Utopia and dystopia in The host

Abstract

To live in a utopia is an old human desire. Its earliest literary representation is probably the story of The Garden of Eden, with Adam and Eve living in Paradise. Nevertheless, the word Utopia was only coined in 1516 by Sir Thomas More in his book called Utopia. The twentieth century was a time of many social, political and economic changes in Great Britain. Arguably, those changes influenced literature and enabled the rise of a kind of novel that is known today as dystopian, which has emerged from that socio-historical background and is considered a modern way of looking at literary utopias. In the present thesis, we analyse utopian and dystopian features in the book The Host in order to create an understanding of how these energies shape the two main groups of characters in the novel: the society of the souls and the society of human living in the cave. In order to perform this research, we used the bibliographic and the exploratory methods.