This is the first study of the literary theories of H. G. Wells, the founding father of English science fiction and once the most widely read writer in the world. It explores his entire career, during which he produced popular science, educational theory, history, politics, and prophecy, as well as realist, experimental, and science fiction.

• 1: Of Art, Of Literature, Of Mr. H. G. Wells


• 2: The History of the Future: The Scientific Romances


• 3: The Uses of Literacy: Reading and Realismin Wells's Novels


• 4: The Idea of a Planned World: H. G. Wells's Utopias


• 5: Education and Catastrophe: The War and the World


• Bibliography

Dr Simon J. James is Professor of Victorian Literature at Durham University. He is the author of Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative Form in the Novels of George Gissing and of work on Charles Dickens, H. G. Wells, and Edwardian fiction. He has edited four Wells novels for Penguin Classics, and is the current editor of The Wellsian, the scholarly journal of the H. G. Wells Society.