No writer is more renowned for his ability to foresee the future than H. G. Wells. His writing foresaw the airplane, the tank, space travel, the atomic bomb, and the world wide web; his fantastic fiction imagined time travel, flights to the moon, alien invasion, and human beings with the powers of gods. Wells’s political writing argued for an end to war through the creation of a World State; at the height of his fame Wells was one of the world’s most significant public intellectuals, and, towards the end of his career, he became increasingly interested in universal human rights.
The RBML’s H. G. Wells holdings constitute one of the most significant literary archives in the world: this exhibition will use the Illinois collection to show Wells as a writer and thinker of global importance.
The Rare Book & Manuscript Library is located at 346 Library, 1408 Gregory Drive, Urbana.
Thanks to Eva Miller of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library for this information item.
Simon James presents on “H.G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future” on Wednesday, September 21, 2016 at 3:00 p.m. in the The Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Main Library 346D. Speaker Simon James is one of the world’s leading H. G. Wells scholars, and has edited for print publication five of Wells’s novels. His much acclaimed monograph Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity and the End of Culture (OUP, 2012) was the first full-length study of Wells’s aesthetics. James is also a former editor of The Wellsian and the author of numerous books and articles on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. For more information, contact Eva Miller at (217) 333-3174 or emillr@illinois.edu.
Thanks to the University Library for this information item.
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