Abstract
This second chapter on modern utopias looks at the work of a number of writers who have been concerned with the struggle between the cult of power and the power of culture. By the cult of power, I mean the worship of authoritarian rule that found its chief expression in Nazi Germany under Hitler; by the power of culture I mean that faith in the liberal values of reason, justice, mercy, and brotherhood that are imperfectly enshrined in our political institutions but are more perfectly embodied in some of the great literary and artistic works of the past. The writers with whom I shall mainly be concerned are Rex Warner, George Orwell, and Shirley Hazzard.
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Notes
Irving Howe, ‘The Fiction of Anti-Utopia’, A World More Attractive, New York, 1963, p. 222.
George Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit, (Harmondsworth, 1970) p. 154.
See Keith Alldritt, The Making of George Orwell: An Essay in Literary History (London, 1969), to which my account of Nineteen Eighty-Four owes something.
For general discussion of Shirley Hazzard’s fiction, see my essay in Contemßorary Novelists; edited James Vinson (London, 1972), pp. 578–80, and ‘Patterns and Preoccupations of Love: The Novels of Shirley Hazzard’, Meanjin, 29 (Summer 1970), pp. 461–6.
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© 1978 John Colmer
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Colmer, J. (1978). The Cult of Power and the Power of Culture. In: Coleridge to Catch-22. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15885-0_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15885-0_12
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