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The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature
Since the publication of Thomas More's genre-defining work Utopia in 1516, the field of utopian literature has evolved into an ever-expanding domain. This Companion presents an extensive historical survey of the development of utopianism, from the publication of Utopia to today's dark and despairing tendency towards dystopian pessimism, epitomised by works such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Chapters address the difficult definition of the concept of utopia, and consider its relation to science fiction and other literary genres. The volume takes an innovative approach to the major themes predominating within the utopian and dystopian literary tradition, including feminism, romance and ecology, and explores in detail the vexed question of the purportedly ‘western' nature of the concept of utopia. The reader is provided with a balanced overview of the evolution and current state of a long-standing, rich tradition of historical, political and literary scholarship.
316 pages, Paperback
First published August 5, 2010
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About the author
Gregory Claeys
95 books26 followersGregory Claeys was born in France and educated in Canada and the United Kingdom. He has taught in Germany and the United States and is now Professor of the History of Political Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
April 29, 2023
“Ütopya Edebiyatı”, Cambridge Üniversitesi Yayınları tarafından 2010 yılında yayınlanan çok yazarlı bir “edebiyat çalışması” kitabının çevirisi. Akademik bir kitap bence, çok kapsamlı, kaynak belirterek yazılmış ve konuyla ilgili çok sayıda edebi yazı örneği incelenmiş. Ancak dili çok sade ve akıcı, popüler bilim kitabı olarak da kabul edilebilir. Kitabın başında Ütopya Edebiyatı ve düşünce sistemindeki temel eserlerin bir kronolojisi verilmiş. Platon’un “Devlet”i ile başlayan liste M. Atwood’un “Tufan Zamanı” (2009) ile sonlanıyor.
Listede yeralan 86 kitap içinde çok iyi bilinen Thomas More/Ütopya, T. Campanella/Güneş Ülkesi, Francis Bacon/ Yeni Atlantis, J. Swift/ Gulliver’in Seyahatleri, Robert Owen/ Yeni Ahlaki Dünyanın Kitabı, Jules Verne/ Dünyanın Merkezine Yolculuk, H.G. Wells/ Zaman Makinesi/Dr Moreau’nun Adası/Dünyalar Savaşı, Yevgeny Zamyatin/Biz, A. Huxley/ Cesur Yeni Dünya, Katharine Burdekin/ Swastika Geceleri, G. Orwel/1984, Ray Bradbury/Fahrenheit 451, W. Golding/ Sineklerin Tanrısı, Ursula Le Guin/Mülksüzler, M. Atwood/ Damızlık Kızın Öyküsü gibi edebi yapıtların ana konuya yani Ütopya Edebiyatına ilişkin çok güzel açıklamaları var.
Ütopyanın sözlük anlamları, çeşitleri, edebi olarak değerlendirilmesi, distopya, anti-ütopya, hicvi ütopya, hiperütopya ve benzeri terimlerin farklılıkları, T. More’dan sonra Rönesans ve Aydınlanma dönemlerinde ütopya, 19. yüzyılında altın çağını yaşayan ütopya kavramı içine Marx ve Engels’in “Komunist Manifesto’sunun da dahil edilmesi, Distopya’nın kökenlerinin Wells, Huxley ve Orwell tarafından atılması gibi konular geniş olarak kitapta yeralmakta.
Ütopyanın farklı tanımları ve türleri var. Benim aklıma en uygun tanım Lyman T. Sargent’in “toplumsal düş” yorumu oldu. Zaten bu tanımı her tür ütopya düşüncesine uygulamak mümkün. Bilimkurgu ile ütopya ve distopyanın benzerlikleri ve farklılıkları, yine edebiyat eserleri üzerinden anlatılmış. Ayrıca feminizm ile ütopyacılık, sömürgecilik ve ütopyacılık, ekoloji ve ütopyacılık konuları da mükemmel işlenmiş. Son olarak ütopya kavramı ve ütopya edebiyatının sadece Batıya ait olmadığını, Doğu kültür ve edebiyatında da bulunduğu vurgusu için bir bölüm ayrılmış.
