Era dos extremos : Análise política e histórica dos romances distópicos de Orwell, Huxley e Atwood

Abstract

The present work aims to critically analyze dystopian novels from the point of view of historical and political issues and support their origins in the utopian genre. Therefore, this work has utopias and dystopias as its works of analysis. The utopias are Plato's The Republic (380 BC) and Thomas More's Utopia (1516), while the dystopias are 1984, by George Orwell (1949), Brave New World (1932), by Aldous Huxley, and The Handmaid's Tale (1985), by Margareth Atwood. Dystopia is used as a literary resource to deal with political and sociocultural problems that are aggravated in the reality brought by the author, as it defends the idea that literature can be the means that authors use to carry out a social complaint. Based on this assumption, the work discusses the internal aspects of the narratives to determine the meaning of dystopias, such as the characters' discourse, the environment, and the political background of the work to propose reflections on dissatisfaction with reality and what can be done to improve it. Therefore, for the analysis of the character of social criticism, which is present in dystopian literature, it is necessary to have a dialogue between the moment of production of the works and the elements that make up dystopian novels. In this way, the origins of theocratic and totalitarian regimes are also discussed and contrasted with the works. Through this work, we can see how they arise and how we can avoid them, by considering dystopia in the literature as an important aspect for the studies of possible scenarios that may surround us in the future, and also by making an analysis of past contexts in history, which can influence the behavior of a society and the context of social networks today, which are intrinsically related to the concepts of freedom of expression and sharing of ideas that we know.