I’m proud to say that my essay “The Folly of Fallen Futures: Reading and Teaching Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward after The End of History” is leading off a new collection of essays entitled Future Humans in Fiction and Film from Cambridge Scholars Publishing. The collection explores the posthuman turn just in time for the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein. You can read a PDF of the introduction and a significant portion of my essay from the Cambridge Scholars website. You can also order it direct from the publisher or from Amazon.
My chapter explores an experiment in teaching gone somewhat wrong. I taught a class about the anxieties of the modernity, and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000-1888 was part of the syllabus. Looking Backward was once the most popular novel in American history, but 21st Century students couldn’t connect to its utopian vision. I explore this gulf between the sensibility of the centuries.
Special thanks to the editors Louisa MacKay Demerjian and Karen F. Stein for making this collection possible and for seeing something I didn’t in my own abstract. Extra special thanks goes to the Duquesne University English Graduate Organization for having me speak at their monthly colloquium. Without their granting me an excellent platform to present a version of my essay, I would not have as focused a final product.