Çok yararlandım. Konuya ilgi duyanlara kesinlikle öneririm.
June 12, 2018
Kitabı okurken yarısını anca anlamışımdır, bitirince ise ondan da az bilgi aklımda kaldı. Buna büyük oranda kalın bir kitap olması ve sürece yayarak, daha doğrusu arada bir okumam sebep oldu. Buna rağmen elimde ütopya ve ütopya ile ilişkili birçok kavrama dair çok güzel bir kaynak olduğunu söyleyebilirim. Distopya, bilimkurgu, feminizm, sömürgecilik gibi konuların ütopya ile ilişkisi çok başarılı bir şekilde anlatılmış. Şimdilik kitabı bitirip kenara koyabildiğim için memnunum ama arada bir makalelere tekrar göz atacağıma da eminim.
April 4, 2018
Ütopya düşüncesine ve edebiyatına yakından bakmak, anlamak için çok iyi bir kaynak. İçindeki on bir makale ütopyanın doğuşunu, distopyaya evrilişini, bilimkurgu ile ilişkisini, bir düşünce biçimi olarak dünya tarihi içindeki yerini ve diğer edebi türlerle, akımlarla, felsefelerle ilişkisini ayrıntılı bir biçimde ele alıyor.
Üstelik yetkin bir çeviri, özenli bir baskı.
Kitap, Özgen Berkol Doğan Bilimkurgu Kütüphanesi tarafından İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları'nın desteğiyle yayımlandığı için ayrı bir dikkati de hak ediyor.
Üstelik yetkin bir çeviri, özenli bir baskı.
Kitap, Özgen Berkol Doğan Bilimkurgu Kütüphanesi tarafından İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları'nın desteğiyle yayımlandığı için ayrı bir dikkati de hak ediyor.
July 9, 2015
The chapter on postcolonial utopias is really fascinating. It highlights both the religious and socialist utopian projects that have been operating in (especially settler colonial) colonies for hundreds of years, beginning with the puritans in the 1600s. It kind of blew me away to see that connection; Australia has more 'intentional communities' than any other country per capita, except for Israel. It was interesting and thought provoking to see that distinction between text and reality disregarded. Also really interesting to see the settler colony and all of its symptoms in the socialist and religious left as directed towards a utopian fantasy of social change.
The chapter on non-western utopias has this incredibly annoying part about Australia, where it names 'the dreaming' (as described by Deborah Bird-Rose and a few 19ths century ethographers) as a form of utopia centred around a "Golden Age" genre of literature, and mentions a few texts by non-Aboriginal people who wrote apocalyptic dystopian novels about Aboriginal people. Only one actual Aboriginal author is mentioned, but not discussed.
The rest of the book is ok but talks about Thomas Moore a bit too much.
The chapter on non-western utopias has this incredibly annoying part about Australia, where it names 'the dreaming' (as described by Deborah Bird-Rose and a few 19ths century ethographers) as a form of utopia centred around a "Golden Age" genre of literature, and mentions a few texts by non-Aboriginal people who wrote apocalyptic dystopian novels about Aboriginal people. Only one actual Aboriginal author is mentioned, but not discussed.
The rest of the book is ok but talks about Thomas Moore a bit too much.
November 16, 2012
I used this as a textbook for a class on YA dystopian lit. The students struggled with a few of the chapters, but overall found it to be helpful in understanding the history and tradition of utopia, which added a lot of context to our discussions on more contemporary texts.
March 19, 2021
Why does it feel like the more i read about a topic, the less i know about it?
December 12, 2024
I could never understand why 19th century Marxists so often pointedly eschewed predictions about what communism would mean in practice, dismissing them as "utopianism" and "foreclosing on the future". It never made sense to me that any speculation over the specific nature of their objectives was deemed to be unscientific. Still doesn't actually. But this book goes some way to helping me understand how they could get away with this intellectual sleight of hand.
