Kunio Shin

Bio

Kunio Shin is Associate Professor of British Literature and Culture at Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan. He has written on authors such as Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, and Kingsley Amis, and is currently working on a project that examines the intersection between late modernism and antimodernism in the context of late British imperialism.

Contributions

The Uncanny Golden Country: Late-Modernist Utopia in Nineteen Eighty-Four

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“My new book is a Utopia in the form of a novel”—this is how George Orwell characterized Nineteen Eighty-Four in a letter to a friend on 4 February 1949. [1] As its reception history abundantly documents, it turned out to be an interpretive challenge to read the novel as a utopia. [2] Instead, many early readers chose to read it as the very opposite, as an anti-utopia or dystopia—a form centrally defined by its negative reaction against any attempt at realizing or imagining a utopia. Identifying...

Tags:

utopia uncanny cosmopolitanism politics