"My world is sight"H. G. Wells¿s anti-utopian imagination in ¿The country of the blind¿

  1. Mercedes Peñalba García 1
  1. 1 Universidad de Salamanca
    info

    Universidad de Salamanca

    Salamanca, España

    ROR https://ror.org/02f40zc51

Revue:
Epos: Revista de filología

ISSN: 0213-201X

Année de publication: 2015

Número: 31

Pages: 475-484

Type: Article

DOI: 10.5944/EPOS.31.2015.17384 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR

D'autres publications dans: Epos: Revista de filología

Résumé

This article examines H. G. Wells’s «The Country of the Blind» (1904) as a parable of post-Darwinian man, influenced by Victorian mythography and anthropological models of primitivism. Drawing on utopian, evolutionary and imperialist paradigms, this fin-desiècle tale is an intellectual game or thought experiment with multiple ironic reversals. The macro-structure of this speculative story is a negation of the original proverb about the country of the blind, with echoes of Plato’s Parable of the Cave, as well as a rewriting of the archetypal myth of a remote pastoral eu-topia. By remaining faithful to the conventions of this tradition and sometimes inverting their suggestive symbolism, the early Wells explored the complexities of colonialism and imperialism, and treated them in the ironic mode. Sight and blindness simply reverse definitions of supremacy and subordination, civilization and nature in this Andean anti-utopia (or ironic utopia)