The production of various forms of utopian fiction in twentieth-century Europe and America is enormous so only some of the major trends can be discussed here. Both positive and negative utopias appeared, but the latter attracted more attention: in response to the infelicitous, violent, and plainly criminal attempts to realize utopian projects, with well-known counterproductive results, some highly interesting dystopian novels were written.

Apart from the growth of dystopian fiction in reaction to unchecked technological and disastrous political developments, there is another factor that has radically changed the writing and reading of utopias. Increasing democracy and the introduction of universal electoral suffrage stimulated not only the political but also the cultural autonomy of individuals, who felt less and less bound to remain loyal to traditional beliefs and conventions. The reactions to social wrongs and to projects for correcting them were also individualized. The essentially Manichaean distinction between eutopia and dystopia was relativized, not only because, at least since Mande - ville and Swift, awareness had grown that a eutopian society would never be realized on earth, but also because the judgment whether a particular text was to be considered eutopian or dystopian appeared to be linked to a critical reader’s individual value system. It is not farfetched to suspect that the emphasis on the role of the reader in literary communication after World War II had been made possible by the gradual democratic emancipation of individuals in the first half of the century. As mentioned in the introduction, the judgment whether Plato’s Republic represents a eutopia or a dystopia depends on the reader’s personal affinity with the abolition of family life and the organization of regulated promiscuity and eugenics. Similarly, the credibility of the eutopian perspective in socialist-realist fiction depends on the reader’s affinity with Communist ideology, just as there is some logic in the rejection of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or Zamyatin’s We by Communist critics.

At a basic, textual level, however, most critics agree that some narratives are clearly dystopian and others eutopian, whereas in some others yet again the two generic modes appear in combination. In this chapter I shall first discuss fiction that generally is considered dystopian, then turn to some well-known attempts to represent positive utopias, and finally comment on texts whose utopian purport remains ambiguous.