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, epitomized 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.

Gregory Claeys is Professor of the History of Political Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has edited Utopias of the British Enlightenment (1994), Modern British Utopias, 1700–1850 (8 vols., 1997), Restoration and Augustan British Utopias (2000), Late Victorian Utopias (6 vols., 2008) and other works. He has written several studies of aspects of the Owenite socialist movement, of the French Revolution debate in Britain and of Thomas Paine’s thought. His most recent book is Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850–1920 (Cambridge, 2010).

AUTHORS

Edward Albee edited by Stephen J. Bottoms

Margaret Atwood edited by Coral Ann Howells

W. H. Auden edited by Stan Smith

Jane Austen edited by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster

Beckett edited by John Pilling

Bede edited by Scott DeGregorio

Aphra Behn edited by Derek Hughes and Janet Todd

Walter Benjamin edited by David S. Ferris

William Blake edited by Morris Eaves

Brecht edited by Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks (second edition)

The Brontës edited by Heather Glen

Frances Burney edited by Peter Sabor

Byron edited by Drummond Bone

Albert Camus edited by Edward J. Hughes

Willa Cather edited by Marilee Lindemann

Cervantes edited by Anthony J. Cascardi

Chaucer edited by Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (second edition)

Chekhov edited by Vera Gottlieb and Paul Allain

Kate Chopin edited by Janet Beer

Caryl Churchill edited by Elaine Aston and Elin Diamond

Coleridge edited by Lucy Newlyn

Wilkie Collins edited by Jenny Bourne Taylor

Joseph Conrad edited by J. H. Stape

Dante edited by Rachel Jacoff (second edition)

Daniel Defoe edited by John Richetti

Don DeLillo edited by John N. Duvall

Charles Dickens edited by John O. Jordan

Emily Dickinson edited by Wendy Martin

John Donne edited by Achsah Guibbory

Dostoevskii edited by W. J. Leatherbarrow

Theodore Dreiser edited by Leonard Cassuto and Clare Virginia Eby

John Dryden edited by Steven N. Zwicker

W. E. B. Du Bois edited by Shamoon Zamir

George Eliot edited by George Levine

T. S. Eliot edited by A. David Moody

Ralph Ellison edited by Ross Posnock

Ralph Waldo Emerson edited by Joel Porte and Saundra Morris

William Faulkner edited by Philip M. Weinstein

Henry Fielding edited by Claude Rawson

F. Scott Fitzgerald edited by Ruth Prigozy

Flaubert edited by Timothy Unwin

E. M. Forster edited by David Bradshaw

Benjamin Franklin edited by Carla Mulford

Brian Friel edited by Anthony Roche

Robert Frost edited by Robert Faggen

Gabriel García Márquez edited by Philip Swanson

Elizabeth Gaskell edited by Jill L. Matus

Goethe edited by Lesley Sharpe

Günter Grass edited by Stuart Taberner

Thomas Hardy edited by Dale Kramer

David Hare edited by Richard Boon

Nathaniel Hawthorne edited by Richard Millington

Seamus Heaney edited by Bernard O’Donoghue

Ernest Hemingway edited by Scott Donaldson

Homer edited by Robert Fowler

Horace edited by Stephen Harrison

Ibsen edited by James McFarlane

Henry James edited by Jonathan Freedman

Samuel Johnson edited by Greg Clingham

Ben Jonson edited by Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart

James Joyce edited by Derek Attridge (second edition)

Kafka edited by Julian Preece

Keats edited by Susan J. Wolfson

Lacan edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté

D. H. Lawrence edited by Anne Fernihough

Primo Levi edited by Robert Gordon

Lucretius edited by Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie

Machiavelli edited by John M. Najemy

David Mamet edited by Christopher Bigsby

Thomas Mann edited by Ritchie Robertson

Christopher Marlowe edited by Patrick Cheney

Herman Melville edited by Robert S. Levine

Arthur Miller edited by Christopher Bigsby (second edition)

Milton edited by Dennis Danielson (second edition)

Molière edited by David Bradby and Andrew Calder

Toni Morrison edited by Justine Tally

Nabokov edited by Julian W. Connolly

Eugene O’Neill edited by Michael Manheim

George Orwell edited by John Rodden

Ovid edited by Philip Hardie

Harold Pinter edited by Peter Raby (second edition)

