Some of the most influential works of literature have conjured fantastic places and worlds populated by beings beyond ordinary experience. What inspired some of the greatest of these, and what gives them their ongoing capacity to capture our imagination?
Thomas More’s Utopia, written more than 500 years ago, has spawned innumerable imitations with its traveller’s tale of a distant country where unjust norms are turned on their heads and everything is organised in an ostensibly better way. Appearing at a historical moment when world-changing new ideas and reports of newly-discovered lands were in the air, Utopia conjured an engaging, challengingly ambivalent vision of alternative social possibilities, which continues to provoke fundamental questions about why we live as we do and what it would take genuinely to improve the human condition.
John Milton’s Paradise Lost, published some 150 years after Utopia, likewise addresses questions of why human society is so full of suffering and injustice, and whether it is possible to live in a better way. Its ambitious answer takes us to the beginning of time in the Garden of Eden, and beyond the known world as far as Heaven and Hell. Among its cast of characters of superhuman stature is Milton’s sublime anti-hero Satan, whose doomed struggle has captivated generations of readers and powerfully influenced the literature of subsequent ages.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus was published in 1818, when she was still a teenager. The tale of one man who makes another he then abandons was probably meant to insist on parental responsibility and that people are not born bad but made so by the way they are treated; yet its many stage and film adaptations and revisions, starting in the 1820s and running through Boris Karloff to Edward Scissorhands and beyond, instead repeatedly make it a dire warning about mad science.
TS Eliot’s The Waste Land became on its appearance in 1922 a defining poem of Modernism – a fragmented narrative studded with quotations and allusions that draws on pre-Christian myth to identify modernity as godless, meaningless, and morally debased. Its post-war London is crowded with the lonely, blind to themselves and others amid the ruins of culture. Still commanding in itself, its visions and techniques have echoed loudly ever since.
JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, published in 1954–5, took nearly 20 years to write and drew on a legendarium Tolkien had been creating for much longer. Despite running to over 1000 pages with six appendices, it has since 1966 sold on average 8,500 copies a day, created a subgenre, and enthralled successive generations for varied reasons. The record-breaking films warped its fabric but boosted sales, and it still stands, with Harry Potter, as the world’s largest shared fantasy. Yet it is in many ways profoundly bleak, rooted in experiences of both world wars, coloured by professional, religious, and ecological senses of elegy, and bearing a burden of horror that readers must confront.
Together these works map some of the widest worlds and most fantastic places and beings in English literature—imaginations that continue to compel and inspire in unexpected ways.
