Radical Imagination: Feminist Conceptions of the Future in Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy and Sally Miller Gearhart

Before the New Feminism of the 1970s provided an ideological frame, women writers of utopian fiction had not proposed radical alternative models of society. On the basis of three contemporary American feminist novels, The left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin, Woman on The Edge of Time by Marge Piercy, and The Wanderground by Sally Miller Gearhart, this study investigates the relations between different feminist theories and the creation of alternative fictional societies, the influence of ideology on content and its impact on narrative technique.