ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the ways in which the competing world(s) established in fantasy operate as canvases upon which our assumptions about society are exposed and interrogated. The opening section looks at three narratives for children: Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, Jean de Brunhoff’s Barbar the Elephant and Enid Blyton’s Noddy books, exploring their relationship to controversial racial politics, before moving on to a discussion of American comic book superheroes and Japanese film and toy culture, linked to American Post-World War II hostility. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is then discussed in detail, especially in relation to oppressive dreams and nightmares, its treatment of time and the particular appeal of the dystopia to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Western societies. Following an analysis of George Saunder’s short story Escape from Spiderhead, the chapter moves on to discuss two dystopias by Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake. Here, the main themes comprise political surveillance, the politics of smoking, environmentalism, medical research and maternal loss. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the feminist utopia, based on Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground.
