The Political Novel Seminar 3: Edwin Frank on H.G. Wells and Ursula K. Le Guin

From September through November, Edwin Frank, editor of New York Review Books and author of Stranger than Fiction: The Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel, will lead a new three-part webinar series on the political novel. Join Frank in an investigation of the visions of politics reflected in the lives and works of Anthony Trollope, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, and Ursula K. Le Guin. 

Seminar Three: Edwin Frank on H.G. Wells and Ursula K. Le Guin (Nov. 3–17)

Science fiction has exercised a powerful shaping influence on the modern political novel: H.G. Wells’s breakthrough novella The Time Machine exposes the mirage of progress and in The Island of Dr. Moreau, an inspiration for Conrad's Heart of Darkness as well as Orwell’s Animal Farm, he depicts a dystopia driven both by colonialist exploitation and scientific enlightenment. Taking off from Wells, our final seminar will turn to Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, in which anarchist collectivism and capitalist liberalism vie in the infinitude of outer space.

Seminar three is three one-hour sessions: November 3, 10, 17. All sessions will start at 7pm EDT.