Dans l'Amérique de la fin du XIXe siècle, Julian West, un jeune homme, s'endort pour se réveiller en 2000. Il découvre alors un pays transformé, où le capitalisme et la société de consommation ont laissé place à une société plus équitable et plus écologique. A travers cette utopie politique empreinte de fantaisie, l'auteur souligne les vices de l’Amérique de son temps.

Un regard en arrière

Chef-d'œuvre d'idéalisme, grand classique de la littérature américaine, C'était demain dresse le portrait d'une société humaniste du XXIe siècle dans laquelle un jeune Bostonnais prospère du XIXe siècle, Julian West, est mystérieusement transporté. Il passe alors d'un monde de conflits et d'indigence à un univers de paix et d'abondance : dans le Boston où il s'éveille règnent l'harmonie, la coopération, la justice et la démocratie, le plein emploi et la prospérité. Avec l'aide du docteur Leete, de sa femme et de leur fille, Edith, Julian West découvre et apprivoise peu à peu le nouveau monde où il revient à la vie ; allant d'étonnements en émerveillements, il comprend ce qu'avait de désespérément inhumain la société qu'il a quittée et il apprend à aimer celle qu'il découvre.

C'était demain - Suivi de "Post-Scriptum sur les avancées du progrès dans le monde" et de "l'allégorie du réservoir"

The sequel to Bellamy's Looking Backward, his utopian novel of several years earlier, where a young man falls asleep in 1887 and wakes in a utopian year 2000, where all social ills are solved. This novel continues the thread of his utopian vision.

Equality begins when Julian West returns to the year 2000 to continue his education. The book describes an ideal society in that year. Equality was published just before his death and was not received nearly as well as Looking Backward.

Equality

A utopia is an imagined community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its citizens. The term was coined by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island society in the south Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South America. The opposite of a utopia is a dystopia, which dominates the fictional literature. Dystopian fiction (sometimes combined with, but distinct from, apocalyptic fiction) offers the opposite: the portrayal of a setting that completely disagrees with the author's ethos.

This book contents:

The Republic by Plato

Utopia by Thomas More

The City of the Sun by Tommaso Campanella

The New Atlantis by Francis Bacon

Looking Backward: 2000 to 1887 by Edward Bellamy

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

The Iron Heel by Jack London

We by Evgeny Zamyatin

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Utopia. Сlassic collection. Philosophical and fiction works. From Plato to Orwell - The Republic, The New Atlantis, The Iron Heel, Animal Farm, Looking Backward: 2000–1887, We, 1984 and others

A utopia is an imagined community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its citizens. The term was coined by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island society in the south Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South America. The opposite of a utopia is a dystopia, which dominates the fictional literature. Dystopian fiction (sometimes combined with, but distinct from, apocalyptic fiction) offers the opposite: the portrayal of a setting that completely disagrees with the author's ethos.

This book contents:

The Republic by Plato

Utopia by Thomas More

The City of the Sun by Tommaso Campanella

The New Atlantis by Francis Bacon

Looking Backward: 2000 to 1887 by Edward Bellamy

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

The Iron Heel by Jack London

We by Evgeny Zamyatin

Utopia. Сlassic collection. Philosophical and fiction works. From Plato to Bellamy - The Republic, The New Atlantis, The Iron Heel, Looking Backward: 2000–1887, We and others

I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857. "What!" you say, "eighteen fifty-seven? That is an odd slip. He means nineteen fifty-seven, of course." I beg pardon, but there is no mistake. It was about four in the afternoon of December the 26th, one day after Christmas, in the year 1857, not 1957, that I first breathed the east wind of Boston, which, I assure the reader, was at that remote period marked by the same penetrating quality characterizing it in the present year of grace, 2000.

These statements seem so absurd on their face, especially when I add that I am a young man apparently of about thirty years of age, that no person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity. Nevertheless I earnestly assure the reader that no imposition is intended, and will undertake, if he shall follow me a few pages, to entirely convince him of this. If I may, then, provisionally assume, with the pledge of justifying the assumption, that I know better than the reader when I was born, I will go on with my narrative. As every schoolboy knows, in the latter part of the nineteenth century the civilization of today, or anything like it, did not exist, although the elements which were to develop it were already in ferment. Nothing had, however, occurred to modify the immemorial division of society into the four classes, or nations, as they may be more fitly called, since the differences between them were far greater than those between any nations nowadays, of the rich and the poor, the educated and the ignorant. I myself was rich and also educated, and possessed, therefore, all the elements of happiness enjoyed by the most fortunate in that age. Living in luxury, and occupied only with the pursuit of the pleasures and refinements of life, I derived the means of my support from the labor of others, rendering no sort of service in return. My parents and grandparents had lived in the same way, and I expected that my descendants, if I had any, would enjoy a like easy existence.

Looking Backward 2000-1887

Julian West vit au 19ème siècle - mais une expérience hors du commun l'amène en l'an 2000: Julian y découvre un monde sans problèmes ni inégalités sociales et où règne la justice: de quoi faire rêver son époque d'origine!

Né en 1850 dans le Massachusets, Edward Bellamy ne se consacra à l'écriture qu'après avoir interrompu ses études de droit et avoir travaillé dans le monde du journalisme. Les idées sociales de son roman Cent ans après ou l'an 2000 entrainèrent la création de divers mouvements politiques, notamment aux Pays-Bas.

Cent ans après ou l'An 2000

Boston, 28 décembre 2000.

J'ai vu le jour dans la ville de Boston, en l'année 1857.

« 1857, dites-vous ? C'est une erreur ; il veut sans doute dire 1957. »

Je vous demande pardon, mais il n'y a pas d'erreur. Il pouvait être environ quatre heures de l'après-midi, le 26 décembre, le lendemain de Noël, en 1857 et non en 1957, quand je respirai pour la première fois le vent d'Est de Boston, et je puis vous assurer qu'à cette époque reculée, il possédait les mêmes qualités piquantes et pénétrantes qui le caractérisent en l'an de grâce actuel 2000.

Fruit d'une sélection réalisée au sein des fonds de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, Collection XIX a pour ambition de faire découvrir des textes classiques et moins classiques dans les meilleures éditions du XIXe siècle.

Un regard en arrière

Résumé

Plus de livres de Edward Bellamy

Critiques

Ce livre n'a pas encore de critiques