Laboratories of Circumstances and Misshapen Transhumans: Failures of Perfectibility in Two Nineteenth-Century American Dystopias
Abstract
The article is an analysis of two early American nineteen-century dystopias, The Man Machine, or the Pupil of Circumstances (1826) by James Kirke Paulding and A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation in the Year of our Lord 19 (1835) by Jerome Bonaparte Holgate, focusing on the presentation of early versions of transhumans in the works. While Paulding’s novella focuses on criticism of Robert Owen’s New Lanark, a textile factory and a socialist experiment, and Holgate’s satire addresses the question of miscegenation, they both foreground the concept of the new human as a product of the respective reformers’ misguided ideologies.
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