Critical Theory and Dystopia

Dystopian fiction is one of the most popular genres of the twenty-first century. This book explores its meaning and significance, asking whether it retains the critical energy of the utopian fiction it seems to have replaced or whether it is simply a compensatory form that extolls the present as preferable to a frightening future. The book tracks dystopia as a genre of fiction that occupies the spaces of literature and politics simultaneously. Drawing on Theodor Adorno's critique of the situation of writing in the twentieth century, it applies the notion of a 'negative commitment' to situate both the potential and the limits of dystopia. Examining classic dystopias by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, the book follows the mutation of the genre in works by Margaret Atwood, J. G. Ballard and William Gibson in the 1980s. It concludes by exploring the dystopias of Michel Houellebecq, Lionel Shriver and Gary Shteyngart. Critical theory and dystopia makes the case for a more rigorously historicised understanding of the dystopias we have now. In addition to reworking the scholarship on dystopian fiction, it also makes a significant contribution towards reorienting approaches to Theodor Adorno, casting his literary-theoretical work as an invaluable resource with which to approach our own present so as to figure out how best to break out of it.