Brave New World
Place on List:
II. Literary Genre: The
Novel
4. How
do elements of irony work in the novel?
Aldous
Huxley. Brave
New World.
(1931,
United Kingdom)
Key Terms (tags): novel, irony, english
literature, science fiction, twentieth century
Supporting References:
- http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides_b/brave_new_world1.asp
- "Brave New World." The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. Eds. Drabble, Margaret, Jenny Stringer, and Daniel Hahn. : Oxford University Press, 2007. Oxford Reference. 2007. Date Accessed 29 Aug. 2013
“Brave New World, a novel by A. Huxley,
published 1932. It is a dystopian fable about a world state in the
7th cent. af (after Ford), where social stability is based on a
scientific caste system. Human beings, graded from highest
intellectuals to lowest manual workers, hatched from incubators and
brought up in communal nurseries, learn by methodical conditioning to
accept their social destiny. The action of the story develops round
Bernard Marx, an unorthodox and therefore unhappy Alpha‐Plus
(something had presumably gone wrong with his antenatal treatment),
who visits a New Mexican Reservation and brings a Savage back to
London. The Savage is at first fascinated by the new world, but
finally revolted, and his argument with Mustapha Mond, World
Controller, demonstrates the incompatibility of individual freedom
and a scientifically trouble‐free society.
“In Brave New
World Revisited (1958) Huxley reconsiders his prophecies and
fears that some of these may be coming true much sooner than he
thought.”
- "Huxley, Aldous." The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. Eds. Drabble, Margaret, Jenny Stringer, and Daniel Hahn. : Oxford University Press, 2007. Oxford Reference. 2007. Date Accessed 16 Aug. 2013
The article offers
an overview of Huxley and less a discussion on the above-cited
text.
“Huxley, Aldous (Leonard Huxley) (1894–1963), grandson of T. H.
Huxley
and brother of Julian Huxley.
By 1919, when he began to write for Murry
in the Athenaeum,
he had already published three volumes of verse; a volume of stories,
Limbo (1920), was followed by Crome Yellow (1921),
a country‐house satire which earned him a reputation for precocious
brilliance and cynicism, and which much offended Lady Ottoline
Morrell
whom Huxley had frequently visited at Garsington. During the 1920s
and 1930s Huxley lived in Italy, then France; in this period he wrote
much fiction, including Mortal Coils (1922, stories;
includes ‘The Gioconda Smile’); Antic Hay (1923, set in
post‐war London's nihilistic Bohemia); Those Barren Leaves
(1925, set in Italy); and Point Counter Point (1928), in
which were recognized portraits of his friend D. H. Lawrence
as Rampion and Murry as Burlap. Brave
New World (1932), his most popular work, was
followed by Eyeless
in Gaza (1936). Huxley left for California in
1937, partly in search (with his friend Gerald Heard, 1889– ) of
new spiritual direction. He continued to write in many genres: novels
include After Many a Summer (1939), in which Heard appears
as the mystic Propter, and Island (1962), an optimistic
Utopia; and other works include essays, historical studies, travel
works, and The Devils of Loudun (1952), a study in sexual
hysteria which became the basis of Whiting's
play The Devils. He became deeply interested in mysticism
and parapsychology; The Doors of Perception (1954) and
Heaven and Hell (1956) describe his experiments with
mescalin and LSD.
Huxley's novels with their mixture of
satire and earnestness, of apparent brutality and humanity, have led
some to dismiss them as smart and superficial, a symptom rather than
an interpretation of a hollow age; others have seen them as brilliant
and provocative ‘novels of ideas’ written by a man who was not by
nature a novelist.”
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