Women’s Utopian and Dystopian Fiction

Women's Utopian and Dystopian Fiction explores the genres of utopian and dystopian recent fiction. It is about how this literature of both imagined perfection and disaster creates new worlds and critiques gender roles, traditions, and values. Essays range in subject matter from Charlotte Perkins Gilman, P. D. James, Joanna Russ, and Marge Piercy, to Ursula Le Guin, Fay Weldon, and Toni Morrison. Two of the three sections focus on Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood. Examining especially the twentieth century, including second-wave feminism, writers from Tunisia, Turkey, Italy, Korea, the US, and England give both an historical and a global perspective. Utopian and dystopian elements are explored in the Nobel-Prize-winning Doris Lessing's Memoirs of a Survivor, the little-known Mara and Dann, and The Cleft; and new perspectives are offered on Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

Sharon R. Wilson is Emerita Professor of English, University of Northern Colorado. She has taught twentieth-century English and American Literature, Women’s Studies, and Life of the Mind. She has published two books: Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics, and Myths and Fairy Tales in Contemporary Women’s Fiction, and edited two books: Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations and, with Thomas B. Friedman and Shannon Hengen, Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works. She has published numerous other articles on Jean Rhys, Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett, Atwood and Lessing and was Founding President of the Margaret Atwood Society and President of the Doris Lessing Society.