The World a Department Store

AS RECENT SCHOLARS OF UTOPIANISM HAVE DEMONSTRATED, A STUDY OF the late nineteenth-century utopian genre and its authors is predominantly a study of the impact of social change on middle-aged, middle-class Americans who felt like victims. Biographical profiles of utopian novelists compiled by Kenneth M. Roemer and Charles J. Rooney also note that the majority of authors advocated cooperative or collectivist ideas as an alternative to the competitive system, that they were engaged in a variety of reform efforts related to their utopian visions, and that their endeavors were accompanied by a mixture of disillusionment and hope, pessimism and optimism, faith and doubt. By connecting utopian thought to the realities of American life, such scholars have provided valuable insights into the nature of modern utopianism, particularly in suggesting its universality and practicality on the one hand, and its complexity and ambiguity on the other.' Bradford Peck (1853-1935), a Lewiston, Maine, self-made businessman, was in many ways representative of the more than one hundred men and women between 1888 and 1900 who wrote utopian novels expressing their discontent with America's present and elaborating their dreams for

Art · Media studies · Peck (Imperial · Sociology · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Mathematics · Political Economy and Marxism · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction