Planning utopia: Control over women and nature in Mary Shelley's "The Last Man", William Morris's "News from Nowhere" and M. P. Shiel's "The Purple Cloud".

Nineteenth-century utopian British literature often articulates the ideal of a society of equals, but it also evinces the problem of control over women and nature. In order to deal with this contradiction, I examine three novels from key moments in the development of utopian fiction. As case studies, I have chosen Mary Shelley's The Last Man, William Morris's News From Nowhere, and M.P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud because each novel evaluates utopian potential as occurring through revolution and enacted by social and city planning. I analyze their representations of prophecy, control over women, and control over nature. While these utopian novels imagine utopia as an alternative to capitalism, I find that capitalist impulses remain in the novels, undermining their articulations of utopia. --P.ii.