Artur Blaim is Professor of English Literature at the University of Gdansk. He is the author of Gazing in Useless Wonder. English Utopian Fictions, 1516-1800 (2013) and other books on early English utopias. He edited several volumes on literary studies and utopian cinema.
Ludmila Gruszewska-Blaim is Associate Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Gdansk. She published books on 20th-century literature and co-edited, together with Artur Blaim, Imperfect Worlds and Dystopian Narratives in Contemporary Cinema (2011) as well as Spectres of Utopia (2012).

The work comprises adaptation studies of selected utopian/dystopian fictions written and filmed in Europe and America during the last century. It focusses on ways of constructing fictional realities as well as on techniques of rendering literary utopias/dystopias into film and allows a deep insight into the history of cinema.

Contents: Artur Blaim/Ludmila Gruszewska-Blaim: On Utopia, Adaptation, and Utopian Film Analysis - Justyna Galant: H.G. Wells's and Cameron Menzies's Things To Come: A Neurotic Utopia of Progress - Katarzyna Pisarska: The «Speaking Picture»: Frank Capra's Adaptation of James Hilton's Lost Horizon - Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga: Visualizing the «Shadow World»: Dystopian Reality in the Film Adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four - Artur Blaim: «As if it wasn't a good island»: Failed and Forgotten Utopias in the Cinematic Adaptations of William Golding's Lord of the Flies - Andrzej Slawomir Kowalczyk: The World in (Dis)harmony: Yevgeni Sherstobitov's The Andromeda Nebula - Grzegorz Maziarczyk: Between the Scylla of Estrangement and the Charybdis of Naturalisation: Two Television Adaptations of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley - Zofia Kolbuszewska: From Philip K. Dick's Dystopian World to Hollywood Utopian Vision: «We Can Remember It for You Wholesale», Wunderkammer, Memory and Total Recall - Barbara Klonowska: From Ideal Community to the Land of Cockayne: Redefining Utopia in The Secret Garden by Agnieszka Holland - Ludmila Gruszewska-Blaim: Dystopian Topography of Noise: «Harrison Bergeron» by Kurt Vonnegut, Bruce Pittman, and Chandler Tuttle - Marta Komsta: Parts Unknown: Strategies of Disappropriation in Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go.

The volume comprises adaptation studies of ten selected utopian/dystopian fictions written and filmed in Europe and America during the 20th and 21st centuries: Things to Come, Lost Horizon, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Lord of the Flies, The Andromeda Nebula, Brave New World, Total Recall, The Secret Garden, Harrison Bergeron and Never Let Me Go. It focuses not only on the ways of constructing fictional realities and techniques of rendering literary utopias/dystopias into film, but also on their cultural and political determinants.