Modernist Utopias

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the mad, bad world of modern utopias. “I want to gather together about twenty souls,” wrote D H Lawrence in 1915, “and sail away from this world of war and squalor and find a little colony where there shall be no money but a sort of communism as necessaries of life go, and some real decency”. Utopias were in the air in the first decades of the 20th century and the literature of the period abounds with worlds of imagined escape, feminist utopias, technological nightmares and rich imaginings of the world as it could or should become. Many of the societies that writers like H G Wells created were meant seriously, as signposts to a future that would seem horrific to us now, where the weak are eradicated and the strong prosper and procreate.What was it about that era that brought forward so many imagined futures? How did utopias become the dystopias of Brave New World and 1984, and why are writers so much less likely to create a Utopia now?With John Carey, Emeritus Professor of English Literature, Oxford University and editor of The Faber Book of Utopias; Steve Connor, Professor of Modern Literature at Birkbeck, University of London; Laura Marcus, Professor of English, University of Sussex.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• John Carey 7 episodes
  Emeritus Professor of English Literature, Oxford University
• Steve Connor 3 episodes
  Professor of Modern Literature at Birkbeck, University of London
• Laura Marcus 2 episodes
  Professor of English, University of Sussex

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Programme ID: p003k9fz

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003k9fz

Auto-category: 320 (Political science)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. I want to gather together about 20 souls, wrote D. H. Florence in 1915, and sail away from this world of war and squalor and found a little colony where there shall be no money but a sort of communism as necessaries of life go and some real decency.