Epistemological Warfare and Hope in Critical Dystopia

This book focuses on the transition from innocence and ignorance to experience and knowledge in dystopian fiction, revealing that truth and knowledge in Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night, Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed, and P. D. James’s The Children of Men are fictional constructs. These critical dystopias show characters’ journeys from ignorance to experience as a process of epistemological warfare. The protagonists’ initial ignorance is shattered through various symbolic transformations, increasing the utopian undertone within these examples of critical dystopia. The open-ended structure of these texts reinforces the hope of the utopian impulses and of revisionary epistemologies that might lead to more just, meritocratic societies