Utopia And Dystopian Novel

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Future has always intrigued people; we have always wanted to find out what future will be like. Since the Utopia of Thomas More there have been several novels in which the authors drew up different visions of a possible future expressing their concern about society and its dangerous evolving. Unforgettable and thought-provoking novels were written in the genre of utopia or dystopia like 1984 by Orwell, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle, V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and the recently popular The
Hunger Games trilogy written by Susan Collins.

Utopian novels are not only written for adults but for children and young adults as well
– such as The Giver1 written by Lois Lowry, published in 1993. Lowry is an American contemporary author who is well-known in the United States. She mainly writes children’s novels, she has several series aimed for the young, for example, the Anastasia Series. In addition, she has also written a dystopian sequel, The Quartet which consists of four books:
The Giver, Gathering Blue, Messenger and the Son which was published in 2012. All four books are available in Hungary, yet they are not well-known, while in the United States mainly the first book of the sequel, The Giver is rather popular and equally questioned and debated. 1 Lowry, Lois 1993. The Giver. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. The edition I used for this essay is an electronic version; see its link in the Reference List.

The theme of my essays is the first part of this sequel, The Giver, I am going to analyse this novel from a gender-sexuality approach. I would like to examine how in this dystopia people are deprived from their free will by forcing them to take away their gender roles an...

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Being an individual enables us to think for ourselves, deciding what is right and what is wrong. If it is taken away, people are in the Sameness – there is no personalities, no independent thoughts, only easily controlled crowd of people. That’s what Lowry drew up in
The Giver.

Works Cited

American Library Association 2014. “Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books: 2000-2009”
Accessed June 13. http://www.ala.org/bbooks/top-100-bannedchallenged-books-2000-2009

Lowry, Lois. 1993. The Giver. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Accessed June 13. http://www.jeffersontrojans.org/apps/download/SGezEXTPbkdcBhqgzZHg9UGFY5rj4nS2QZQ54lqWjONkp2aD.pdf/Full%20Text%20of%20The%20Giver.pdf Pope, Rob. 2002. The English Studies Book. London and New York: Routledge

SparkNotes. 2014. “The Giver, Chapter 5-6.” Accessed June 13.
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/giver/section3.rhtml

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