The Nationality of Utopia: H. G. Wells, England, and the World State by Maxim Shadurski (review)

In The Nationality of Utopia, Maxim Shadurski considers the utopian writings of H. G. Wells within the context of cultural Englishness and the British liberal tradition. Shadurski, an associate professor of literary theory and comparative studies at Siedlce University, has edited The Wellsian, the journal of the H. G. Wells Society, since 2016 and published Utopiia kak model mira: granitsy i pogranichiia literaturnogo iavleniia (Utopia as a world model: The boundaries and borderlands of a literary phenomenon) in 2016. Curiously, given Shadurski's multinational heritage—a Belorussian by birthright who has published in Russian and English and teaches at a Polish university—his secondary sources are overwhelmingly Anglocentric (in the linguistic sense of the word), despite the long heritage of Russian and Soviet interaction with the Wellsian utopian tradition, not to mention translated contributions from around the world.

In his study, Shadurski's critical exercise focuses on Wells's model of utopia, the influence of Wells's national heritage on its creation, and how far utopia in Wells's hands is an extension of the English liberal polity or a reaction against it or a vehicle through which to preserve it in the illiberal epoch of 1914–1945. In presenting the historiography (or utopiography?) of utopian studies, Shadurski rightly considers the works of A. L. Morton (The English Utopia) and Richard Gerber (Utopian Fantasy) but two other foundational texts—Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel's Utopian Thought in the Western World (1979) and Krishan Kumar's Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (1987)—surprisingly receive no consideration.¹

Shadurski agrees with the prevailing thinking on the unstable, indeterminate nature of utopia, citing Lyman Tower Sargent, who "refers to utopia and the nation as 'imagined communities,' both produced in the space of modernity and each affecting the other" (13). Again, he concurs with Ruth Levitas when she writes: "Utopia as method is not and cannot be blueprint. Utopian envisioning is necessarily provisional, reflexive and dialogic" (16). And Shadurski follows Doreen Massey, who refers to the utopian space as "a multiplicity of 'stories-so-far'" (18).

Relating the prevailing thinking to Wells himself, Shadurski writes: "I maintain that the Wellsian utopia inscribes a cosmopolitan intent on national predispositions, which makes it neither cosmopolitan nor national, but both at the same time" (56). The provisional nature of the Wellsian utopia is further highlighted by Shadurski when considering the evolution of the British Empire: "English utopia follows a major geo-political shift, related particularly to empire and England's post-colonial condition. Founded on the expansionist tendencies of the British Empire, the Wellsian utopia endorses the World State's outlying territories with alterity" (180).

The influence of the British imperial model, though, was not to be facsimile; public challenge was to be ever present: "Rebellion can thus supply a degree of disturbance, reminding the society of its hereto unresolved problems and contradictions. This scheme points up Wells's departure from the idiom of character oriented towards conformity and regimented consensus" (75). This critical safety valve was essential in Wells's thought as he came to identify a crisis in English liberalism, though he generally faced it in his literature by sleight of hand, falling back on the fantastic rather than attempting mechanistic solutions:

Faced up with the crisis of Liberalism in England, the Wellsian utopia loses much of its emancipatory potential to the cause of redemption. Wells entrusts dreams with the latter task, which renders England and Utopia mutually compatible, rather than exclusive. In this scheme, lower middle-class Liberal loyalties foreshadow Utopia, which, in turn, envisages itself as the realization of England's unfulfilled longings. In looping back and forth to the discourse of England, Wells's diptych leaves Utopia under-imagined.

(139)

During the Second World War, with his campaign for universal human rights protections and his...