The reason was surely that utopian ideas and futuristic plans were so very much in the air during the long 19th century ("Between 1888 and the early years of the twentieth century, at least 200 literary utopias appeared in the United States alone") that Marxists could safely leave all the speculative yearnings to them without committing themselves to anything more than their appropriation of the means of production. Today we lose sight of the fact that hundreds of utopian works of both fiction and putative non-fiction helped form public awareness at that time along with various utopian and communal projects, movements and visions. We forget that we are living among the ruins of our ancestors' utopias.
This book helped me to map out some of the most prominent utopian ideas of the past. It refers to and interestingly ties in with some other works I have read on allied topics, e.g. Norman Cohn's Pursuit of the Millennium about chiliastic religious movements and Schumacher's Small is Beautiful on modern trends. It also has an excellent bibliography with a whole warren of fascinating rabbit holes.
I was particularly interested in this topic because I recently translated a Czech short story written in 1841 by Jakub Malý about a visit to the future, so I was curious to track down some of the common features of utopian literature before and since, e.g. the characteristic formal requirements of utopian description – the conducted tour, the account of utopian history and government and the answers to frequently voiced objections to the vision of society the author is putting forward. Note also the typically utopian "liminal ordeals" suffered in the transition from present-day reality to the utopia. To move from one world to another is to pass through a frontier zone or no man’s land with several typical features. These include separation and isolation, the crossing of a forbidden boundary, entry into a timeless condition, the appearance of monstrous and marvellous forms, and an experience of death leading to rebirth. Cue Also Sprach Zarathustra.
A frequent association with the carnivalesque (see Bakhtin) was also of relevance to me here.
I should also highlight the utopian and utopian satire tradition that had been bubbling away in literature, e.g. see Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais, a 1771 underground bestseller depicting a secular future and condemned by the Inquisition. In 1810 Julius von Voss had brought out Ini: Ein Roman aus dem einundzwanzigsten Jahrhundert, then in 1821 August von Kotzebue, whom Malý had translated, wrote the drama Die hundertjährigen Eichen oder das Jahr 1914 followed by Étienne Cabet and his highly influential 1840 novel Voyage en Icarie, subsequently referred to by Karl Marx and inspiring the creation of American utopian communities that survived well into the 20th century. As a translator himself, Malý was familiar with the European literary scene and will surely have been familiar with the ideas involved.
The description of all the major utopias and dystopias written from the Middle Ages through to the twentieth century makes for fascinating reading, which I cannot hope to do full justice to here. The exposition is largely clear and jargon-free, though it helps to know beforehand that a utopia that is truly wonderful is called a eutopia, while a future eutopia is a euchronia -- fun facts: "for a whole century euchronias were exclusively French" but then "with Paine and Godwin, British utopian thought became truly euchronic". More fun facts, quotes and notes for my own occasional perusal:
Utopia [by Thomas More] was often seen as a foundation document of modern socialism. The most extreme manifestation of this was the inclusion of More’s name on an obelisk commemorating the eighteen founders of communism, erected on Lenin’s orders in post-revolutionary Moscow [Alexander Garden Obelisk with list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexand... ]
More was influenced by Erasmus, himself building on ideas expressed by Pythagoras, Plato and Cicero. In the 1515 edition of his Adages, Erasmus began with two proverbs which seem to inform More’s utopian design: ‘Between friends all is common’ and ‘Friendship is equality. A friend is another self.’ In its equality of goods, labour and leisure, Utopia then looks like a Pythagorean society of friends.
As Cicero put it, ‘the whole human race should co-exist as a single fellowship cemented by reason and common speech’ adding the identification of such fellowship with the friendship between those who hold all things in common
This Pythagorean friendship, a ‘sharing of life and property’, was ‘the very thing Christ wants to happen among Christians’.
Myths of the Island of the Blessed, the Land of Cockaygne, Elysium, Shangri-La and the Garden of Eden haunted philosophers, writers and travellers for centuries and paved the way for the geographical utopia of the Renaissance period and the voyage utopia of the eighteenth century, which believed in the transformative quality of alterity.
