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''Islandia'' is a classic novel of utopian fiction by Austin Tappan Wright, a U. C. Berkeley Law School Professor. Written as a hobby over a long period, it was posthumously edited down by a third by his wife and daughter, and first published in hardcover by Farrar & Rinehart in 1942, eleven years after the author's 1931 death.1 ''Islandia'' is a fully realized world which has drawn parallels to Tolkien's ''The Lord of the Rings'', but it contains no magic, so it is much more a utopia than a standard fantasy. The original Islandia was conceived by Wright while he was yet a small boy. Creating its civilization became his lifelong leisure occupation. The complete Islandia papers include "a detailed history ... complete with geography, genealogy, representations from its literature, language and culture."4. The ''complete'' and never published version of ''Islandia'' can be found in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. A 61 page ''Introduction to Islandia'' by Basil Davenport was published along with the original novel in 1942. The protagonist of the novel is an American named John Lang, who graduates from Harvard in 1910. The setting is Islandia, an imaginary country set in the real world of that time. This remote nation "at the tip of the Karain semi-continent" is near "the unexplored wastes of Antarctica in the Southern Hemisphere."2 The citizens have imposed "the Hundred Law, limiting access to Islandia to a bare one hundred visitors at a time."3 Wright may have had in mind both the self-imposed isolation of Siam, starting in 1688, and that of Japan, starting soon after the Battle of Sekigahara in 1603. In any case, for the country of Islandia, these two factors have shrouded this nation in mystery. ==Themes== Islandia's culture has many "progressive" features. For example, prostitutes are rehabilitated back into respectable society. Another "progressive" feature is the citizens' love of nature, and their rural lives. Everyone, including members of the upper classes, engages in some kind of useful work, especially farming. The word for city in Islandian, "elainry", literally means "place of many people"; all city families have a country home to which they can return. Like other writers of speculative fiction, Wright decided to imagine a society that differs from ours in one or several key features. One of these is that, while Islandian civilization is technologically primitive, it is far in advance of Western culture in terms of understanding of human emotion and psychology. Wright wrote much of the story in the 1920s, but set it before World War I, providing a particularly stark contrast between Islandian understanding, and the emotionally unperceptive and self-repressive Victorian world. Immersed in the Islandian culture, John Lang steadily grows in understanding of his emotions and his sexual feelings. He grows accustomed to the sexually permissive Islandian culture. Wright's portrayal may have been intended as a positive comment on the growing sexual permissiveness of American culture in the 1920s. Another difference between Islandian culture and the West is that Islandians determinedly reject the rush of modern Western life, and most modern Western technology. It is a rural society with an arcadian worldview, which at one point Dorn humorously describes as "enlightened Hedonism". They're not interested in building railroads for quick travel. But they do not blindly reject all Western technology; they use a few Western inventions that they judge to be worthwhile, such as modern rifles, and Singer sewing machines. Among John Lang's discoveries, he finds that the Islandians use four words for love: *alia: love of place and family land and lineage (heimat) *amia: love of friends (philia) *ania: desire for marriage and commitment (storge) *apia: sexual attraction (eros) 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「Islandia (novel)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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