takes its title from Miranda’s comment on her first encounter with wider humanity in Shakespeare’s
The Tempest: “How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, / That has such people in’t” (Act V. Scene i. Line 183). Huxley’s novel takes up this theme of the “vision” of a new society and constructs a fable centred on a World State 600 years in the future where social stability is based on a scientific caste system. Human beings, graded from highest intellectuals to lowest manual workers, hatched from incubators and brought up in communal nurseries, learn by methodical conditioning to accept their social destiny.
Set between the wars, at a time of concern about population growth and the rise of totalitarianism, the novel seems to express the intellectual’s
1929 words
Citation: Childs, Peter. "Brave New World". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 07 January 2019 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6226, accessed 23 November 2024.]
