Aldous Huxley, Island

Roy Booth (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Ed. by Peter Childs, Birmingham Newman University
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.08: English Writing and Culture of the early Twentieth Century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: Chris Baldick (Goldsmiths College, University of London), Peter Childs (Birmingham Newman University), Louise McDonald (Birmingham Newman University), Andrew Radford (University of Glasgow)

Dates

First circulation or publication Mar 1962

Places

England (Publication/ performance)
United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel
Utopian / Dystopian

Resources

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If you make a landing on Huxley’s utopian fiction

Island

expecting an idyll of warm sand and happiness, you discover that it offers instead an uncomfortable terrain of narratorial grit: “ ‘Psycho-physical means to a transcendental end,’ said Vijaya, raising his voice above the grinding screech of the low gear into which he had just shifted …” (

Island

, Ch. 9, p.149). The preoccupations of the book are indeed “psycho-physical”. This is not a fiction about blissful existence. The book has a “transcendental end”: it invents a whole society organised to keep at bay what its central character refers to as “E.H.”, the “Essential Horror” of existence. Throughout this novel of ideas, voices like Vijaya’s are very much raised in disquisition – to the extent that when…

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3639 words

Citation: Booth, Roy. "Island". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 August 2019 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4416, accessed 21 November 2024.]

Aldous Huxley, Island

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