Bringing together an historian of political thought and a literary scholar, this book offers a historically wide-ranging and theoretically sophisticated discussion of utopia--one of the most vexed concepts in the humanities and social sciences as well as a mode of imagining that continues to inspire an extraordinary range of cultural productions.
Ideal societies, better worlds, more just and peaceful ways of living: these have long been the stuff of human beings' social dreaming. In this compact volume, two leading scholars from different disciplines join to consider the life of utopian imagining within the frame of literature and politics.
Duncan Bell, a political scientist and intellectual historian, opens the book with a critical overview of the Anglophone utopian tradition and a fresh definition of utopia. He then shows how the threat of technological annihilation, and the promise of transcendence of human limitations, has shaped utopian and dystopian writing of the last hundred years. Douglas Mao, a scholar of literature, begins the second part of the book by delving into utopian literature's vexed relation to sentimental feeling, especially as this is signalled by speculation on how inhabitants of utopia themselves would read literary works. He then shows how utopian writing's orientation to problem-solving puts it into surprising relation with both politics and literature in general. An interview in which the two authors compare their methods and conclusions closes out the book.
