This book aims to put the fiction back into utopian fictions. While tracing the development of fiction in the writing of modern utopias, especially in Britain, it seeks to demonstrate in specific ways how those utopias have become increasingly literary--possibly as a reaction not only against the social scientification of modern utopias but also against the modern attempt to institute utopia in reality, notably in the former Soviet Union but also in consumerist, late-twentieth-century America. After an introductory discussion of how we understand--and how we should understand--modern utopian fictions, the book provides several examples of the ways in which those understandings affect our appreciation of utopian fiction. There are chapters on H. G. Wells's Time Machine Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara Aldous Huxley's Brave New World George Orwell's Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four William Golding's Lord of the Flies and Iris Murdoch's The Bell. Firchow provides a truly fresh approach t