“Peace, harmony, ease, security, happiness, will be found only in Individuality.”
There is a fine tradition of Utopias going terribly wrong when people tried to put their ideals into practice
Extreme green eco building concept
The entertaining story of four utopian writers--Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman--and their continuing influence today In this lively literary history, Michael Robertson introduces readers to a vital strain of utopianism that seized the imaginations of four American and British writers during an extraordinary period of literary and social experiment. The publication of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward in 1888 opened the floodgates to an unprecedented wave of utopian writing. William Morris, the Arts and Crafts pioneer, was a committed socialist whose News from Nowhere envisions a workers' Arcadia. Edward Carpenter boldly argued that homosexuals constitute a utopian vanguard. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a women's rights activist and the author of \"The Yellow Wallpaper,\" wrote numerous utopian fictions, including Herland, a visionary tale of an all-female society. These writers believed in radical gender and class equality, envisioning new forms of familial and romantic relationships, and were committed to living a simple life rooted in a restored natural world. And their legacy remains with us today, from Occupy Wall Street to the Radical Faeries.
A group of Utopians, dispirited by a mid-19th-century America they view as dissolute, takes to the pastoral life, but finds little satisfaction in its socialist living experiments. Little by little, the members' hypocrisies, contradictions, and ideological and economic paradoxes are exposed — even as they attempt to create the ideal community. Among the group are Hollingsworth, an idealistic but egotistical reformer; Zenobia, an ardent feminist and exotic beauty; Priscilla, her frail and mysterious sister; Old Moodie, the sisters' manipulative father; Westervelt, a demonic mesmerist; and Miles Coverdale, whose narrative of the Blithedale experiment reveals the sexist and classist oppression permeating the Utopian group. First published in 1852, The Blithedale Romance was based in part on Hawthorne's disillusioning experiences with the Brook Farm experimental community near Boston in 1841. An engrossing novel about love, idealism, and politics tragically gone amiss, this captivating work bristles with the author's perceptive wit and intelligence.
This volume contains H. G. Wells' 1922 science fiction novel, \"Men Like Gods\". Mr. Barnstaple is a journalist for \"The Liberal\" who is prone to depression. One day, Barnstaple and a group of other Englishmen are accidentally transported to a parallel universe and find a Utopian society on earth with a socialist world government and advanced science. However, the new arrivals pose a biological threat to the Utopians and, as such, are quarantined. Confined, the outsiders plot to take over Utopia. Herbert George Wells (1866 - 1946) was a prolific English writer who wrote in a variety of genres, including the novel, politics, history, and social commentary. Today, he is perhaps best remembered for his contributions to the science fiction genre thanks to such novels as \"The Time Machine\" (1895), \"The Invisible Man\" (1897), and \"The War of the Worlds\" (1898). Although never a winner, Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature a total of four times. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this book now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.
