Edwards, Caroline (2011) Strange transactions: utopia, transmigration and time in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas. In: David Mitchell: critical essays. Gylphi Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays . Gylphi, Canterbury, pp. 177-200. ISBN 9781780240039, 9781780240022, 9781780240046

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Abstract

This chapter explores the way in which British novelist David Mitchell contributes towards a rethinking of utopia in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas: (1) firstly, through a critique of programmatic or blueprinted totalitarian models of utopian social engineering; (2) secondly, through the positing of utopian possibility at a minor, self- scale that self-referentially deconstructs the utopian narrative synthesis; and (3) thirdly, through what I call Mitchell’s networking of such scaled-down utopian “moments of possibility” through his transmigratory metamorphoses of narrative voice through different historical moments, and the ways in which coincidence connects seemingly disparate, geographically dispersed characters.

Item Type:	Book Section
Keywords:	David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, Ghostwritten, transmigration, utopianism, 21st-century literary criticism, ref29, refchapter
Subjects:	Q Linguistics, Classics and related subjects > Q320 English Literature
Divisions:	College of Arts > Faculty of Media, Humanities & Performance > Lincoln School of Humanities
Depositing User:	Caroline Edwards
Date Deposited:	26 May 2012 07:48
Last Modified:	03 May 2013 14:29
URI:	http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/id/eprint/5706

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