Desire and Empathy in Twentieth-Century Dystopian Fiction

This book assesses key works of twentieth-century dystopian fiction, including Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, to demonstrate that the major authors of this genre locate empathy and morality in eroticism. Taken together, these books delineate a subset of politically conscious speculative literature, which can be ...