Utopias and Dystopias in the Fiction of H. G. Wells and William Morris

Emelyne Godfrey is Publicity Officer of the H.G. Wells Society. She graduated with a PhD from Birkbeck College in 2008 and is author of Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes (2012) and Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature (2010), published by Palgrave Macmillan. In 2014 she edited The Convert, the first suffragette novel, originally published in 1907.

• Introduction; Emelyne Godfrey.- SETTING THE SCENE.- Kelmscott House: Threshold to Utopia; Michael Sherborne.- PART I. TIME AS A KIND OF SPACE.- 1. Imaginary Hindsight: Contemporary History in William Morris and H. G. Wells; Helen Kingstone.- 2. ‘Quivers of Idiosyncrasy’: Modern Statistics in A Modern Utopia; Genie Babb.- 3. ‘All Good Earthly Things Are In Utopia Also’: Familiarity and Irony in the Better Worlds of Morris and Wells; Ben Carver.- PART II. MATTERS OUT OF PLACE: DANGER AND DISRUPTION IN UTOPIA.- 4. Problems in Utopia from the Thames Valley to the Pacific Edge; Tony Pinkney.- 5. Utopia’s the Thing: An Analysis of Utopian Program and Impulse in H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau; Rhys Williams.- 6. ‘Great Safe Places Down Deep’: Subterranean Spaces in the Early Novels of H.G. Wells; Catherine Redford.- PART III. DISTORTED REALITIES, SHATTERED PERSPECTIVES.- 7. The Urban Wasteland in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds; Vera Benczik.- 8. An Epistemological Journey: the Uncertainty of Construed Realities in The Time Machine; Károly Pintér.- PART IV. UNNATURAL THEOLOGIES IN THE ISLAND.- 9. Dark Artistry in The Island of Doctor Moreau; Sarah Faulkner.- 10. Punishment, Purgatory, and Paradise; Hating the Sin and Sometimes the Sinner in H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Invisible Man; Gianluca Guerriero.- 11. Mr Blettsworthy on Rampole Island: The Novel as Fable; John Hammond.- PART V. BUILDING THE FUTURE.- 12. ‘Flowers and a Landscape Were the Only Attractions Here’: The England of Wells and Morris in Aldous Huxley’s Interpretation; Maxim Shadurski.- 13. Modernist Ideals: The Utopian Designs of William Morris, Peter Behrens, and the Social Housing Schemes in Mid-Twentieth Century Sheffield; Clare Holdstock.- Bibliography.- Index.-

“This collection of essays highlights and interrogates the differences between Wells’s and Morris’s respective worldviews, but it also approaches their own interdisciplinary visions through a variety of methodologies. … the breadth and variety of approaches in Godfrey’s collection are commendable. Because methodological scope is so broad, each major section is curated thoughtfully and manageably. … the collection surveys with depth and interest the influence of both writers on each other, on their environments, and on scholarship and post-nineteenth-century fiction.” (Kameron Sanzo, The British Society for Literature and Science, bsls.ac.uk, July, 2017)