'Brave New World': Contexts and Legacies

This collection of essays provides new readings of Huxley's classic dystopian satire, Brave New World (1932). Leading international scholars consider from new angles the historical contexts in which the book was written and the cultural legacies in which it looms large. The volume affirms Huxley's prescient critiques of modernity and his continuing relevance to debates about political power, art, and the vexed relationship between nature and humankind. Individual chapters explore connections between Brave New World and the nature of utopia, the 1930s American Technocracy movement, education and social control, pleasure, reproduction, futurology, inter-war periodical networks, motherhood, ethics and the Anthropocene, islands, and the moral life. The volume also includes a 'Foreword' written by David Bradshaw, one of the world's top Huxley scholars. Timely and consistently illuminating, this collection is essential reading for students, critics, and Huxley enthusiasts alike.

Auteur

Dr Jonathan Greenberg is Associate Professor in the English Department at Montclair State University, USA. He is the author of Modernism, Satire, and the Novel (2011).

Dr Nathan Waddell is Assistant Professor in the School of English at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is the author of Modernist Nowheres (2012).

List of Contributors

David Bradshaw, University of Oxford, UK

Laura Frost, The New School, USA

Andrzej Gsiorek, University of Birmingham, UK

Keith Leslie Johnson, Georgia Regents University, USA

Aaron Matz, Scripps College, USA

Jerome Meckier,(Emeritus) University of Kentucky, USA

Patrick Parrinder, University of Reading, UK

Claudia Rosenhan, University of Edinburgh, UK

Carey Snyder, Ohio University, USA

Kathryn Southworth, Independent Scholar

Contenu

Introduction.- 1. Brave New World as a Modern Utopia.- 2. Signs of the T.- 3. 'That Learning Were Such a Filthy Thing'.- 4. The Pleasures of Dystopia.- 5. Huxley and Reproduction.- 6. What Huxley Got Wrong.- 7. Brave New World and Vanity Fair; Carey Snyder.- 8. The Brave New World of Mothering.- 9. Ethics in the Late Anthropocene.- 10. 'My Hypothetical Islanders'.- 11. 'Words Without Reason'.