Thomas More’s Utopia was the collaborative product of an early sixteenth-century European intellectual elite, in Latin but engaging with the classical Greek of which they were advocates. This linguistic complexity has not prevented it enjoying worldwide popularity, being translated into numerous vernaculars and scarcely ever out of print in the 500 years since its first publication in 1516. It is at once jocular and serious, seeking both to profit and delight the reader. One of its jokes is inherent in the word which came to be its title, ‘Utopia’.
The challenge of the ideal society of More’s aspiration was how to reasonably manage imagination and emotion without crushing both under the imperative of reshaping the human will, without replicating the great emptiness at the heart of things. One of his tools was an elusive, teasing humour. Whether he succeeded is perhaps the most open of all the open questions.
John Ruskin described it as ‘perhaps the most really mischievous book ever written’.
Some see Utopia as a profoundly anti-utopian work
Eighteenth-century Jesuit utopian colonies (‘Reductiones’) in Paraguay which sought to reconcile primitive Christianity and aboriginal primitivism.
The circle around Samuel Hartlib, Jan Amos Comenius and Gabriel Plattes, the Pansophists, pre-empted the rise of a revolutionary idealism that resulted in later constitutional changes. What characterized their language and that of later Parliamentarians and pamphleteers and writers was a novel and radical political leverage, a practical, social approach to political discourse and an element of millenarian chiliasm.
The most striking example of an anarchistic pastoral text is the medieval Land of Cockaygne (Land of ‘small cakes’). Merging the classical myths and fantasies of Lucian’s True History and Hesiod’s Golden Age of Kronos and the chiliastic yearning for Heaven and Eden, it adds to the history of early modern utopianism the element of the carnivalesque.
Despite their objections to utopian imagining, [see my initial comment] there are obvious connections between Engels and Marx and the earlier French and British utopian socialists. Owen’s followers in Manchester directly influenced Engels. Marx and Engels’s promotion of job rotation, in The German Ideology (1845–6), as a means of alleviating alienating labour, reflected Fourier’s concepts of work; and their advocacy of redistributing urban labourers to rural workers’ communities in The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) echoed Fourier and Owen’s faith in intentional communities. On a broader level they agreed that the current social system oppressed the natural and good tendencies in human nature and they even indulged in a bit of imaginary picture making when they envisioned the ultimate goal of a communist reality – the withering away of the state in a classless society.
The logical transition from Marx and Engels to the rebirth of the literary utopia in the late nineteenth century is an easy one to imagine. Despite the tendency of utopists like Bellamy to avoid using the terms ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’, it is clear that the tremendous impact of Marx and Engels’s responses to the industrial revolution directly or indirectly shaped much of the utopian literature that ushered in the rebirth of the literary utopia in the United States, Britain, the British Commonwealth, Europe and Asia. But as indicated previously, over-emphasis on the late nineteenth century and the utopias of cooperation and socialism, distorts the history of nineteenth century utopian literature by obscuring the importance of earlier works and the variety of the century’s literary utopias.
Edward Bellamy (1850–98), who was compared to Hawthorne by the influential American editor and novelist, William Dean Howells, began writing the most famous nineteenth-century literary utopia, Looking Backward 2000–1887 (1888), using a similar concept of utopian literature. At first he envisioned the book as ‘literary fantasy’, even a ‘fairy tale’. But while writing an episode about an organization not unlike Owen’s grand civil armies and Fourier’s industrial armies, Bellamy’s concept of utopia changed from fairy tale to blueprint.
Only one pre-1900 American utopia, Imperium in Imperio (1899), focused on African Americans and it was written by the only late nineteenth-century black utopist, Sutton Griggs, a respected Baptist minister. The narrative takes the form of two fictional biographies of black leaders, during the Jim Crow era, who organize a secret society inspired by visions of freedom and a perfect form of government. The society is torn between two factions: one supports peaceful co-existence and plans to establish a separatist colony in Texas; the other advocates revolution. The revolutionaries triumph and the book ends with warnings for the future of America.
