Utopias and Dystopias in the Fiction of H. G. Wells and William Morris

Emelyne Godfrey is Publicity Officer of the H.G. Wells Society. She graduated with a PhD from Birkbeck College in 2008 and is author of Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes (2012) and Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature (2010), published by Palgrave Macmillan. In 2014 she edited The Convert, the first suffragette novel, originally published in 1907.

“This collection of essays highlights and interrogates the differences between Wells’s and Morris’s respective worldviews, but it also approaches their own interdisciplinary visions through a variety of methodologies. … the breadth and variety of approaches in Godfrey’s collection are commendable. Because methodological scope is so broad, each major section is curated thoughtfully and manageably. … the collection surveys with depth and interest the influence of both writers on each other, on their environments, and on scholarship and post-nineteenth-century fiction.” (Kameron Sanzo, The British Society for Literature and Science, bsls.ac.uk, July, 2017)

• Introduction; Emelyne Godfrey.- SETTING THE SCENE.- Kelmscott House: Threshold to Utopia; Michael Sherborne.- PART I. TIME AS A KIND OF SPACE.- 1. Imaginary Hindsight: Contemporary History in William Morris and H. G. Wells; Helen Kingstone.- 2. ‘Quivers of Idiosyncrasy’: Modern Statistics in A Modern Utopia; Genie Babb.- 3. ‘All Good Earthly Things Are In Utopia Also’: Familiarity and Irony in the Better Worlds of Morris and Wells; Ben Carver.- PART II. MATTERS OUT OF PLACE: DANGER AND DISRUPTION IN UTOPIA.- 4. Problems in Utopia from the Thames Valley to the Pacific Edge; Tony Pinkney.- 5. Utopia’s the Thing: An Analysis of Utopian Program and Impulse in H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau; Rhys Williams.- 6. ‘Great Safe Places Down Deep’: Subterranean Spaces in the Early Novels of H.G. Wells; Catherine Redford.- PART III. DISTORTED REALITIES, SHATTERED PERSPECTIVES.- 7. The Urban Wasteland in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds; Vera Benczik.- 8. An Epistemological Journey: the Uncertainty of Construed Realities in The Time Machine; Károly Pintér.- PART IV. UNNATURAL THEOLOGIES IN THE ISLAND.- 9. Dark Artistry in The Island of Doctor Moreau; Sarah Faulkner.- 10. Punishment, Purgatory, and Paradise; Hating the Sin and Sometimes the Sinner in H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Invisible Man; Gianluca Guerriero.- 11. Mr Blettsworthy on Rampole Island: The Novel as Fable; John Hammond.- PART V. BUILDING THE FUTURE.- 12. ‘Flowers and a Landscape Were the Only Attractions Here’: The England of Wells and Morris in Aldous Huxley’s Interpretation; Maxim Shadurski.- 13. Modernist Ideals: The Utopian Designs of William Morris, Peter Behrens, and the Social Housing Schemes in Mid-Twentieth Century Sheffield; Clare Holdstock.- Bibliography.- Index.-