Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity and the End of Culture

245 Pages·2012·1.22 MB·English

by  Simon J. James.

MAPS OF UTOPIA
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Maps of Utopia
H. G. Wells, Modernity,
and the End of Culture
SIMON J. JAMES
‘AmapoftheworldthatdoesnotincludeUtopia
isnotworthevenglancingat.’
OscarWilde,‘TheSoulofManunderSocialism’
1
3
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xiii
1. OfArt,OfLiterature,OfMr.H.G.Wells 1
2. TheHistoryoftheFuture:TheScientificRomances 37
3. TheUsesofLiteracy:ReadingandRealisminWells’sNovels 77
4. TheIdeaofaPlannedWorld:H.G.Wells’sUtopias 125
5. EducationandCatastrophe:TheWarandtheWorld 157
Bibliography 197
Index 221
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Preface
Writingonanauthorwithwhosepersonalviewsonefrequentlydisagrees
withcanproducedifficulties.AnauthorasopinionatedasH.G.Wellswill
provokesomedisagreementinalmostallofhisreaders.Asaconsequence,
differentcriticalworkonWellshasseverallydismissedthemajorityofhis
published output, been nakedly hostile to the content of the text it
discusses, sought to find a means of legitimizing his work’s agenda in
the present day, or even reshaped the text to promote the critic’s own
agenda.
I have attempted in what follows to avoid where possible unnecessary
hindsight condemnation of Wells’s failings, but also to suggest a small
revisioninthereceivedversionoftheliteraryhistoryofthefin-de-siècleand
earlytwentieth-centuryperiods.Theperioddubbedthe‘Interregnum’by
RaymondWilliams(acriticwhowasnonethelessamongthefirsttotreat
suchwritersasGissing,Wells,andBennettwiththehistoricalseriousness
thattheydeserve)hasonlyrecentlybeguntoreceivethecriticalattention
it deserves, in comparison to the high Victorian era and canonical mod-
ernism.1EvenasstaunchaWellsianasJohnHammondmakesacasefor
thevalueofWells’sworkonthegroundsofhis‘modernism’,asifthis,as
for Conrad and James, is the means by which he might escape the
backwater of ‘transition’ and be counted in the first rank of canonical
writers.2SincehighmodernismandthebirthofEnglishStudiesasamajor
academic discipline share an origin at roughly the same time, they share
many of the same values and methodologies—Wells is thus proved
‘wrong’ by the canons that evolved for literary study over the twentieth
century. As David Trotter has also argued, modernism is still too often
used toevaluateratherthan tocharacterize, todistinguishbetweenthose
writers who are considered innovatory, and thus worthy of study, and
those who aren’t.3 Maps of Utopia seeks to recover some of Wells’s
reputationinhisownlifetime,asperhapsthemostinfluentialAnglophone
1 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1963),165.
2 J. R Hammond, H. G. Wells and the Modern Novel (New York: St Martin’s Press,
1988).Forathoughtfuldiscussionofthisissue,seeRobertL.Caserio,‘TheNovelasNovel
Experiment in Statement: The Anticanonical Example of H. G. Wells’, in Decolonizing
Tradition:NewViewsofTwentieth-Century‘British’LiteraryCanons(Urbana:Universityof
IllinoisPress,1992),88–109.
3 DavidTrotter,TheEnglishNovelinHistory,1895–1920(London:Routledge,1993),5.