Aldous Huxley, Island

Roy Booth (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Ed. by Peter Childs, Birmingham Newman University
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.08: English Writing and Culture of the early Twentieth Century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: Chris Baldick (Goldsmiths College, University of London), Peter Childs (Birmingham Newman University), Louise McDonald (Birmingham Newman University), Andrew Radford (University of Glasgow)

Dates

First circulation or publication Mar 1962

Places

England (Publication/ performance)
United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel
Utopian / Dystopian

Resources

Save to Bookshelf

If you make a landing on Huxley’s utopian fiction

Island

expecting an idyll of warm sand and happiness, you discover that it offers instead an uncomfortable terrain of narratorial grit: “ ‘Psycho-physical means to a transcendental end,’ said Vijaya, raising his voice above the grinding screech of the low gear into which he had just shifted …” (

Island

, Ch. 9, p.149). The preoccupations of the book are indeed “psycho-physical”. This is not a fiction about blissful existence. The book has a “transcendental end”: it invents a whole society organised to keep at bay what its central character refers to as “E.H.”, the “Essential Horror” of existence. Throughout this novel of ideas, voices like Vijaya’s are very much raised in disquisition – to the extent that when…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

3639 words

Citation: Booth, Roy. "Island". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 August 2019 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4416, accessed 22 November 2024.]

Aldous Huxley, Island

Dates

Places

Genres and Modes

Resources

Save this article

Leave Feedback