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''Caesar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century'' is a novel by Ignatius Donnelly, famous as the author of ''Atlantis: The Antediluvian World''. ''Caesar's Column'' was published pseudonymously in 1890.〔"Edmund Boisgilbert, M.D.," ''Caesar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century'', Chicago, F. J. Shulte and Co., 1890.〕 The book has been variously categorized as science fiction, speculative fiction, dystopian fiction, and/or apocalyptic fiction;〔Frederic Cople Jaher, ''Doubters and Dissenters: Cataclysmic Thought in America, 1885–1918'', New York, Free Press of Glencoe, 1964.〕 one critic has termed it an "Apocalyptic Utopia."〔Jean Pfaelzer, ''The Utopian Novel in America 1886–1896: The Politics of Form'', Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984.〕 The book is also a political novel, and a romance. It was a popular success as well, selling 60,000 copies upon its initial publication. Its sales eventually comprised 250,000 copies.〔Alexander Sexton, "''Caesar's Column'': The Dialogue of Utopia and Catastrophe," ''American Quarterly'', Vol. 19 No. 2 Part 1 (Summer 1967), pp. 224-238; see p. 227.〕 Donnelly's novel was one element of the great wave of utopian and dystopian literature during the later nineteenth century and the early twentieth, exemplified by works like Edward Bellamy's ''Looking Backward'' and Jack London's ''The Iron Heel''.〔Allyn B. Forbes, "The Literary Quest for Utopia, 1880–1990," ''Social Forces'', Vol. 6 No. 2 (December 1927), pp. 179-89.〕〔Kenneth Roemer, ''The Obsolete Necessity, 1888–1900'', Kent, OH, Kent State University Press, 1976.〕 ==Politics== ''Caesar's Column'' is partly based on Donnelly's commitment to agrarian Populism. In 1892, two years after the publication of his novel, Donnelly drafted the platform of the Populist Party, in which he wrote, :"A vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized on two continents, and it is rapidly taking possession of the world. If not met and overthrown at once it forebodes terrible social convulsions, the destruction of civilization, or the establishment of an absolute despotism."〔Quoted in Pfaelzer, p. 121.〕 This is the world view of ''Caesar's Column'': a man comes from his rural environment to the heart of a brutal capitalist oligarchy; he sees its corruptions firsthand, and witnesses its destruction. Donnelly's novel partly concerns the debated question of the alleged anti-Semitism of the Populist movement.〔Norman Pollack, "Handlin on Anti-Semitism: A Critique of ''American Views of the Jew''," ''Journal of American History'', Vol. 51 No. 3 (December 1964), pp. 391-403.〕〔Norman Pollack, "The Myth of Populist Anti-Semitism," ''American History Review'', Vol. 68 No. 1 (October 1962), pp. 76-80.〕 Donnelly's villain is an Italian Jew — but his protagonist has a name, Weltstein, that must have suggested a Jewish identity to many readers.〔Sexton reads the name as "Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon" rather than Jewish; Sexton, pp. 233-4.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Caesar's Column」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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