystopia is a history of the future. What are the consequences of a literature, even a pulp literature, of political desperation? “It’s a sad commentary on our age that we find dystopias a lot easier to believe in than utopias,” Atwood wrote in the nineteen-eighties. “Utopias we can only imagine; dystopias we’ve already had.” But what was really happening then was that the genre and its readers were sorting themselves out by political preference, following the same path—to the same ideological bunkers—as families, friends, neighborhoods, and the news. In the first year of Obama’s Presidency, Americans bought half a million copies of “Atlas Shrugged.” In the first month of the Administration of Donald (“American carnage”) Trump, during which Kellyanne Conway talked about alternative facts, “1984” jumped to the top of the Amazon best-seller list. (Steve Bannon is a particular fan of a 1973 French novel called “The Camp of the Saints,” in which Europe is overrun by dark-skinned immigrants.) The duel of dystopias is nothing so much as yet another place poisoned by polarized politics, a proxy war of imaginary worlds.

Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it’s become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century, the fiction of fake news and infowars, the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness. It cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn’t ask anyone to bother to make one. It nurses grievances and indulges resentments; it doesn’t call for courage; it finds that cowardice suffices. Its only admonition is: Despair more. It appeals to both the left and the right, because, in the end, it requires so little by way of literary, political, or moral imagination, asking only that you enjoy the company of people whose fear of the future aligns comfortably with your own. Left or right, the radical pessimism of an unremitting dystopianism has itself contributed to the unravelling of the liberal state and the weakening of a commitment to political pluralism. “This isn’t a story about war,” El Akkad writes in “American War.” “It’s about ruin.” A story about ruin can be beautiful. Wreckage is romantic. But a politics of ruin is doomed. ♦

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Towards a Poetics of Dystopia

• First Online: 30 August 2022

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• Jessica Norledge 4  

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style ((PSLLS))

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In this chapter, I map the history of the dystopian genre, contextualising my research in relation to its critical backdrop and exploring those key literary and socio-cultural influences which spurred the establishment and development of the dystopian form.

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Norledge, J. (2022). Towards a Poetics of Dystopia. In: The Language of Dystopia. Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93103-2_1

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• It also shows that you did not plagiarize or copy someone else's work.

The Research Process (text only)

1.   Develop your Research Topic:

• Use  Opposing Viewpoints database to browse topics and get ideas.

2.   Select Keywords from your Research Topic:

• How many Sources do you need and do they have to be Scholarly or Popular Sources?

3.   Search the Library's Resources  -

4.    Evaluate your Sources:

5.   Create   your Works Cited or Reference page:

Need help? Ask a Librarian, we are always here to help you with your research assignments.  

Library Terms

Abstract: a short summary of an article in an academic journal, usually appearing at the beginning of the article.

Catalog: an online listing of all the materials a library owns with a detailed description of each item and information on where they are located.

Citation: basic information about a specific source; a citation for a book includes author, title, publisher, place of publication and year of publication.

Database: a collection of organized information; Academic Search Complete is an example of an electronic database.

Journal: a publication that contains scholarly articles written by professors, researchers, or experts in a specific area; also called scholarly journals, academic journals and peer reviewed journals .

Periodical: a publication that appears on a continual and predictable schedule; examples include newspapers, magazines and journals.

Reference books: books such as encyclopedias, dictionaries and handbooks; these books provide key sources of information.

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Dystopia Research Paper: Dystopian Topics

• Dystopian Topics

Topic Choices

Issues and Current Events Databases

American History Databases

World History Databases

Other Databases

Databases A-Z

A-z database list, the plagiarism spectrum.

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Welcome to /r/literature, a community for deeper discussions of plays, poetry, short stories, and novels. Discussions of literary criticism, literary history, literary theory, and critical theory are also welcome. We are not /r/books: please do not use this sub to seek book recommendations or homework help.

PhD thesis on dystopian literature

I am thinking about applying for PhD in the UK, the topic that I have in mind is dystopian literature and with the thesis, I want to work on predicting the future and draw out the possibilities of the near future. I have yet to find the "gap" since I have just started with my research. Like every other student, my main concerns are my lingering doubts as to whether what I picture myself doing for the next three years can or could be a reality? And hence I wanted to reach out in terms of any sort of guidance, which would really be appreciated.

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