Character and Dystopia

This is the first extended study to specifically focus on character in dystopia. Through the lens of the "last man" figure, Character and Dystopia: The Last Men examines character development in Yevgeny Zamyatins We, Anthony Burgesss A Clockwork Orange, Kazuo Ishiguros Never Let Me Go, Fyodor Dostoevskys Notes from Underground, George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four, Nathanael Wests A Cool Million, David Mamets Glengarry Glen Ross, Octavia Butlers Parable of the Sower, Lois Lowrys The Giver, Michel Houellebecqs Submission, Chan Koonchungs The Fat Years, and Maggie Shen Kings An Excess Male, showing how in the 20th and 21st centuries dystopian nostalgia shades into reactionary humanism, a last stand mounted in defense of forms of subjectivity no longer supported by modernity. Unlike most work on dystopia that emphasizes dystopias politics, this books approach grows out of questions of poetics: What are the formal structures by which dystopian character is constructed? How do dystopian characters operate differently than other characters, within texts and upon the reader? What is the relation between this character and other forms of literary character, such as are found in romantic and modernist texts? By reading character as crucial to the dystopian project, the book makes a case for dystopia as a sensitive register of modern anxieties about subjectivity and its portrayal in literary works.