Thanks for learning the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use

Please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for. I hope you enjoy the program

Hello, I want to gather together about 20 souls wrote the edge Florence in

1915 and sail away from this world of war and scholar and found a little colony where there should be no money

But a sort of communism as necessary as of life go and some real decency

Utopias were in the air as a 19th swallowing to the 20th century and the literature of the period abound 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 weaker 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 in 1984 and why are writers so much less likely to create a utopia now?

With me to discuss modern utopias is John Kerry emeritus professor of English literature at Oxford University and

Editor of the favor book of utopias

Steve Conner professor of modern literature at Birkbeck University of London and Laura Marcus professor of English at the University of Sussex John Kerry

Can you give us an overview of the kinds of utopia that were written about at the end of the 19th beginning of the 20th century?

Yes, I think there was a change between the late 19th and the early 20th century and I think you could sum it up by saying that late 19th century utopias

are

early 20th century ones pessimistic and that late 19th century ones are

by and large egalitarian

aiming for equality

and early 20th century ones are exclusive

the opposite of egalitarian and you could take marks. I think writing in the critique of the go-to program

...