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This collection addresses the ways in which the contributors approach their study of the objects and practices of utopianism (understood as social anticipations and visions produced through texts and social experiments) and of how, in turn, those objects and practices have shaped their intellectual work and research perspectives.
This book provides both an introduction to utopianism and a general perspective on radical political thought. Vigorously disputing the widespread conviction that utopianism is a fantasy with no relevance to modern political life and thought, the authors argue that it is a concept whose special virtue lies in its capacity to transcend the limitations of present circumstances, to inspire alternative thinking and to open up new directions for political action. This book develops an approach which relates social causes to political theory and practice. The first part discusses utopianism as a form of political theory with unique characteristics and the ability to transcend the present. The second part considers utopianism as an expression of fundamental social impulses and as an ingredient of modern political movements. The third part offers a defence of utopianism as both theory and practice, and argues for its use to counteract the pragmatism and narrow empiricism which often passes for political «realism» in modern societies. This reissue of a popular and well-received landmark text contains a new preface.
A series of essays by an international and trans-disciplinary group of contributors which explores the nature and extent of the utopian impulse. Working across a range of historical periods and cultures, the book investigates key aspects of utopian theory, texts, and socio-political practices.
This major two-volume collection presents Darko Suvin's critical meditations on science fiction and utopia from the late 1960s through the early years of the new millennium.
The grounding assumption of this book is that an element of utopianism is a necessity in any political thinking, and that a self-conscious utopianism can generate a richer level of theory and practice. The text then follows the chequered career of utopianism in the Marxist tradition.
This classic text, first published in 1990, analyses the contested concept of utopia and examines how it has been used by commentators and social theorists.
A dream of a better world is a powerful human force that inspires activists, artists, and citizens alike. In this book Tom Moylan – one of the pioneering scholars of contemporary utopian studies – explores the utopian process in its individual and collective trajectory from dream to realization. Drawing on theorists such as Fredric Jameson, Donna Haraway and Alain Badiou and science fiction writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson and China Miéville, Becoming Utopian develops its argument for sociopolitical action through studies that range from liberation theology, ecological activism, and radical pedagogy to the radical movements of 1968. Throughout, Moylan speaks to the urgent need to confront and transform the global environmental, economic, political and cultural crises of our time.
This book explores the deep utopianism of one of the most significant modern cultural practices: science fiction. It contends that utopianism is not simply a motif in science fiction - alongside technology, time travel, alien encounters, conspiracies, alternate histories or the post-apocalypse - but is fundamental to the genre's narrative dynamics.
"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...