Sylvia Plath edited by Jo Gill

Edgar Allan Poe edited by Kevin J. Hayes

Alexander Pope edited by Pat Rogers

Ezra Pound edited by Ira B. Nadel

Proust edited by Richard Bales

Pushkin edited by Andrew Kahn

Rabelais edited by John O’Brien

Rilke edited by Karen Leeder and Robert Vilain

Philip Roth edited by Timothy Parrish

Salman Rushdie edited by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Shakespeare edited by Margareta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (second edition)

Shakespearean Comedy edited by Alexander Leggatt

Shakespeare on Film edited by Russell Jackson (second edition)

Shakespeare’s History Plays edited by Michael Hattaway

Shakespeare’s Last Plays edited by Catherine M. S. Alexander

Shakespeare’s Poetry edited by Patrick Cheney

Shakespeare and Popular Culture edited by Robert Shaughnessy

Shakespeare on Stage edited by Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton

Shakespearean Tragedy edited by Claire McEachern

George Bernard Shaw edited by Christopher Innes

Mary Shelley edited by Esther Schor

Shelley edited by Timothy Morton

Sam Shepard edited by Matthew C. Roudané

Spenser edited by Andrew Hadfield

Laurence Sterne edited by Thomas Keymer

Wallace Stevens edited by John N. Serio

Tom Stoppard edited by Katherine E. Kelly

Harriet Beecher Stowe edited by Cindy Weinstein

August Strindberg edited by Michael Robinson

Jonathan Swift edited by Christopher Fox

J. M. Synge edited by P. J. Mathews

Tacitus edited by A. J. Woodman

Henry David Thoreau edited by Joel Myerson

Tolstoy edited by Donna Tussing Orwin

Mark Twain edited by Forrest G. Robinson

Virgil edited by Charles Martindale

Voltaire edited by Nicholas Cronk

Edith Wharton edited by Millicent Bell

Walt Whitman edited by Ezra Greenspan

Oscar Wilde edited by Peter Raby

Tennessee Williams edited by Matthew C. Roudané

August Wilson edited by Christopher Bigsby

Mary Wollstonecraft edited by Claudia L. Johnson

Virginia Woolf edited by Susan Sellers (second edition)

Wordsworth edited by Stephen Gill

W. B. Yeats edited by Marjorie Howes and John Kelly

Zola edited by Brian Nelson

Topics

The Actress edited by Maggie B. Gale and John Stokes

The African American Novel edited by Maryemma Graham

The African American Slave Narrative edited by Audrey A. Fisch

Allegory edited by Rita Copeland and Peter Struck

American Modernism edited by Walter Kalaidjian

American Realism and Naturalism edited by Donald Pizer

American Travel Writing edited by Alfred Bendixen and Judith Hamera

American Women Playwrights edited by Brenda Murphy

Ancient Rhetoric edited by Erik Gunderson

Arthurian Legend edited by Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter

Australian Literature edited by Elizabeth Webby

British Romantic Poetry edited by James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane

British Romanticism edited by Stuart Curran (second edition)

British Theatre, 1730–1830 edited by Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn

Canadian Literature edited by Eva-Marie Kröller

Children’s Literature edited by M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel

The Classic Russian Novel edited by Malcolm V. Jones and Robin Feuer Miller

Contemporary Irish Poetry edited by Matthew Campbell

Crime Fiction edited by Martin Priestman

Early Modern Women’s Writing edited by Laura Lunger Knoppers

The Eighteenth-Century Novel edited by John Richetti

Eighteenth-Century Poetry edited by John Sitter

English Literature, 1500–1600 edited by Arthur F. Kinney

English Literature, 1650–1740 edited by Steven N. Zwicker

English Literature, 1740–1830 edited by Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee

English Literature, 1830–1914 edited by Joanne Shattock

English Novelists edited by Adrian Poole

English Poetry, Donne to Marvell edited by Thomas N. Corns

English Poets edited by Claude Rawson

English Renaissance Drama edited by A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (second edition)

English Renaissance Tragedy edited by Emma Smith and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr.

