Looking Backward 2000-1887 - Softcover

Bellamy, Edward

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199552576 ISBN 13: 9780199552573

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2009

Synopsis

'No person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity.'

Julian West, a feckless aristocrat living in fin-de-siècle Boston, plunges into a deep hypnotic sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. America has been turned into a rigorously centralized democratic society in which everything is controlled by a humane and efficient state. In little more than a hundred years the horrors of nineteenth-century capitalism have been all but forgotten. The squalid slums of Boston have been replaced by broad streets, and technological inventions have transformed people's everyday lives. Exiled from the past, West excitedly settles into the ideal society of the future, while still fearing that he has dreamt up his experiences as a time traveller.

Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) is a thunderous indictment of industrial capitalism and a resplendent vision of life in a socialist utopia. Matthew Beaumont's lively edition explores the political and psychological peculiarities of this celebrated utopian fiction.

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From the Publisher

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Edition details

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0199552576
• ISBN 13: 9780199552573
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 220
• Editor: Beaumont Matthew