About the book

About Charlotte Perkins Gilman's utopian novels

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Utopian Novels brings together for the first time in one volume Gilman's three major utopian novels: Moving the Mountain (1911), Herland (1915), and With Her in Ourland (1916). These novels portray ideal societies that give visionary shape and imaginative form to Gilman's ideas of equality, economic justice, and social reorganization. Set in imaginary realms of future time or uncharted space, the novels dramatize the reformist ideas she discusses in her nonfiction books and essays. The reader can readily trace the development of Gilman's thought from her first optimistic vision of a utopian society thirty years hence, once the women of America "wake up," to the more developed feminist ideas of Herland, in which the implications of renovated female consciousness are more fully explored but are located in imaginary geographic space, to the final satirical view of contemporary society with all its illogical incongruities in which utopian renovation is indefinitely postponed.

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