English Restoration Theatre edited by Deborah C. Payne Fisk

The Epic edited by Catherine Bates

Feminist Literary Theory edited by Ellen Rooney

Fiction in the Romantic Period edited by Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener

The Fin de Siècle edited by Gail Marshall

The French Novel: from 1800 to the Present edited by Timothy Unwin

German Romanticism edited by Nicholas Saul

Gothic Fiction edited by Jerrold E. Hogle

The Greek and Roman Novel edited by Tim Whitmarsh

Greek and Roman Theatre edited by Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton

Greek Lyric edited by Felix Budelmann

Greek Mythology edited by Roger D. Woodard

Greek Tragedy edited by P. E. Easterling

The Harlem Renaissance edited by George Hutchinson

The Irish Novel edited by John Wilson Foster

The Italian Novel edited by Peter Bondanella and Andrea Ciccarelli

Jewish American Literature edited by Hana Wirth-Nesher and Michael P. Kramer

The Latin American Novel edited by Efraín Kristal

The Literature of Los Angeles edited by Kevin R. McNamara

The Literature of New York edited by Cyrus Patell and Bryan Waterman

The Literature of the First World War edited by Vincent Sherry

The Literature of World War II edited by Marina MacKay

Literature on Screen edited by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan

Medieval English Literature edited by Larry Scanlon

Medieval English Theatre edited by Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher (second edition)

Medieval French Literature edited by Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay

Medieval Romance edited by Roberta L. Krueger

Medieval Women’s Writing edited by Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace

Modern American Culture edited by Christopher Bigsby

Modern British Women Playwrights edited by Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt

Modern French Culture edited by Nicholas Hewitt

Modern German Culture edited by Eva Kolinsky and Wilfried van der Will

The Modern German Novel edited by Graham Bartram

Modern Irish Culture edited by Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly

Modern Italian Culture edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and Rebecca J. West

Modern Latin American Culture edited by John King

Modern Russian Culture edited by Nicholas Rzhevsky

Modern Spanish Culture edited by David T. Gies

Modernism edited by Michael Levenson

The Modernist Novel edited by Morag Shiach

Modernist Poetry edited by Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins

Narrative edited by David Herman

Native American Literature edited by Joy Porter and Kenneth M. Roemer

Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing edited by Dale M. Bauer and Philip Gould

Old English Literature edited by Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge

Performance Studies edited by Tracy C. Davis

Postcolonial Literary Studies edited by Neil Lazarus

Postmodernism edited by Steven Connor

Renaissance Humanism edited by Jill Kraye

The Roman Historians edited by Andrew Feldherr

Roman Satire edited by Kirk Freudenburg

The Spanish Novel: from 1600 to the Present edited by Harriet Turner and Adelaida López de Martínez

Travel Writing edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs

The Twentieth-Century English Novel edited by Robert L. Caserio

Twentieth-Century English Poetry edited by Neil Corcoran

Twentieth-Century Irish Drama edited by Shaun Richards

Utopian Literature edited by Gregory Claeys

Victorian and Edwardian Theatre edited by Kerry Powell

The Victorian Novel edited by Deirdre David

Victorian Poetry edited by Joseph Bristow

War Writing edited by Kate McLoughlin

Writing of the English Revolution edited by N. H. Keeble

Gregory Claeys

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Contents

Notes on Contributors

Gregory Claeys is Professor of the History of Political Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has edited Utopias of the British Enlightenment (1994), Modern British Utopias, 1700–1850 (8 vols., 1997), Restoration and Augustan British Utopias (2000), Late Victorian Utopias (6 vols., 2008) and other works. He has written several studies of aspects of the Owenite socialist movement, of the French Revolution debate in Britain and of Thomas Paine’s thought. His most recent book is Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850–1920 (Cambridge, 2010).

J. C. Davis is the author of a major study of early modern utopian writing, Utopia and the Ideal Society 1516 to 1700 (Cambridge, 1981/1983). His publications also include essays exploring the relationship between utopia and history, science and social science. Most recently, he has published an essay on travel as a theme within utopian writing. In addition, he has written studies of individual utopian writers such as James Harrington, Gerrard Winstanley and Thomas More. He is also well known for his work on religious and political radicalism in the period of the English Revolution and is currently working on a book on English political discourse in that period. He is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of East Anglia.

Jacqueline Dutton lectures in French Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She has published widely on utopianism in French literature and thought, including a monograph in French on the utopian writings of the 2008 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Le Chercheur d’or et d’ailleurs: L’Utopie de J. M. G. Le Clézio (2003). Her research interests range from travel writing and contemporary world literature in French to comparative utopias and Japanese imaginaries of the ideal. She is currently completing a book-length study of French visions of Australia as utopia, and editing volumes on representations of time in postcolonial and Francophone travel writing, and on comparative utopian studies.

