Courting utopia: The romance plot in contemporary utopian fiction
Item
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Title
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Courting utopia: The romance plot in contemporary utopian fiction
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:b0239f5320ac:11285
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identifier
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11781
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Creator
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Broad, Katherine R.,
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Contributor
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Carrie Hintz
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Modern literature | American literature | Canadian literature
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Abstract
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Utopian literature is typically read as a transformative genre that compels readers to rethink the norms and assumptions that govern their worlds. But what kinds of imaginative work does the genre perform with regards to women's status in the ideal society, and how has this work developed---or failed to---in more recent utopian texts? Courting Utopia: The Romance Plot in Contemporary Utopian Fiction focuses on a specific subgenre of utopian literature known as the feminist critical utopia, which emerged in the 1970s out of previous utopian genres and continues to develop today. Despite the genre's aspirations for social change, however, I observe an ongoing refusal to challenge, let alone transform, normative gender roles in feminist critical utopian texts, a limitation that persists because the novels remain wedded to traditional narrative conventions carried over from earlier utopian forms. Ultimately, the genre remains predominantly structured not around the rhetoric of social change, as utopian scholars generally presume, but around the rhetorics of romance. Looking at the work of Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, and Ursula K. Le Guin, who have been central to defining the field, as well as recent popular novelists Suzanne Collins and Scott Westerfeld who show where the feminist critical utopia is moving in the twenty-first century, I detail how the romance plot undermines the feminist utopian project by restricting the utopian imagination to traditional gender roles. Identifying romance as a key obstacle to the imagining of more radical forms of social change, I break company with those who see authors like Piercy, Atwood, and Le Guin as the paragons of the genre and instead look to Robert C. O'Brien, Samuel R. Delany, and finally Toni Morrison for alternative narratives that move beyond romance to reimagine feminist critical utopian worlds. The persistence of the romance plot in contemporary feminist critical utopias has been largely overlooked by utopian scholarship, but contending with how this pervasive plotline shapes utopian possibilities stands to offer new insights into the development of more open, oppositional, and liberatory female characters and feminist alternatives to the status quo.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