Fictional satires of the ‘new philosophy’, loosely defined as ‘perfectibility’, which portrayed Godwinian invocations of a society governed by reason as inducing disaster, such as Hannah More’s The History of Mr Fantom (1797). This is also the point at which both major strands of the later dystopian turn, population control and socialism, are addressed by the most famous anti-utopian text of the nineteenth century, and a key source for Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), T. R. Malthus’s Essay on Population (1798).5 This in its first edition targeted Condorcet and William Godwin,
Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein (1818), often held to be the founding text of the genre of science fiction, but also partly a satire on the failed aspirations of the Revolution, heralding one of the key themes of late dystopian writings [...] the creature standing in part for the ‘new man’ of the revolutionary ideal,
On Orwell: He attempted to define a unique brand of British socialism which could reconcile the need to centralize the economy with a sense of the value of freedom, privacy, the dislike of regimentation and an incorruptible belief in law. He hoped that working-class culture, which he believed did not encourage power-worship, and retained instead a vital measure of moral integrity, might help sustain these values. But he still warned of ‘the persistent effort to chip away English morale and spread a hedonistic, what-do-I-get-out-of-it attitude to life’
A Crystal Age - W. H. Hudson - A Crystal Age - NOTE the typically utopian "liminal ordeals" of separation, transgression, timelessness, monstrosity [...] and symbolic death and rebirth.
VIZ To move from one world to another is to pass through a frontier zone or no man’s land with several typical features. These include separation and isolation, the crossing of a forbidden boundary, entry into a timeless condition, the appearance of monstrous and marvellous forms, and an experience of death leading to rebirth.
Check out Ernst Bloch: Bloch was a ‘warm’ Marxist who disagreed with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s disparagement of utopias as escapist and ineffectual. ^^^ His idea of the ‘not-yet’ lines up significantly with Dewey’s notion of the ‘end-in-view’ and with feminists’ characterization of that goal as furthered by utopian writing. It is part of ‘anticipatory consciousness’, an awareness of possibilities that have not yet taken shape but that could one day be effected. Bloch focuses on the daydream, the way the individual’s desires come to consciousness as visions, allowing people to organize their discontent with the present.
[Bloch's work became influential in the course of the student protest movements in 1968 and in liberation theology -- Bloch's formulation of utopia shifted how scholars conceptualize the ontology and the staging of performances as imbued with an enduring indeterminacy - Wiki - see Peggy Phelan - "The Ontology of Performance,"]
Early Buddhist texts from Southeast Asia have strong utopian elements. Explore.
The claim has been made that China has an authentic utopian tradition. Particular emphasis is put on the Confucian concept of ta-t’ung, a Golden Age of ‘Great Unity’ or ‘Great Togetherness’; the Taoist concept of t’ai-p’ing, the ‘Great Harmony’ …
Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl founded the political Zionist movement, outlining his programme in The Jewish State (1896) and writing a utopian novel Altneuland (1902) describing the Zionist utopia that he dreamed of creating in Eretz Israel (Palestine)
The Confucian utopian vision has also produced a series of feminist utopias, from Luo Maodeng’s sixteenth/seventeenth-century work Sanbao’s Expedition to the Western Ocean, and the late eighteenth-century narratives by Chen Duansheng, The Destiny of the Next Life (Zai shengyuan), and Xia Jingqu, Humble Words of an Old Rustic (Yesou Puyan), to Bai Hua’s recent novel of an idyllic matriarchal community in The Remote Country of Women.
Check out Ecotopia - Callenbach
The reason was surely that utopian ideas and futuristic plans were so very much in the air during the long 19th century ("Between 1888 and the early years of the twentieth century, at least 200 literary utopias appeared in the United States alone") that Marxists could safely leave all the speculative yearnings to them without committing themselves to anything more than their appropriation of the means of production. Today we lose sight of the fact that hundreds of utopian works of both fiction and putative non-fiction helped form public awareness at that time along with various utopian and communal projects, movements and visions. We forget that we are living among the ruins of our ancestors' utopias.
This book helped me to map out some of the most prominent utopian ideas of the past. It refers to and interestingly ties in with some other works I have read on allied topics, e.g. Norman Cohn's Pursuit of the Millennium about chiliastic religious movements and Schumacher's Small is Beautiful on modern trends. It also has an excellent bibliography with a whole warren of fascinating rabbit holes.
