“The Dream of a Madman”: Prophecy and Planning in Bernard Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island and Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett’s A New Amazonia
Published in SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies, 2026.
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Abstract
This article explores how Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Islandand E. B. Corbett’s A New Amazoniause speculative futures to provoke critical reflection rather than present idealized utopias. A New Amazoniaprophesies a future society revolutionized by feminist domestic reforms and urban planning, yet its vision is complicated by embedded racial hierarchies and eugenic practices. The narrator’s ambivalent response invites readers to reconsider the costs and contradictions of such futures. In John Bull’s Other Island, competing visions clash: Broadbent’s romantic but colonialist Garden City proposal contrasts with Keegan’s melancholic, prophetic critiques of capitalism and imperialism. Keegan’s “dream” serves not as escapism but as a form of imaginative engagement that exposes the limits of political idealism. Both texts resist static or totalizing visions of utopia and instead foster a dynamic process of imaginative contemplation that reflects on social realities, interrogates ideological frameworks, and creates space for intellectual growth.