Within the cycle that runs from Erewhon to Island British literary utopias compete with one
another to form the most persuasive picture of what the future might or should be like. At
issue for Butler Wells Zamiatin Orwell and others is whether utopia be it positive or
negative is essentially prediction or hypothesis. Huxley contributed to this debate at roughly
fifteen-year intervals his three utopias becoming its key texts. In addition Aldous Huxley
and Utopia examines ironic cure scenes the obsession with golf in the brave new world
attitudes towards death in Brave New World and Island problems with names and history in the
former the role of islands in both the detrimental impact of Madame Blavatsky and young
Krishnamurti on the story of Pala and the significance of a zoological conclusion of Island.
Professor emeritus of English at the University of Kentucky Jerome Meckier has published seven
books and dozens of essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century English and American
literature. Besides three book-length studies of Dickens he has written Aldous Huxley: Satire
and Structure and edited Critical Essays on Aldous Huxley. In this series a collection of his
essays on Huxley has appeared as volume 8 under the title of Aldous Huxley: Modern Satirical
Novelist of Ideas. Volume 11 is another book-length study entitled Aldous Huxley from Poet to
Mystic. He is a curator of the Aldous Huxley Society and co-edits Aldous Huxley Annual.