I was particularly interested in this topic because I recently translated a Czech short story written in 1841 by Jakub Malý about a visit to the future, so I was curious to track down some of the common features of utopian literature before and since, e.g. the characteristic formal requirements of utopian description – the conducted tour, the account of utopian history and government and the answers to frequently voiced objections to the vision of society the author is putting forward. Note also the typically utopian "liminal ordeals" suffered in the transition from present-day reality to the utopia. To move from one world to another is to pass through a frontier zone or no man’s land with several typical features. These include separation and isolation, the crossing of a forbidden boundary, entry into a timeless condition, the appearance of monstrous and marvellous forms, and an experience of death leading to rebirth. Cue Also Sprach Zarathustra.
A frequent association with the carnivalesque (see Bakhtin) was also of relevance to me here.
I should also highlight the utopian and utopian satire tradition that had been bubbling away in literature, e.g. see Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais, a 1771 underground bestseller depicting a secular future and condemned by the Inquisition. In 1810 Julius von Voss had brought out Ini: Ein Roman aus dem einundzwanzigsten Jahrhundert, then in 1821 August von Kotzebue, whom Malý had translated, wrote the drama Die hundertjährigen Eichen oder das Jahr 1914 followed by Étienne Cabet and his highly influential 1840 novel Voyage en Icarie, subsequently referred to by Karl Marx and inspiring the creation of American utopian communities that survived well into the 20th century. As a translator himself, Malý was familiar with the European literary scene and will surely have been familiar with the ideas involved.
The description of all the major utopias and dystopias written from the Middle Ages through to the twentieth century makes for fascinating reading, which I cannot hope to do full justice to here. The exposition is largely clear and jargon-free, though it helps to know beforehand that a utopia that is truly wonderful is called a eutopia, while a future eutopia is a euchronia -- fun facts: "for a whole century euchronias were exclusively French" but then "with Paine and Godwin, British utopian thought became truly euchronic". More fun facts, quotes and notes for my own occasional perusal:
Utopia [by Thomas More] was often seen as a foundation document of modern socialism. The most extreme manifestation of this was the inclusion of More’s name on an obelisk commemorating the eighteen founders of communism, erected on Lenin’s orders in post-revolutionary Moscow [Alexander Garden Obelisk with list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexand... ]
More was influenced by Erasmus, himself building on ideas expressed by Pythagoras, Plato and Cicero. In the 1515 edition of his Adages, Erasmus began with two proverbs which seem to inform More’s utopian design: ‘Between friends all is common’ and ‘Friendship is equality. A friend is another self.’ In its equality of goods, labour and leisure, Utopia then looks like a Pythagorean society of friends.
As Cicero put it, ‘the whole human race should co-exist as a single fellowship cemented by reason and common speech’ adding the identification of such fellowship with the friendship between those who hold all things in common
This Pythagorean friendship, a ‘sharing of life and property’, was ‘the very thing Christ wants to happen among Christians’.
Myths of the Island of the Blessed, the Land of Cockaygne, Elysium, Shangri-La and the Garden of Eden haunted philosophers, writers and travellers for centuries and paved the way for the geographical utopia of the Renaissance period and the voyage utopia of the eighteenth century, which believed in the transformative quality of alterity.
Thomas More’s Utopia was the collaborative product of an early sixteenth-century European intellectual elite, in Latin but engaging with the classical Greek of which they were advocates. This linguistic complexity has not prevented it enjoying worldwide popularity, being translated into numerous vernaculars and scarcely ever out of print in the 500 years since its first publication in 1516. It is at once jocular and serious, seeking both to profit and delight the reader. One of its jokes is inherent in the word which came to be its title, ‘Utopia’.
The challenge of the ideal society of More’s aspiration was how to reasonably manage imagination and emotion without crushing both under the imperative of reshaping the human will, without replicating the great emptiness at the heart of things. One of his tools was an elusive, teasing humour. Whether he succeeded is perhaps the most open of all the open questions.
John Ruskin described it as ‘perhaps the most really mischievous book ever written’.
