Hughes, Jillian2024-06-252024-06-252023-05https://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/34517Dystopian fiction is a genre that has amassed both commercial success and the attention of literary scholars alike. Despite dystopian fiction’s popularity in mainstream culture and media, defining what it means for a novel to be dystopian is a challenge that literary critics still grapple with. The definitions that do exist, like Sargent’s definition of a dystopia, which is one of the most cited definitions, that states “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which the reader lived.” (Sargent 9) does not fully capture what it means for a novel to be dystopian. This project analyzes eight British novels considered to be dystopian over the time span 1872 to 2007. After reading the novels Erewhon (1872), The Fixed Period (1882), The Time Machine (1895), Brave New World (1932), 1984 (1949), A Clockwork Orange (1962), The Children of Men (1992), and Daughters of the North (2007), I sorted the novels into the following periods: the Victorian proto-dystopias, World War One to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the contemporary period. I argue that the dystopian novel is one that criticizes some aspects of society contemporary to when the novel was written, and that it features an individual, alienated from and whose individuality is restricted by the society or government in which they live, but cannot escape.en-USThesis