Mapping the future(s): Forms and functions of metafictionality in the English utopian novel

The essay deals with utopian novels that have turned upon the conventions of the genre in order to theorise the fictional status of the 'classical' utopian narrative. Proceeding from the early 20th century, it seeks to establish a typology that distinguishes the most important genre patterns and describes the specific functions associated with them. It will be shown that metautopian novels emerged in the first decades of the century, when authors began to reflect on the future of utopianism in a technologically advanced and dynamic modern world. After the decline of the dystopian satire in the 1960s it was those writers who sought to re-inscribe into utopian discourse the voices of groups formerly excluded who made extensive use of metafictional narrative strategies (revisionist metautopian novel). With the arrival of postmodernism this tendency to self-referential writing has turned blatantly into the open. Writers syncopate a variety of utopian and dystopian, science fiction and fantasy discourses often within a single text in order to test their potential for perceptual change in a contemporary world that seems to have dispensed with efforts to create a radically different society. Utopographic metafiction, as the genre pattern emerging from this strategic positioning of various utopianisms will be called, not only lays bare the implicit dogmatism of progressive utopias in the tradition of Morris, Skinner and Callenbach, but also attempts to reinforce the utopian impulse by creating a world in which the utopian horizon remains unfixed and open-ended and constantly has to be redefined in the textual interplay of meanings and patterns.