Angele Botros Samaan

"This paper's first aim is to investigate the theme of death and related to it death-penalty, in More's utopia. Secondly by the way of comparison it will simply explore these themes in some modern utopia novels. On the occasion of the 450th anniversary of More's death-penalty the subject almost imposes itself. Although utopia is generally concerned with this world, with the here and now even when it has an eye on the future, and is, thus, a kind of paradise on earth, while death is a matter of the hereafter, yet death and the death- penalty figure, in some form or other, in many a utopia piece of writing. The choice of representatives samples was no difficult matter. Five fairly well known novels have been selected. First Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872) one of the two novels generally thought to have greatly contributed to the rise of utopia vague in the modern period (the other being Bulwer Lytton's The Coming Race). Then, Anthony Trollope's The Fixed Period (1882), William Morris's News From Nowhere (1892), Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), and finally George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). To forestall objections to my using the term utopia in reference to works which have come to be widely,and rightly perhaps, described as 'dystopias',let me point out that I am using it as a sort of generic term to cover both the positive pictures of an ideal world and the negative or satiric projections of the present or the future, no less than works of fantasy of the same genre. I rely for support on More himself, whose mixture of the ideal and the satiric in Utopia still baffles many a reader."