SOURCE: “Imagination and Inversion in Nineteenth-Century Utopian Writing,” in Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and Its Precursors, edited by David Seed, Syracuse University Press, 1995, pp. 137-52.

In the following essay, Dentith studies the ways in which nineteenth-century utopian literature employs and transcends the trope of inversion.

In Chapter 17 of Adam Bede, ‘In which the story pauses a little’, George Eliot contrasts the ‘wonderful facility for drawing a griffin’ with the difficulty faced in trying to draw a real lion. George Eliot was a writer who was generally anti-utopian in spirit, for whom science meant not so much the possibility of emancipation as the recognition of limits, and for whom imagination was fundamentally subservient to realism; as such she can be taken as providing a strong case against the ‘imaginativeness’ of both science fiction and utopia. Her hostility to the ‘imaginative’ understood as drawing griffins is one that...