The Spectre of Utopia
Title | The Spectre of Utopia PDF eBook |
Author | Matthew Beaumont |
Publisher | Ralahine Utopian Studies |
Pages | 0 |
Release | 2012 |
Genre | Literature and society |
ISBN | 9783034307253 |
In the late nineteenth century, a spectre haunted Europe and the United States: the spectre of utopia. This book re-examines the rise of utopian thought at the fin de siècle, situating it in the social and political contradictions of the time and exploring the ways in which it articulated a deepening sense that the capitalist system might not be insuperable after all. The study pays particular attention to Edward Bellamy's seminal utopian fiction, Looking Backward (1888), embedding it in a number of unfamiliar contexts, and reading its richest passages against the grain, but it also offers detailed discussions of William Morris, H.G. Wells and Oscar Wilde. Both historical and theoretical in its approach, this book constitutes a substantial contribution to our understanding of the utopian imaginary, and an original analysis of the counter-culture in which it thrived at the fin de siècle.
The Philosophy of Utopia
Title | The Philosophy of Utopia PDF eBook |
Author | Barbara Goodwin |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 272 |
Release | 2012-12-06 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 1136337636 |
This collection addresses the important function of utopianism in social and political philosophy and includes debate on what its future role will be in a period dominated by dystopian nightmare scenarios.
Planet Utopia
Title | Planet Utopia PDF eBook |
Author | Mark Featherstone |
Publisher | Taylor & Francis |
Pages | 260 |
Release | 2017-02-17 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 1351815881 |
It has become clear that utopian thought has returned to the political scene. Featherstone traces the history of utopia and also discusses a number of contemporary case studies. This examination of the nature of utopian politics in the twenty-first century will be essential reading for political scientists and sociologists.
Memory and Utopian Agency in Utopian/Dystopian Literature
Title | Memory and Utopian Agency in Utopian/Dystopian Literature PDF eBook |
Author | Carter F. Hanson |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 205 |
Release | 2020-06-09 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1000165957 |
For a genre that imagines possible futures as a means of critiquing the present, utopian/dystopian fiction has been surprisingly obsessed with how the past is remembered. Memory and Utopian Agency in Utopian/Dystopian Literature: Memory of the Future examines modern and contemporary utopian/dystopian literature’s preoccupation with memory, asserting that from the nineteenth century onward, memory and forgetting feature as key problematics in the genre as well as sources of the utopian impulse. Through a series of close readings of utopian/dystopian novels informed by theory and dialectics, Hanson provides a case study history of how and why memory emerged as a problem for utopia, and how recent dystopian texts situate memory as a crucial mode of utopian agency. Hanson demonstrates that many modern and contemporary writers of the genre consider the presence of certain forms of memory as necessary to the project of imagining better societies or to avoiding possible dystopian outcomes.
The Concept of Utopia
Title | The Concept of Utopia PDF eBook |
Author | Ruth Levitas |
Publisher | Peter Lang |
Pages | 284 |
Release | 2010 |
Genre | Utopian socialism |
ISBN | 9783039113668 |
Originally published: London: Philip Allan, 1990.
The Nationality of Utopia
Title | The Nationality of Utopia PDF eBook |
Author | Maxim Shadurski |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 216 |
Release | 2019-08-14 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1000682870 |
Since its generic inception in 1516, utopia has produced visions of alterity which renegotiate, subvert, and transcend existing places. Early in the twentieth century, H. G. Wells linked utopia to the World State, whose post-national, post-Westphalian emergence he predicated on English national discourse. This critical study examines how the discursive representations of England’s geography, continuity, and character become foundational to the Wellsian utopia and elicit competing response from Wells’s contemporaries, particularly Robert Hugh Benson and Aldous Huxley, with further ramifications throughout the twentieth century. Contextualized alongside modern theories of nationalism and utopia, as well as read jointly with contemporary projections of England as place, reactions to Wells demonstrate a shift from disavowal to retrieval of England, on the one hand, and from endorsement to rejection of the World State, on the other. Attempts to salvage the residual traces of English culture from their degradation in the World State have taken increasing precedence over the imagination of a post-national order. This trend continues in the work of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, J. G. Ballard, and Julian Barnes, whose future scenarios warn against a world without England. The Nationality of Utopia investigates utopia’s capacity to deconstruct and redeploy national discourse in ways that surpass fear and nostalgia.
The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More's Utopia
Title | The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More's Utopia PDF eBook |
Author | |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 817 |
Release | 2023-11-30 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0198881037 |
Thomas More's Utopia is one of the most iconic, translated, and influential texts of the European Renaissance. This Handbook of specially commissioned and original essays brings together for the first time three different ways of thinking about the book: in terms of its renaissance contexts, its vernacular translations, and its utopian legacies. It has been developed to allow readers to consider these different facets of Utopia in relation to each other and to provide fresh and original contributions to our understanding of the book's creation, vernacularization, and afterlives. In so doing, it provides an integrated overview of More's text, as well as new contributions to the range of scholarship and debates that Utopia continues to attract. An especially innovative feature is that it allows readers to follow Utopia across time and place, unpacking the often-revolutionary moments that encouraged its translation by new generations of writers as far afield as France, Russia, Japan, and China. The Handbook is organized in four sections: on different aspects of the origins and contexts of Utopia in the 1510s; on histories of its translation into different vernaculars in the early modern and modern eras; and on various manifestations of utopianism up to the present day. The Handbook's Introduction outlines the biography of More, the key strands of interpretation and criticism relating to the text, the structure of the Handbook, and some of its recurring themes and issues. An appendix provides an overview of Utopia for readers new to the text.