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Explores a wide range of utopias and dystopias in film and literature and their important relationship to our present moment.
Wastelands and Wonderlands challenges readers, in these uniquely dystopian times, to reevaluate their ideas about utopia and dystopia. Bringing together film, literary, and utopian studies scholars from across the world, this interdisciplinary collection explores a wide range of utopias and dystopias in film and literature, from visionaries as varied as William Morris and George Lucas to such fresh new and distinctive voices as Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and N. K. Jemisin. Contributors dismantle myths about utopian and dystopian film, literature, and television and explore the nature of utopian and dystopian fiction and its important relationship to our present moment. Whether through ecocritical work, work aimed at decolonizing utopian studies, debates about our relationship with technology and the nonhuman, forms of utopian hope and pessimism, or new thinking about cinematic and literary techniques and production, these essays offer fresh insight into the subject area and something to interest any reader.
"One of the things that impresses me most about this collection is its ability to move beyond a narrow Anglocentric view of utopias and dystopias, including everything from Afrofuturism to ideologies of indigenous Australians. It considers films and literature, utopias and dystopias equally, while also exploring the connections between them." — David Venditto, author of Whiteness at the End of the World: Race in Post-Apocalyptic Cinema
Matthew Leggatt is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Winchester, United Kingdom. He is the editor of Was It Yesterday? Nostalgia in Contemporary Film and Television, also published by SUNY Press, and the author of Play in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction and Cultural and Political Nostalgia in the Age of Terror: The Melancholic Sublime.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Imagining an Exit
Matthew Leggatt
Part I: Utopias on Screen
1. Playfulness, Utopia, and The Fifth Element
Steven Rybin
2. Heavenly Pictures: Utopian Thinking in the Anti-Utopian Cinema of Michael Haneke
Daniel Varndell
3. "I Don't See How Singing and Dancing Could Be Dangerous": Becoming Utopian in Utopia Falls— Interrogating a Nano-Utopian Moment in Young Adult TV
Heather McKnight
4. Utopian Technology in The Mosquito Coast
Douglas McFarland
5. The Utopian World of Technicolor
Murray Pomerance
Part II: Utopias on the Page
6. On the Nature of Utopia: A Dialogue Between Ursula K. Le Guin and N. K. Jemisin
Raffaella Baccolini
7. Utopianism and Imperialism in H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau and William Golding's Lord of the Flies
Hisashi Ozawa
8. Pessimistic Utopianism
Sean Seeger
9. Utopias, Human Nature, and Green Lifestyles
Werner Christie Mathisen
Part III: Dystopias on the Page
10. Algorithmic Satire and the End of Social Media Utopianism in Dave Eggers's The Circle (2013) and The Every (2021)
Matthew Leggatt
11. The Double Gesture of Nonhuman Voices in Kazuo Ishiguro's Speculative Fiction
Burcu Kayıscı Akkoyun
12. Indigenizing the Critical Dystopia: Alexis Wright's (Post)Apocalyptic Imaginaries in Carpentaria and The Swan Book
Jacqueline Dutton
13. The End of Dystopia
Patricia McManus
Part IV: Dystopias on Screen
14. Lonely Utopia, Lonesome Dystopia: The Crisis of Today and Tomorrow
Sean Redmond
15. Totality and Totalitarianism in Four Hollywood Dystopian Films
Maria Varsam
16. "Hell Is Empty and All the Devils Are Here": Space, Corporeality, and Failed Utopia in Westworld
Christina Wilkins
17. Young Adult Dystopia's Influence on the Female Heroine in the TV Series The Handmaid's Tale
Jelena Pataki Šumiga
18. Rebels with a Cause? Waste in Star Wars
Tom Ue and Callum McNutt
List of Contributors
Index