Peter Fitting is an Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Toronto and the former Director of the Cinema Studies Program. He is the author of more than fifty articles on science fiction, fantasy and ­utopia – from critical analyses of the works of various SF and utopian writers (from P. K. Dick to Marge Piercy); to theoretical examinations of the reading effect in utopian fiction, the problem of the right-wing utopia, or gender and reading; to overviews of cyberpunk and of the turn from utopia in the 1990s, on the Golden Age and the foreclosure of utopian discourse in the 1950s; as well as articles on SF and utopian film and architecture, and the work of Fredric Jameson. He has recently completed a critical anthology of subterranean world fiction and is at work on a collection of his writing on science fiction.

Alessa Johns is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She has published Women’s Utopias of the Eighteenth Century (2003) and edited Dreadful Visitations: Confronting Natural Catastrophe in the Age of Enlightenment (1999). She is currently completing a book on Anglo-German exchange in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and is serving as Reviews Editor for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Patrick Parrinder grew up in London and north-west Kent and has had a lifelong interest in H. G. Wells and his literary contemporaries. He is a past chairman of the H. G. Wells Society, and his books on Wells include Shadows of the Future (1995). More recently he has been general editor of the Wells texts published in Penguin Classics. He has written on science fiction and many other topics in modern literature, and is the author of Nation and Novel: The English Novel From Its Origins to the Present Day (2006). He is also General Editor of the forthcoming Oxford History of the Novel in English. He is an Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Reading.

Nicole Pohl is Senior Lecturer in English at Oxford Brookes University. She has published and edited books on women’s utopian writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, European salons and epistolarity, and is currently editing the complete letters of Sarah Scott. Her publications include Women, Space and Utopia, 1600–1800 (2006); with Brenda Tooley (eds.), Gender and Utopia in the Eighteenth Century: Essays in English and French Utopian Writing (2007); with Betty Schellenberg (eds.), Reconsidering the Bluestockings (2002); with Rebecca D’Monté (eds.), Female Communities 1600–1800: Literary Visions and Cultural Realities (2000).

Kenneth M. Roemer an Academy of Distinguished Teachers and Academy of Distinguished Scholars Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, has received four NEH grants to direct Summer Seminars, has co-chaired a utopias seminar at the European Alpbach Forum, and has been a Visiting Professor in Japan and a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellow, a guest lecturer at Harvard and a lecturer in Vienna, Lisbon, Brazil and Turkey. He is the author of four books on utopian literature: The Obsolete Necessity (1976, nominated for a Pulitzer in American history); America as Utopia (ed., 1981); Build Your Own Utopia (1981) and Utopian Audiences: How Readers Locate Nowhere (2003). He is a past President of the Society for Utopian Studies and founding editor of Utopus Discovered.

Lyman Tower Sargent is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and a Visiting Research Fellow, Centre for Political Ideologies, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. He has also been a visiting professor and research fellow in Europe, New Zealand and the United States. He was the founding editor of Utopian Studies (1990–2004), and is author of British and American Utopian Literature, 1516–1985: An Annotated, Chronological Bibliography (1988); Contemporary Political Ideologies: A Comparative Analysis (14th edn, 2009); co-author with Lucy Sargisson of Living in Utopia: Intentional Communities in New Zealand (2004) and author or editor of other books and over 100 articles, mostly on aspects of utopianism.

Brian Stableford has published more than sixty SF novels, twelve short-story collections, twenty non-fiction books and twenty-five volumes of translation from the French. He is currently translating a series of classics of French scientific romance, including works by Maurice Renard, Albert Robida, Theo Varlet, Jean de la Hire and J. H. Rosny, all of which are published by Black Coat Press, which also issued one of his recent novels, Sherlock Holmes and the Vampires of Eternity. Other recent fiction, including the novels The Dragon Man and The Moment of Truth, has been published by Borgo Press, which also issued his essay collection, Heterocosms, and his non-fiction book, The Devil’s Party: A History of Satanic Abuse.

Fátima Vieira is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Oporto, where she has been teaching since 1986. She is currently the ­direct- or of the Department of Anglo-American Studies of that Faculty and the Chairperson of the Utopian Studies Society/Europe. She is the co-ordinator of two research projects on utopianism funded by the Portuguese Ministry of Education: ‘Literary Utopias and Utopianism: Portuguese Culture and the Western Intellectual Tradition’ and ‘Mapping Dreams: British and North-American Utopianism’. She is the director of the collection ‘Biblioteca das Utopias’, of the Portuguese publishing house ‘Quasi’ and the director of E-topia, an electronic journal on Portuguese utopianism, as well as of Spaces of Utopia, a transdisciplinary electronic journal on utopia written in English.