Some see Utopia as a profoundly anti-utopian work
Eighteenth-century Jesuit utopian colonies (‘Reductiones’) in Paraguay which sought to reconcile primitive Christianity and aboriginal primitivism.
The circle around Samuel Hartlib, Jan Amos Comenius and Gabriel Plattes, the Pansophists, pre-empted the rise of a revolutionary idealism that resulted in later constitutional changes. What characterized their language and that of later Parliamentarians and pamphleteers and writers was a novel and radical political leverage, a practical, social approach to political discourse and an element of millenarian chiliasm.
The most striking example of an anarchistic pastoral text is the medieval Land of Cockaygne (Land of ‘small cakes’). Merging the classical myths and fantasies of Lucian’s True History and Hesiod’s Golden Age of Kronos and the chiliastic yearning for Heaven and Eden, it adds to the history of early modern utopianism the element of the carnivalesque.
Despite their objections to utopian imagining, [see my initial comment] there are obvious connections between Engels and Marx and the earlier French and British utopian socialists. Owen’s followers in Manchester directly influenced Engels. Marx and Engels’s promotion of job rotation, in The German Ideology (1845–6), as a means of alleviating alienating labour, reflected Fourier’s concepts of work; and their advocacy of redistributing urban labourers to rural workers’ communities in The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) echoed Fourier and Owen’s faith in intentional communities. On a broader level they agreed that the current social system oppressed the natural and good tendencies in human nature and they even indulged in a bit of imaginary picture making when they envisioned the ultimate goal of a communist reality – the withering away of the state in a classless society.
The logical transition from Marx and Engels to the rebirth of the literary utopia in the late nineteenth century is an easy one to imagine. Despite the tendency of utopists like Bellamy to avoid using the terms ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’, it is clear that the tremendous impact of Marx and Engels’s responses to the industrial revolution directly or indirectly shaped much of the utopian literature that ushered in the rebirth of the literary utopia in the United States, Britain, the British Commonwealth, Europe and Asia. But as indicated previously, over-emphasis on the late nineteenth century and the utopias of cooperation and socialism, distorts the history of nineteenth century utopian literature by obscuring the importance of earlier works and the variety of the century’s literary utopias.
Edward Bellamy (1850–98), who was compared to Hawthorne by the influential American editor and novelist, William Dean Howells, began writing the most famous nineteenth-century literary utopia, Looking Backward 2000–1887 (1888), using a similar concept of utopian literature. At first he envisioned the book as ‘literary fantasy’, even a ‘fairy tale’. But while writing an episode about an organization not unlike Owen’s grand civil armies and Fourier’s industrial armies, Bellamy’s concept of utopia changed from fairy tale to blueprint.
Only one pre-1900 American utopia, Imperium in Imperio (1899), focused on African Americans and it was written by the only late nineteenth-century black utopist, Sutton Griggs, a respected Baptist minister. The narrative takes the form of two fictional biographies of black leaders, during the Jim Crow era, who organize a secret society inspired by visions of freedom and a perfect form of government. The society is torn between two factions: one supports peaceful co-existence and plans to establish a separatist colony in Texas; the other advocates revolution. The revolutionaries triumph and the book ends with warnings for the future of America.
Fictional satires of the ‘new philosophy’, loosely defined as ‘perfectibility’, which portrayed Godwinian invocations of a society governed by reason as inducing disaster, such as Hannah More’s The History of Mr Fantom (1797). This is also the point at which both major strands of the later dystopian turn, population control and socialism, are addressed by the most famous anti-utopian text of the nineteenth century, and a key source for Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), T. R. Malthus’s Essay on Population (1798).5 This in its first edition targeted Condorcet and William Godwin,
Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein (1818), often held to be the founding text of the genre of science fiction, but also partly a satire on the failed aspirations of the Revolution, heralding one of the key themes of late dystopian writings [...] the creature standing in part for the ‘new man’ of the revolutionary ideal,
On Orwell: He attempted to define a unique brand of British socialism which could reconcile the need to centralize the economy with a sense of the value of freedom, privacy, the dislike of regimentation and an incorruptible belief in law. He hoped that working-class culture, which he believed did not encourage power-worship, and retained instead a vital measure of moral integrity, might help sustain these values. But he still warned of ‘the persistent effort to chip away English morale and spread a hedonistic, what-do-I-get-out-of-it attitude to life’
A Crystal Age - W. H. Hudson - A Crystal Age - NOTE the typically utopian "liminal ordeals" of separation, transgression, timelessness, monstrosity [...] and symbolic death and rebirth.
