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| | Literary Terms and Definitions D (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-07) |
 | | The term is a negative one, and it often implies a lack of skill on the part of the writer. |
 | | DYSTOPIA (from Greek, dys topos, "bad place"): The opposite of a utopia, a dystopia is an imaginary society in fictional writing that represents, as M. Abrams puts it, "a very unpleasant imaginary world in which ominous tendencies of our present social, political, and technological order are projected in some disastrous future culmination" ( Glossary 218). |
 | | For instance, while a utopia presents readers with a place where all the citizens are happy and ruled by a virtuous, efficient, rational government, a dystopia presents readers with a world where all citizens are universally unhappy, manipulated, and repressed by a sinister, sadistic totalitarian state. |
| web.cn.edu /kwheeler/lit_terms_D.html (6188 words) |
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