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The English Utopia
"A.L. Morton's classic 1952 study of utopias in the context of British social history constitutes one of the earliest sustained engagements with the social and ideological sources of the utopian imagination, the transformation of its function, content and direction in different historical moments, the importance of the class struggle for literary production and of literary production for cultural, if not political hegemony. Traversing English literary history from the medieval poem on the Land of Cockaygne to Sir Thomas More and his Puritan revisions in the seventeenth century, to Defoe's and Swift's paradigmatic adaptations of utopian and dystopian themes and from thence to William Morris's...
Reading Texts on Sovereignty
Reading Texts on Sovereignty charts the development of the concept from the classical period to the present day. Defined in antiquity as an absolute or supreme type of power, sovereignty's history has been marked ever since by numerous moments of crisis and contestation through which its meaning has been redefined and reconfigured. Using extracts of key texts selected and analysed by leading contributors from the USA, the UK, New Zealand, Japan, Cyprus, Finland, France, Austria, Israel, and Italy, this volume examines these moments and how different societies have grappled with sovereignty through the ages. The book explores a diverse range of geographical and cultural contexts within which ...
The English Utopia
"A.L. Morton's classic 1952 study of utopias in the context of British social history constitutes one of the earliest sustained engagements with the social and ideological sources of the utopian imagination, the transformation of its function, content and direction in different historical moments, the importance of the class struggle for literary production and of literary production for cultural, if not political hegemony. Traversing English literary history from the medieval poem on the Land of Cockaygne to Sir Thomas More and his Puritan revisions in the seventeenth century, to Defoe's and Swift's paradigmatic adaptations of utopian and dystopian themes and from thence to William Morris's...
Race, Sex, and Segregation in Colonial Latin America
This book traces the emergence and early development of segregationist practices and policies in Spanish and Portuguese America - showing that the practice of resettling diverse indigenous groups in segregated "Indian towns" (or aldeamentos in the case of Brazil) influenced the material reorganization of colonial space, shaped processes of racialization, and contributed to the politicization of reproductive sex. The book advances this argument through close readings of published and archival sources from the 16th and early-17th centuries, and is informed by two main conceptual concerns. First, it considers how segregation was envisioned, codified, and enforced in a historical context of cons...
Economic Inequality
This work explores what utopian writers have said about economic inequality. Its transdisciplinary focus is literary utopias--novels of social theory--by authors seeking solutions to the problems of economic inequality. The work challenges our moral assumptions about economic inequality--its potential for resolution--or its inevitability and the ultimate bifurcation of society. It is not an economic treatise but an exploration in social philosophy in its utopian expressions. Economic inequality sets arbitrary limits on whose contributions will benefit society, thereby squandering talent, limiting opportunities, and stifling competition--capriciously restricting the pool of competitors--by class or gender or race. As utopian writers envision a future where the extremes of poverty and wealth have been tempered, it is instructive to explore the instruments they employ; by what measures have they defeated poverty or diminished the threats boundless fortunes pose, thereby revitalizing society?
Transgressive Utopianism
.This volume honors Lucy Sargisson's contribution to the field of utopian studies.
Zone Theory
"Zone Theory develops an approach to the study of utopia that expands its definition and its application in the field of science fiction studies. It rephrases utopia as an unceasing dialectic between totality and novelty which keeps on shaping and discovering new subjectivities and instrumentalities, as it adapts to the exigencies of the present. The author argues that the climate crisis in particular has made the utopian operation especially relevant to the present, in the way it makes possible surprising combinations and permutations of generic forms. The book explores many novels by major SF writers, thinking through them about utopian forms like critical utopia and dystopia, heterotopia, atopia, ecotopia and others. It ultimately ties all of these to the notion of anti-anti-utopia: a form of forms that is capacious enough to house an irreducible and permanently open multiplicity of beings, and to radicalize this more-than-human collectivity into a revolutionary project against dystopian and anti-utopian forces"--
Rethinking Utopia and Utopianism
«These influential essays by one of the world's leading experts in the field revisit the central methodological debates in Utopian Studies over the past half century. They include recent commentary on the development of key disagreements respecting the concepts of utopia, eutopia and dystopia, as well as the relations between the three 'faces' of the subject, literature, ideas or theory, and intentional communities. Sargent's encyclopaedic knowledge of utopianism is deployed throughout to illuminate many areas of concern. This collection provides an essential starting-point for any student of this vibrant, controversial, increasingly popular, and ever-mutating subject.» (Gregory Claeys, Pr...
The Polyphony of Utopia
Utopias - literary visions of better, more just and happier communities - have been misconceived as 'mere fantasies' on the one hand and 'models to implement' on the other. Building on the notion of 'critical utopia' and elaborating on interpretations of literary works as contradictory and incomplete, the book analyses selected utopian and dystopian novels by five writers: Edward Bellamy, Alexander Bogdanov, Ivan Yefremov, Marge Piercy and Octavia E. Butler. It argues that departing from the conventions of realism, utopias advance credible visions of more perfect ways of living and being which are nevertheless destabilized through gothic and poetic generic elements. Unresolved issues are further explored in (utopian as well as dystopian) sequels and prequels. The novels analysed in detail include Bellamy's Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888) and Equality (1897), Bogdanov's Red Star: A Utopia (1908) and Engineer Menni: A Novel of Fantasy (1913), Yefremov's Andromeda: A Space-Age Tale (1957) and The Hour of the Bull (1970), Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and He, She and It (1991), and Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998).
Postcolonial Naturalism
Postcolonial Naturalism proposes an innovative periodizing schema for historicizing contemporary Anglophone fiction. Engaging and revising the materialist paradigm of the Warwick Research Collective’s concept of “world-literature,” Fredric Jameson’s mapping of modernity’s cultural periods, and Christopher L. Hill’s positing of a transnational naturalism, Eric D. Smith theorizes “postcolonial naturalism” as a structurally determined cultural logic rather than as a literary technique or style. Supported by careful, theoretically and critically sophisticated analyses of exemplary literary works, this important intervention invites us to reconsider the living history of aesthetic naturalism as well as its social and political implications for the practice of world-literature in the aftermath of anticolonial resistance.
