Edward Bellamy – författare

It is the year 2000 - and full employment, material abundance and social harmony can be found everywhere. This is the America to which Julian West, a young Bostonian, awakens after more than a century of sleep. West's initial sense of wonder, his gradual acceptance of the new order and a new love, and Bellamy's wonderful prophetic inventions - electric lighting, shopping malls, credit cards, electronic broadcasting - ensured the mass popularity of this 1888 novel. But, however rich in fantasy and romance, "Looking Backward" is a passionate attach on the social ills of nineteenth-century industrialism and a plea for social reform and moral renewal. In her introduction, Cecelia Tichi discusses how the novel echoes the anguish and hopes of its own age while it embodies a sustaining myth of the American literary tradition - that man's perfectibility is attainable in the New World.

'No person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity.'Julian West, a feckless aristocrat living in fin-de-siècle Boston, plunges into a deep hypnotic sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. America has been turned into a rigorously centralized democratic society in which everything is controlled by a humane and efficient state. In little more than a hundred years the horrors of nineteenth-century capitalism have been all but forgotten. The squalid slums of Boston have been replaced by broad streets, and technological inventions have transformed people's everyday lives. Exiled from the past, West excitedly settles into the ideal society of the future, while still fearing that he has dreamt up his experiences as a time traveller.Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) is a thunderous indictment of industrial capitalism and a resplendent vision of life in a socialist utopia. Matthew Beaumont's lively edition explores the political and psychological peculiarities of this celebrated utopian fiction. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Stimulating, thought-provoking utopian fantasy about a young man who's put into a hypnotic sleep in the late 19th century and awakens in the year 2000 to find a vastly changed world where crime, war, and want no longer exist. A provocative study of human society as it is and as it might be.