Desire and Empathy in Twentieth-Century Dystopian Fiction

This book assesses key works of twentieth-century dystopian fiction, including Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night , George Orwell’s  Nineteen Eighty-Four , and Margaret Atwood’s  The Handmaid’s Tale , to demonstrate that the major authors of this genre locate empathy and morality in eroticism. Taken together, these books delineate a subset of politically conscious speculative literature, which can be understood collectively as projected political fiction. While Thomas Horan addresses