Early Modern Utopias - Einzelansicht

With the beginning of European modernity in the Renaissance, the literary genre of the utopia – the construction of imaginary societies and polities as alternatives to the actually existent ones – becomes increasingly important. What are the historical factors that make this kind of writing so popular in the period from ca. 1500 to 1700? How is the interest in utopian writing related to the intensifying relations between Europe and overseas societies, many of which were remarkably different from the familiar? Is utopia, then, an inherently colonialist genre? Or is the utopian literary imagination tied in with a more general urge to ”imagine the present otherwise”, which the French theorist Michel Foucault has identified as typical of modern sensibilities at large? And how, if at all, do the early utopias from Thomas More to Margaret Cavendish ‘speak to us’ today in a period where the slogan that ‘another world is possible’ appears to have, again, lost its force?

In our seminar, we will discuss these and other questions based on in-depth analyses of four influential early modern utopias: Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1627), Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines (1668) and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1668).   

Thomas More, Utopia. Tr. Robert M. Adams (available in the Norton Classics, or alternatively, the Cambridge University Press editions);

Susan Bruce (ed.), Three Early Modern Utopias (incl. The New Atlantisand The Isle of Pines)

Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World (Penguin Classics)

3 CP for regular and active participation; open book exam in the final session.