SOURCE: “The Text as Tactic: Looking Backward and the Power of the Word,” in Looking Backward, 1988-1888: Essays on Edward Bellamy, edited by Daphne Patai, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988, pp. 37-50.

In the following essay, Khanna discusses Edward Bellamy's early utopian fiction in order to highlight the tension between “theory and praxis” in Looking Backward.

Utopian fiction is a hybrid genre, and Edward Bellamy, one of the great utopists, worked its inherent contradictions into a text of surprising social and political power. Although modern readers are likely to dismiss Looking Backward, citing its systematized solutions to social problems, stereotypical characters, and static society, its very clarity in these areas may well have contributed to its remarkable success.

A fuller appreciation of Bellamy's achievement should emerge from a consideration of two contexts: the tradition of utopian discourse and the tradition of Bellamy's own fiction, his early writings. With...