Criticism by genre: The Menippean tradition in British dystopian fiction ("Erewhon" and "Brave New World")

Abstract

"Criticism by Genre: The Menippean Tradition in British Dystopian Fiction" investigates the origins of distinctive features of the English dystopian novel in the ancient and longstanding tradition of Menippean satire. The study traces this influence in the two novels that are must influential on the twentieth-century dystopian tradition in England: Butler's Erewhon and Huxley's Brave New World. Starting with a critical survey of the main concepts and terms that animate contemporary approaches to dystopian fiction, the study identifies a lacuna in the present understanding of the nature and function of this genre: no one has yet appreciated its descent from Menippean satire. Recognizing the debt Erewhon and Brave New World owe to the tradition of Menippean satire and to the work of its famous practitioners--Lucian, Thomas More, Voltaire, Diderot, and Swift--the study reassesses the attitudes toward human nature and the human condition that are developed in these novels, especially as these attitudes emerge through the voice of a fallible narrator. Identifying an ironic structure within these novels that prevents identification of the narrator's point of view with that of the author--an ironic structure almost universally ignored in the critical literature on these novels--the study modifies prevailing definitions of the dystopian genre as a whole and corrects prevailing misunderstandings of Butler and Huxley, providing new interpretations of their structural use of irony on the one hand, and of their attitudes toward human nature and the human condition on the other. The study also explores the critically neglected affinities between Erewhon and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Diderot's Supplement to Bougainville's "Voyage" and Brave New World, arguing that the polemics that Butler and Huxley maintain with the work of their famous predecessors allows us to recognize some distinctly dystopian aspects of their novels.