The Future as Warning: Narrative Voice and Literary Form in Modern Dystopian Novels

Abstract

Since modern dystopian fiction appeared in the wake of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, texts in the genre have warned against the dreadful consequences that could result from current sociopolitical trends and have sought to intervene in the present to prevent the manifestation of nightmarish futures. During this time, Anglophone dystopian novels have frequently eschewed the transparent first- and third-person narrators that dominate both realist literary fiction and genre fiction, instead favoring conspicuous and estranging voices. Putting narrative theory in dialogue with dystopian scholarship, “The Future as Warning” investigates this under-researched phenomenon, exploring the relationship between narratorial form, thematic content, and ideological messaging in dystopian fiction. Analyzing texts by American, British, and Canadian writers, as well as one influential Russian, this dissertation examines four narratorial forms that recur across twentieth- and twenty-first-century dystopian novels: the plural first-person we-voice, narration in an invented future version of English, the diary conceit, and the found-document conceit.