Self-Refection on Three Dualisms: A Critical Utopian Study of Marge Piercy’s &i&Woman on the Edge of Time&/i&

摘要

The tradition of utopian thought in western culture has been a long one. Although the word utopia emerges from Thomas More’s Utopia was published in 1516, the origin of utopian thought can be dated back to Plato’s Republic . It has been inspiring people and encouraging people to fight against the conflicts in their society and work for a better world. However, utopian imagination and utopian writing encountered a bleak situation in the 20th century until the emergence of critical utopian novels in the 1960s. Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time is one of them. Although some scholars have studied this work and thought highly of the utopian world to eliminate sexism, racism, and anthropocentrism, the above criticism fails to explore the significance of this elimination from a self-reflective perspective, which is an essential reason for utopia revival in the 1960s-1970s. This article aims to analyze Marge Piercy’s novel Woman on the Edge of Time from self-reflection to explore how this novel, as a critical utopian one, injects vitality into utopian writing.