The Island of the Great Mother, Or, The Miracle of Île Des Dames
The Island of the Great Mother, Or, The Miracle of Île Des Dames

Author: Gerhart Hauptmann

Publisher:

Published: 1925

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13:

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Begun in 1916, first published in 1924, this an almost poetic utopian work. About one hundred women and a twelve-year-old boy shipwrecked from a luxury liner on an unknown South Sea island establish a matriarchal society, a paradise of natural existence. In this society children are regarded as of divine origin, and there is a taboo on even considering who the father of any given child may be. The island religion resembles ancient Greek mythology but with Hindu and Buddhist aspects. As the male children grow up, they are exiled to the other side of the island where they develop a different kind of society and even establish contact with the outside world. Eventually, the matriarchal rule is ended by a revolt of the men, who bring society back to the more usual 'civilized' aspects and end this temporary, utopian, ideal world.

Modes of Faith
Modes of Faith

Author: Theodore Ziolkowski

Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com

Published: 2011-08-22

Total Pages: 554

ISBN-13: 1459627377

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In the decades surrounding World War I, religious belief receded in the face of radical new ideas such as Marxism, modern science, Nietzschean philosophy, and critical theology. Modes of Faith addresses both this decline of religious belief and the new modes of secular faith that took religion's place in the minds of many writers and poets. Theodore Ziolkowski here examines the motives for this embrace of the secular, locating new modes of faith in art, escapist travel, socialism, politicized myth, and utopian visions. James Joyce, he reveals, turned to art as an escape while Hermann Hesse made a pilgrimage to India in search of enlightenment. Other writers, such as Roger Martin du Gard and Thomas Mann, sought temporary solace in communism or myth. And H. G. Wells, Ziolkowski argues, took refuge in utopian dreams projected in another dimension altogether. Rooted in innovative and careful comparative reading of the work of writers from France, England, Germany, Italy, and Russia, Modes of Faith is a critical masterpiece by a distinguished literary scholar that offers an abundance of insight to anyone interested in the human compulsion to believe in forces that transcend the individual.

Sex in Imagined Spaces
Sex in Imagined Spaces

Author: Caitriona Dhuill

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1351549006

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From Thomas More onwards, writers of utopias have constructed alternative models of society as a way of commenting critically on existing social orders. In the utopian alternative, the sex-gender system of the contemporary society may be either reproduced or radically re-organised. Reading utopian writing as a dialogue between reality and possibility, this study examines the relationship between historical sex-gender systems and those envisioned by utopian texts. Surveying a broad range of utopian writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Huxley, Zamyatin, Wedekind, Hauptmann, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this book reveals the variety and complexity of approaches to re-arranging gender, and locates these 're-arrangements' within contemporary debates on sex and reproduction, masculinity and femininity, desire, taboo and family structure. These issues occupy a position of central importance in the dialogue between utopian imagination and anti-utopian thought which culminates in the great dystopias of the twentieth century and the postmodern re-invention of utopia.