On the representations of Dystopia in Modern English Literature and Its Critical Functions

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Since the appearance of Plato's Republic, not a few thinkers and writers have presented us various images of utopia as the ideal society which does not exist in reality. Searching for the genealogy of utopia, we find there emerged in the twentieth century a number of novels which depicted dystopia or anti-Utopia : We by Zamyatin, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley in Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, to mention but a few. They have a similar characteristic in that a community, organized first from the motif of realizing the ideal society, is now managed by the despotic power, its inhabitants entirely deprived of free will. It should be said that it was a literary expression which reacted against the ideology of Totalitarianism whose typical instances we could see in the regimes of Stalin or Hitler. These days, we have some misgivings that the unbelievably rapid progress of technology might have at last reached the point where we could no longer control the complicated, too sophisticated global system, so that we feel the literary expression of dystopia all the more actual.In this research, I especially paid attention to some versions of dystopia, which has been treated as a variant of utopia in the history of utopian thought, and investigated its characteristics from a number of points of view, with the help of recent studies of feminism, postcolonialism, and cultural studies. Moreover, finding that most novels of dystopia showing concern on the problem of language, I tried to construct a kind of "dystopian linguistics" with the base of the theory of Michael Bahtin. Furthermore, showing that it is now handled by postmodern writers, as well as by Young Adult novelists, such as Robert Cormier, I have confirmed that the theme of dystopia has more actual, critical significance and relevance for us than ever.