Looking Backward: 2000 – 1887
Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888) is one of the most influential utopian novels in English. The narrative follows Julian West, who goes to sleep in Boston in 1887 and wakes in the year 2000 to find that the era of competitive capitalism is long over, replaced by an era of co-operation. Wealth is produced…
The Broadview Editions Bookshelf
The Broadview Editions Bookshelf provides digital access to over 450 meticulously edited works of literature. For more than 30 years, Broadview’s editions have presented classic works of literature, both canonical and lesser-known, in a reader-friendly format with scholarly introductions, footnotes, and appendices to situate each work in its historical and cultural moment. This new digital…
Herland and Related Writings
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s provocative utopian novel Herland, first published in 1915, tells its story through the observations of three male explorers who discover a land inhabited solely by women; the women reproduce through parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction). Initially skeptical, the explorers come to realize that Herland has evolved into an ideal, cooperative, matriarchal society—fertile, peaceful, and…
News from Nowhere
Written in 1890, at the close of William Morris’s most intense period of political activism, News from Nowhere is a compelling articulation of his mature views on art, work, community, family, and the nature and structure of the ideal society. A utopian narrative of a future society, it is also an immensely entertaining novel. This…
The Broadview American Bookshelf
The Broadview American Bookshelf provides digital access to over 80 meticulously edited works of American Literature. For more than 30 years, Broadview’s editions have presented classic works of literature, both canonical and lesser-known, in a reader-friendly format with scholarly introductions, footnotes, and appendices to situate each work in its historical and cultural moment. This new…
American
The Autobiography of Ashley Bowen (1728-1813) The Female American, Second Edition (1767) Unca Eliza Winkfield Common Sense (1776) Thomas Paine Rights of Man (1791) Thomas Paine The Age of Reason (1794) Thomas Paine Emma Corbett (1781) Samuel Jackson Pratt Letters from an American Farmer: Selections (1782) Hector St. John De Crèvecoeur (BAAL Edition) The Interesting…
Exploring the Borders of Science Fiction Website Access
University and college courses on science fiction have proliferated in recent decades—and no wonder. From H.G. Wells to H.P. Lovecraft, from Philip K. Dick and Ray Bradbury to Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, and from Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler to N.K. Jemisin, the genre offers a rich lode of literary material…
The Time Machine
Wells was interested in the implications of evolutionary theory on the future of human beings at the biological, sociological, and cultural levels, and The Time Machine, short and readable, draws on many of the social and scientific debates of the time. The Broadview edition of this science fiction classic includes extensive materials on Wells’s scientific…
When the Sleeper Wakes
As George Orwell wrote in 1940, “Everyone who has ever read When the Sleeper Wakes remembers it.” Graham, the “sleeper” of the title, falls into a cataleptic trance in 1897. Graham will survive on life support for 203 years, suddenly waking in 2100. He wakes to a London encased in a glass dome, in which…