BRAVE NEW WORLD:In our time with Melvyn Bragg.

Antaletriangle · 04-09-2009, 10:53 AM

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00jn8bc

BRAVE NEW WORLD

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In Act V, Scene I of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the character Miranda declares:

“O wonder! How many Godly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O Brave new world! That has such people in it!”

It’s perhaps the only line of Shakespeare to be made famous by someone else, for Brave New World is not associated with Prospero’s Island of sprites, magic and wondrous noises, but with Aldous Huxley’s dystopia of eugenics, soma and zero gravity tennis. A world, incidentally, upon which literary references to Shakespeare would be entirely lost.

Brave New World is a lurid, satirical dystopia in which the hopes and fears of the 1930s are writ large and yet the book seems uncannily prescient about our own time. But why did Huxley feel the need to write it and is Brave New World really as dystopian as we are led to believe?

Contributors

David Bradshaw, Reader and Tutor in English Literature at Worcester College, University of Oxford

Daniel Pick, Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London

Michèle Barrett, Professor of Modern Literary and Cultural Theory at Queen Mary, University of London

04-09-2009, 10:53 AM	#1
Antaletriangle Avalon Senior Member Join Date: Sep 2008 Location: U.K. Posts: 3,380	BRAVE NEW WORLD:In our time with Melvyn Bragg. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00jn8bc BRAVE NEW WORLD Find out more about this subject by using our research page In Act V, Scene I of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the character Miranda declares: “O wonder! How many Godly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O Brave new world! That has such people in it!” It’s perhaps the only line of Shakespeare to be made famous by someone else, for Brave New World is not associated with Prospero’s Island of sprites, magic and wondrous noises, but with Aldous Huxley’s dystopia of eugenics, soma and zero gravity tennis. A world, incidentally, upon which literary references to Shakespeare would be entirely lost. Brave New World is a lurid, satirical dystopia in which the hopes and fears of the 1930s are writ large and yet the book seems uncannily prescient about our own time. But why did Huxley feel the need to write it and is Brave New World really as dystopian as we are led to believe? Contributors David Bradshaw, Reader and Tutor in English Literature at Worcester College, University of Oxford Daniel Pick, Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London Michèle Barrett, Professor of Modern Literary and Cultural Theory at Queen Mary, University of London