VIZ To move from one world to another is to pass through a frontier zone or no man’s land with several typical features. These include separation and isolation, the crossing of a forbidden boundary, entry into a timeless condition, the appearance of monstrous and marvellous forms, and an experience of death leading to rebirth.
Check out Ernst Bloch: Bloch was a ‘warm’ Marxist who disagreed with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s disparagement of utopias as escapist and ineffectual. ^^^ His idea of the ‘not-yet’ lines up significantly with Dewey’s notion of the ‘end-in-view’ and with feminists’ characterization of that goal as furthered by utopian writing. It is part of ‘anticipatory consciousness’, an awareness of possibilities that have not yet taken shape but that could one day be effected. Bloch focuses on the daydream, the way the individual’s desires come to consciousness as visions, allowing people to organize their discontent with the present.
[Bloch's work became influential in the course of the student protest movements in 1968 and in liberation theology -- Bloch's formulation of utopia shifted how scholars conceptualize the ontology and the staging of performances as imbued with an enduring indeterminacy - Wiki - see Peggy Phelan - "The Ontology of Performance,"]
Early Buddhist texts from Southeast Asia have strong utopian elements. Explore.
The claim has been made that China has an authentic utopian tradition. Particular emphasis is put on the Confucian concept of ta-t’ung, a Golden Age of ‘Great Unity’ or ‘Great Togetherness’; the Taoist concept of t’ai-p’ing, the ‘Great Harmony’ …
Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl founded the political Zionist movement, outlining his programme in The Jewish State (1896) and writing a utopian novel Altneuland (1902) describing the Zionist utopia that he dreamed of creating in Eretz Israel (Palestine)
The Confucian utopian vision has also produced a series of feminist utopias, from Luo Maodeng’s sixteenth/seventeenth-century work Sanbao’s Expedition to the Western Ocean, and the late eighteenth-century narratives by Chen Duansheng, The Destiny of the Next Life (Zai shengyuan), and Xia Jingqu, Humble Words of an Old Rustic (Yesou Puyan), to Bai Hua’s recent novel of an idyllic matriarchal community in The Remote Country of Women.
Check out Ecotopia - Callenbach
June 15, 2025
Buen libro sobre el tema de la utopia. ¿Qué le falta para ser perfecto? Diría que haber tratado de forma algo más profunda la cuestión de la definición del término "utopía" y dar menos importancia a movimientos particulares del utopismo (feminismo, ecologismo, postcolonialismo, romance). Lo compensa con muy buenos capítulos sobre la distopía, el primer capítulo sobre el concepto (aunque yo había insistido incluso más ahí) y las utopias no occidentales.
December 6, 2017
Read the appropriate chapters for my dissertation, and used this for an assignment for my Utopian literature module. A really good academic companion to utopian literature - particularly as it pays attention to H. G. Well.s
July 24, 2017
A comprehensive work for introducing the utopian literature. It provides a diversified and interdisciplinary study.
January 20, 2020
Awesome for those who need some basic insight to utopian and dystopian worlds.
March 1, 2016
A bunch of great papers, well written and extremely helpful. I have a paper to hand in for university in the following weeks, and I'm glad I've bought it. Being French, I thought the papers would be hard to read, but they are pretty easy to understand as regards vocabulary and syntax.
I definitely recommend this book if you are studying literature, or if you want to know more about utopia.
I definitely recommend this book if you are studying literature, or if you want to know more about utopia.
December 25, 2016
This is a really good introduction to all utopian and dystopian authors. Essays range from themes in utopian literature to well-known authors. Also has a reading list of major utopian works.
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