Stacey
Margolis
Professor of English
University of Utah
The Future is Fiction:
A Cultural History of Intergenerational Justice
(Oxford UP, 2026)
This is the first cultural history of the idea that living people have an obligation to protect the world for future generations. While political philosophers have regarded intergenerational justice as an important field of study since the 1970s, the history of modern forms of obligation to the future has received almost no attention. Tracing the evolution of the Anglo-American conception of intergenerational justice from its emergence during the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century to its flourishing in the twenty-first century, this book shows how fiction illuminates the contours of a political conviction that has shaped modern culture. From nineteenth-century utopian novels like James Fenimore Cooper’s The Crater and Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora, to post-nuclear war dystopias, like Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, and Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, to recent fiction about endangered children like Toni Morrison’s Paradise, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, this tradition of future-oriented fiction recognizes that our obligation to future generations is not the solution to an ethical problem, but an ethical dilemma in its own right.
Other Books
Fictions of Mass Democracy (Cambridge UP, 2015)
Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America examines how mass democracy was understood before public opinion could be measured by polls. It argues that fiction by writers like Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Fanny Fern, Harriet Jacobs, and James Fenimore Cooper, in its freedom to represent what resists representation, develops the most groundbreaking theories of the democratic public.
The Public Life of Privacy (Duke UP, 2005)
The Public Life of Privacy rethinks a key chapter in American literary history, challenging the idea that nineteenth-century American culture was dominated by an ideology of privacy that defined subjects in terms of their intentions and desires. It reveals how writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Henry James depicted a world in which individuals could only be understood (and, more importantly, could only understand themselves) through their public effects.
