![]() ![]() In Jonas' community, there is no poverty, starvation, unemployment, lack of housing, or prejudice everything is perfectly planned to eliminate any problems. The people seem perfectly content to live in an oli-garchy - a government run by a select few - in which a Community of Elders enforces the rules. Jonas' community appears to be a utopia, but, in reality, it is a dystopia. She uses the irony of utopian appearances but dystopian realities to provoke her readers to question and value their own freedoms and individual identities. Lois Lowry chose to write The Giver as a dystopian novel because it was the most effective means to communicate her dissatisfaction with the lack of awareness that human beings have about their interdependence with each other, their environment, and their world. Examples of fictional dystopias include Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), Ray Bradbury'sįahrenheit 451 (1953), and George Orwell's Animal Farm (1944) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). They also serve to warn members of a society to pay attention to the society in which they live and to be aware of how things can go from bad to worse without anyone realizing what has happened. Although the founders of these utopian communities had good intentions, none of the communities flourished as their creators had hoped.ĭystopias are a way in which authors share their concerns about society and humanity. A few of the places where utopian communities were started include Fruitlands, Massachusetts Harmony, Pennsylvania Corning, Iowa Oneida, New York and Brook Farm, Massachusetts, founded in 1841 by American transcendentalists. In the United States, people have attempted to create real-life utopias. For example, English author Samuel Butler wrote Erewhon (1872) ("nowhere" spelled backward) and Erewhon Revisited (1901), and William Morris wrote News From Nowhere (1891). The idea of utopias continued to be popular during the nineteenth century. Other early fictional utopias include various exotic communities in Jonathan Swift's famous Gulliver's Travels (1726). More's Utopia protested contemporary English life by describing an ideal political state in a land called Utopia, or Nowhere Land. However, once the setting of a utopian or dystopian novel has been established, the focus of the novel is usually not on the technology itself but rather on the psychology and emotions of the characters who live under such conditions.Īlthough the word utopia was coined in 1516 by Sir Thomas More when he wrote Utopia, writers have written about utopias for centuries, including the biblical Garden of Eden in Genesis and Plato's Republic, about a perfect state ruled by philosopher-kings. Both utopias and dystopias share characteristics of science fiction and fantasy, and both are usually set in a future in which technology has been used to create perfect living conditions. Dystopia, which is the direct opposite of utopia, is a term used to describe a utopian society in which things have gone wrong. The word utopia comes from the Greek words ou, meaning "no" or "not," and topos, meaning "place." Since its original conception, utopia has come to mean a place that we can only dream about, a true paradise.
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