Better Futures Needed

Abstract:Both of the books reviewed consider the contemporaneity and the current relevance of the literary utopia and dystopia. Adam Stock's Modern Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought traces the history of the dystopia by examining both well-known and less familiar twentieth-century literary texts, demonstrating how they provoke a counterfactual reflection on the social and cultural politics of their readers' present. Caroline Edwards's Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel focusses on more recent literary fiction, tracing themes of hopefulness and community as forms of resistance to hegemonic capitalism.