Overview of Brave New World

1980 film version Brave New World

[A reasonably good adaptation of the novel, if rather long. The script was written by Robert E. Thompson, who received an Oscar nomination for his scenario of the film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?]

BBC RADIO 45 Minute documentary on BNW http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00jn8bc

[An outstanding discussion of numerous aspects of the novel, with three world experts on 20th-century British literature.]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003k9fz

[Another podcast from BBC. This one is on modernist utopias]

Brave New World article Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World

[An excellent overview of plot, character, and contexts]

Margaret Atwood’s essay on Brave New World http://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/nov/17/classics.margaretatwood

History Concentration

“Brave New World and the Rationalization of Industry”. English Studies in Canada. Discusses Huxley’s satire on communism and capitalism in the novel. [Useful for research focusing on history and/or business.PDF File.] http://opentextbc.ca/englishliterature/wp-content/uploads/sites/27/2014/06/brave-new-world-and-the-rationalization-of-industry-3.pdf

“Sight-seeing in Alien Englands” Aldous Huxley (1931) [A companion essay to BNW, in which Huxley describes his visits to Alfred Mond’s chemical factory in the north of England, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), and to the Lucas Electrical Parts factory in Birmingham. http://opentextbc.ca/englishliterature/?attachment_id=453

My Life and Work: Henry Ford http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=7213

“Dickens’ Hard Times as Dystopia” http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/hardtimes/sexton1.html

[Discusses Charles Dickens’s “condition of England” novel Hard Times as source for BNW.]

http://www.huxley.net/miranda/history.html[Links to political figures important to BNW.]

The Mind and Face of Bolshevism René Fülop-Miller. [Huxley reviewed this anti-communist book shortly before he wrote BNW. It is an important source for the satire on communism.] https://archive.org/details/mindandfaceofbol015704mbp

“Aldous Huxley’s Bokanovsky” http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/covers/cov47.htm (Science Fiction Studies). [A short essay on the source of the name “Bokanovsky.”]

“‘Brave New World,’ The Feelies, and Elinor Glyn.” [ELN 35.2 Sept. 1997.] [Discusses the uses Huxley made of various sources such as Shakespeare’s Othello and Elinor Glyn’s novel It.] http://opentextbc.ca/englishliterature/wp-content/uploads/sites/27/2014/09/RevdBrave-New-World-The-Feelies-and-Elinor-Glyn.pdf

“Aldous Huxley’s Americanization of the Brave New World Typescript.” http://somaweb.org/w/sub/Americanization.html [Primarily a historical approach to the novel.]

Psychology Focus

“Brave New World Revisited Revisited: Huxley’s Evolving View of Behaviorism.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2733409/pdf/behavan00027-0062.pdf [Valuable discussion of Huxley’s changing attitude to behaviorism in BNW and later works. Psychology]

“Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World as a Parody and Satire of Wells, Ford, Freud and Behaviourism” AHA 8 [A wide-ranging discussion of Huxley’s satire on the ideas of key figures in psychology.] http://opentextbc.ca/englishliterature/?attachment_id=456

Biology Concentration

Congdon, Brad “Community, Identity, Stability”: The Scientific Society and the Future of Religion in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.”

http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/ESC/article/view/20085/15530 [This paper is quite wide-ranging but will be particularly helpful for students wanting to concentrate their research on biological aspects of the novel.]

J. B. S. Haldane. Daedalus: or Science and the Future. http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Daedalus.html [This paper by noted biologist Prof. Haldane, a friend of Huxley’s, discusses concepts such as ectogenesis and others topics central to BNW.]

Julian Huxley. “The Tissue-Culture King.” A science-fiction story by Huxley’s brother, Sir Julian Huxley, written in 1927. It discusses scientific ideas also found in BNW. http://www.revolutionsf.com/fiction/tissue/

Anthropology Concentration

Franklin, Benjamin. “Remarks on the Savages of North America.”

http://mith.umd.edu//eada/html/display.php?docs=franklin_bagatelle3.xml

http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/zuni/ [Huxley used some of the Smithsonian reports from Frank Cushing for background source material for BNW.]

Hough, Walter. Moki Snake Dance. [N.B. “Moki” was an early synonym for “Hopi”.] https://archive.org/details/mokisnake00houg

Huxley read this pamphlet in 1930 before writing Brave New World. Despite his limited time visiting Aboriginal reservations in the U.S. states of Arizona and New Mexico, he was able to gain further background details for the “Savage Reservation” chapters in the novel by using this and other publications as source material. [The Cushing, Hough and the Higdon essays are particularly useful for students wishing to do research with emphasis on Anthropology.]

David Leon Higdon Essay: Huxley’s Hopi Sources http://opentextbc.ca/englishliterature/wp-content/uploads/sites/27/2014/06/Hopi-Sources-with-fnsecond-version.pdf

Penitentes http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11635c.htm

Philosophy Concentration

“The Utopian Tradition and Aldous Huxley” SFS http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/6/matter6art.htm [As the title suggests, this essay discusses BNW within a context of previous utopian works, including Plato’s Republic.]

The “Grand Inquisitor Chapter” from Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pol116/grand.htm [Useful for students wishing to focus on Chapters 16 and 17 in BNW, particularly the philosphy of the Grand Inquisitor. Political Science/Philosophy.]

Fremantle, Ann. Introduction to The Grand Inquisitor. http://web.pdx.edu/~tothm/religion/Summary%20of%20The%20Grand%20Inquisitor.pdf

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~karamazov/resources/?page_id=391

Lewicki, Greg. “Dostoevsky Extended: Aldous Huxley on the Grand Inquisitor, Specialisation and the Future of Science.”

http://ebookbrowsee.net/gdoc.php?id=181704028&url=c9916ddd0284a3df025e0ce4e036d271 [Culture and Politics, Tischner European Univesity Papers, Issue 2/3, pp 210-33. Use this article together with Wikipedia “Grand Inquisitor” as starting point.]

Miranda Web site http://www.huxley.net/miranda/home.html [Contains numerous sources for Brave New World in downloadable format.]

“Utopias, Positive and Negative. Aldous Huxley (1963). [pdf] http://opentextbc.ca/englishliterature/?attachment_id=455

Utopias Postitive and Negative Afterword [James Sexton]. [pdf] http://opentextbc.ca/englishliterature/?attachment_id=454