The Genesis of Dystopian Meaning Structure and its Relation to Utopian Literary Tradition

Abstract

The article represents an attempt of generalizing the material, collected while researching the problem of meaning structure of dystopian novels of the first half of the 20-th century. The meaning structure of the novels studied was determined as consisting of partial meanings, integrating into initial meaning. Not only the traits of identity between the partial meanings of dystopian novels were revealed, but it was also determined that the partial meanings of utopian novels resulted to be of similar nature. As was revealed in the course of the research many of the partial meanings of dystopian novels ascend to Plato's "Republic". The identity of meaning structure of utopian and dystopian novels allows to draw the conclusion that both genres have generic nature and can be defined as meta-genre.

Category Of Time In Modern English Works Of The Dystopian Genre

“…Although dystopia has its origins in utopia (Zhurkova, 2018;Zhurkova & Khomutnikova, 2019), we contend that such differential features as prospectivity, anthropocentrism, a typical set of characters, the concealment of history, total government control (quite often manifested in a policing language), as well as the division of the dystopian timeline by a certain event into "before" and "after", are reasons to consider dystopia as a separate literary genre.…”