Editing Looking Backward (section)

==Precursors==
Though Bellamy tended to stress the independence of his work, ''Looking Backward'' shares relationships and resemblances with several earlier works—most notably the anonymous ''[[The Great Romance]]'' (1881), [[John Macnie]]'s ''[[The Diothas]]'' (1883),<ref>Arthur E. Morgan, ''Edward Bellamy'', New York, Columbia University Press, 1944.</ref> [[Laurence Gronlund]]'s ''The Co-operative Commonwealth'' (1884), and [[August Bebel]]'s ''Woman in the Past, Present, and Future'' (1886).<ref>Arthur E. Morgan, ''Plagiarism in Utopia: A Study of the Continuity of the Utopian Tradition With Special Reference to Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward"'', Yellow Springs, Ohio, privately printed, 1944.</ref> For example, in ''The True Author of Looking Backward'' (1890) J. B. Shipley argued that Bellamy's novel was a repeat of Bebel's arguments,{{Citation needed|date=September 2024}} while literary critic R. L. Shurter went so far as to argue that "''Looking Backward'' is actually a fictionalized version of ''The Co-operative Commonwealth'' and little more".<ref>Robert L. Shurter, ''The Utopian Novel in America, 1865–1900'', New York, AMS Press, 1975; p. 177.</ref> However, Bellamy's book also bears resemblances to the early socialist theorists or 'utopian socialists' [[Étienne Cabet|Etienne Cabet]], [[Charles Fourier]], [[Robert Owen]], and [[Henri Saint-Simon]], as well as to the 'Associationism' of [[Albert Brisbane]], whom Bellamy had met in the 1870s.<ref>Carl J. Guarneri, ''The Utopian Alternative, Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America'', (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1991), p. 368, p. 401</ref>