1516. Originally used as a word play with the Greek language and its English pronunciation, i.e. between ‘ou-topos’ (no place) and ‘eu-topos’ (good place; cf. Seeber, Selbstkritik 55),5 the word has migrated from one individual work to denominate the entire genre (cf. Assheuer 45; also Weber 5).6 Since its beginnings, utopia has commonly been used within literary studies to denote the description of an ideal society fashioned according to the views and opinions of its author.7 By contrast, dystopia is a much younger term. It was first documented in 1868, when John Stuart Mill used the term in a speech to the House of Commons (cf. Shiau). Its morphological structure, “dys” meaning “bad, abnormal, and diseased” (Vieira 16), and “topos” meaning place, yet is like Thomas More’s original neologism.
While the term utopia/eutopia has generally been accepted as proper terminology, scholars still debate about the appropriate denomination of its darker twin: numerous terms compete its supreme use within literary studies. Interestingly, these terms still use the neologism ‘utopia’ as their root (cf. Vieira 3). Konrad Tuzinski offers his readers a collection of the following terms, ‘pessimistic utopia,’ ‘apocalyptic utopia,’ ‘inverted utopia,’ or ‘Groteskutopie,’ before eventually settling for the term ‘devolutionary utopia’ himself (cf. 6f.); Peter Fitting records the use of ‘negative utopia’ as well as ‘anti-utopia’ (cf. “Short History” 126), while Elena Zeißler summarises the last 50 years of dystopian research and confusion of terminology by gathering even more possible terms – among them ‘Gegenutopie,’ ‘Mätopie,’ or ‘Cacotopia’ (cf. 15).8 Yet, Zeißler, eventually, settles for the term ‘dystopia,’ thereby following an emerging consensus within utopian scholarship. ‘Dystopia’ is not only recognised by a majority of readers and researchers alike but also “denotes a broader concept, allowing criticism of utopia, but also [deals] directly […] with contemporary social evils and posits thus an independent term far less linked with utopia/eutopia” (Mohr, Worlds 28f.) – an advantage that other concepts lack for they are morphologically too close to the original neologism.
Increasingly, ‘dystopia’ has become the standard term. This consensus is reflected in the research by the most influential dystopian scholars, who all settle on the term, when attempting to define the genre boundaries. In Scraps of the Untainted Sky (2000), Tom Moylan defines dystopia according to its alignment to “militant pessimism [and] resigned pessimism,” whereas anti-utopia is defined by “despair” (157). However, he is careful not to give the impression of constructing a binary opposition between utopia and anti-utopia. Moylan argues for a continuum which stretches between the two poles – with dystopia being the “literary form that works between these historical antinomies and draws on the textual qualities of both subgenres” (ibid. 147, emphasis in the original). Whereas Moylan defines ‘dystopia’ as a hybrid structure, Lyman Tower Sargent reserves the term for a clear category of works. In “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited” (1994), he writes that ‘positive utopia’ is defined as “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than the society in which that reader lived” (9), whereas ‘dystopia’ is defined as “a non-existent society […] intended [to be viewed] as considerably worse” (ibid.). Rejecting the idea of perfection as a definitional category because “there are in fact very few eutopians that present societies that the author believes to be perfect” (ibid.), he claims that the defining characteristic for his categories ‘eutopia,’ ‘dystopia,’ ‘utopian satire,’ ‘anti-utopia,’ and ‘critical utopia’ is authorial intention – while being aware that one can never be absolutely sure about it – and diminishes the readers’ role in assessing the text.9
Although both Moylan and Sargent offer convincing definitions for both ‘eutopia’ and ‘dystopia,’ this analysis follows the hands-on definitions offered by Darko Suvin, who constructs a taxonomy based on his ‘radically different’ principle. He defines utopia as “the construction of a particular community where socio-political institutions, norms, and individual relationships between people are organized according to a radically different principle than in the author’s community” (Suvin, “Theses” 188, my emphasis), thereby reserving ‘utopia’ as a categorial denominator that includes both eutopian and dystopian writing. He then goes on to differentiate between ‘eutopia,’ “organized according to a radically more perfect principle than in the author’s community” and ‘dystopia,’ “organized according to a radically less perfect principle” (ibid. 189). Yet again, the category of dystopia can be subdivided into ‘anti-utopia,’ a form that is “explicitly designed to refute a currently proposed eutopia” (ibid.), formulating a counter statement concerning utopias, and ‘simple dystopia,’ a more “straightforward dystopia, that is, one which is not also an anti-utopia” (ibid.). Suvin thus bases his taxonomy of dystopias on the question whether they explicitly attack eutopian fiction or not, thereby providing the most suitable theoretical framework for this project.
2. The History of Dystopian Fiction
The Golden Age is the most unlikely of all the dreams that have been, but for it men have given up their life and all their strength, for the sake of it prophets have died and been slain, without it the peoples will not live and cannot die. (Dostoevsky, A Raw Youth 501)
Utopian fiction is a highly self-reflexive genre aware of its rich, dense tradition, its canonised conventions, and its modes of production and reception. To understand this genre, it is imperative to comprehend its intrageneric connections, relations and criticism as well as its long tradition reaching back to the very roots of Western philosophical thought, both in the form of Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian spiritual writings (cf. Han, Triplett, and Anthony, “Introduction” 3).1 It permeates “a sense of [its] own specific tradition [i. e.] by the writer’s consciousness of what has gone before” (Ferns 16f.). Yet, as Bernd Schulte-Middelich asserts, not only authors are expected to be versed in the canonised conventions of the genre but readers are subject to the same high demands (cf. 40): utopian writing expects its audience to be well read in the tradition and history of both subforms, eutopia and dystopia. In order to fully grasp the rich allusions and ongoing intertextual debate about the nature of the radically different community, to borrow Suvin’s words once more, readers are advised to start their research at the beginning of the tradition (cf. Villgradter and Krey 353f.). Dating back to 380–370 BC, Plato’s Politeia, a philosophical tractate written in the form of a Socratic dialogue, is one of the first fictional texts dedicated to the description of an ideal society that should secure a peaceful and perfected co-existence of all citizens of the state (cf. Pfister and Lindner 17; also Ferrari and T. Griffith xxiii.)2 This society is governed by so called ‘Guardians,’ an “enlightened elite of specially trained, philosophically minded thinkers” (Booker and Thomas 75) tasked to watch over the strict moral and conduct rules introduced to foster a radically more perfect society: “there is no end to suffering […] for the human race, unless either philosophers become kings in our cities, or the people who are now called kings and rulers become, in the truest and most complete sense of the word, philosophers” (Politeia 175). Offering thoughts on the distribution of wealth, the institutionalisation of freedom, and the avoidance of oppression, Plato’s Politeia has been classified both as a work of moral and political philosophy (cf. Ferrari and T. Griffith xxiii), which continues to inspire political philosophy, ethics, and of course, utopian writing to this day.
Despite its roots in ancient Greece, eutopia’s modern formulations constitute “an extension of the Enlightenment belief that the judicious application of reason and rationality could result in the essentially unlimited improvement of human society” (Booker, Impulse 4).3 Thomas More’s already mentioned fictional travel report Utopia (clearly written in the tradition of Plato’s Politeia, cf. Booker and Thomas 75) is thus usually considered to be the origin of eutopian writing. Reviving the tradition at the beginning of the 16th century, Thomas More invents the character Raphael Hythloday (i.e. speaker of nonsense) to describe an ideal state system, lecturing his intra- and extradiegetic audience on the ideal construction of a given society in terms of governance of citizens, distribution of wealth, or warfare (a badly hidden critique of England’s society in