Utopias

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2024

The last years of the 19th century witnessed a significant surge in both the production and the popularity of narrative utopias. Its causes are multiple and include the crisis, particularly in advanced industrial capitalist societies, of laissez-faire capitalism and the rise of capitalist monopolies; the increasing threat of downward mobility or dependency for the professional and mercantile middle classes; the rising militancy of the labor movement; and the emergence of socialist (as well as anarchist) political parties and movements. Narratives informed by utopian speculation as well as dystopian anxiety (within or outside utopian fiction proper) thus became means through which writers and readers in industrial capitalist societies of the fin de siècle responded to the crisis of legitimacy of an earlier faith in unimpeded progress, filling the void opened up by the increasingly visible failures of free-trade capitalism and the comparative impotence of economic and political alternatives during the period. Dozens of utopian literary fictions and some properly dystopian ones were published, but Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) form indisputable cornerstones, being the century’s most popular and most aesthetically celebrated utopian literary texts, respectively. Additionally, they are works that are closely interlinked, not only because Morris’s “utopian romance” was significantly motivated by his critical reading of Bellamy but also because both texts dramatize the ambivalence with which earlier (Enlightenment and early 19th-century) ideas of historical progress had come to be viewed by the century’s end. They do so through fictional frameworks that either complicate or severely problematize the certainties of earlier, mostly non-narrative utopias. Despite its popularity, Looking Backward has long tended to be critically underestimated for a variety of reasons, including its anti-political implications, its naïve progressivism, its statism and its emphasis on consumerism, its apparent hostility to working-class militancy, and its stale portrayals of femininity. Curiously, such underestimation coincides with Bellamy’s own largely dismissive attitude toward the literary qualities of his text, which he came to see as merely instrumental in communicating doctrinal content. Matters, however, are very different once Looking Backward is considered from the standpoint of form: the ideological certainties of progress are undermined by the complexities presented in “gazing backward,” confidence in the future is vitiated by moments of intense anxiety and the encounter with the uncanny, the complexities and ambiguities involved in the framing of the fiction undermine the idea of its mere instrumentality. Ultimately, the effect of estrangement that Bellamy’s narrative generates tends toward a genuinely cognitive direction—that of historicizing his own present rather than proffering anodyne solutions for the future. Notwithstanding Morris’s own stark criticism of Bellamy’s narrative and the effective replication of its premises by later critical appraisals, News from Nowhere is, on closer inspection, far more dialogically related to its precedent than has frequently been supposed. For it features both a very similar device of narrative framing (with a narrator who sleeps and wakes into a utopian future) and very similar preoccupations with the dystopian underside of utopian visions of redeemed futurity. Of course, there are important differences, as well: Morris eschews not only the urban and administratively centralized emphases involved in Bellamy’s fiction but also—by and large—the reliance on a fully developed rational blueprint for the future, focusing instead on the lived experience of utopian difference and hence on the education of desire. This last has important theoretical consequences for the very way in which utopia would be henceforth conceptualized, particularly by Marxist literary criticism: the utopian text emerges as something far more complex than an illustration of preconceived ideological theses: it is an open-ended experiment that aims to make place for a radical openness to possibility rather than to provide ready-made doctrinal answers.

2019

The Revival of Political Imagination. Utopias as Methodology, 2020

2021

Sustainable Consumption and the Good Life: Interdisciplinary perspectives. Ed. Karen Lykke Syse and Martin Lee Mueller, 2015

As ecological crisis are often met with dystopian narratives of gloom and doom, this chapter explores whether utopian narratives might prove to speak more compellingly and persuasively than narratives of looming disasters. Utopian narratives may, under the right historic, cultural, and personal conditions, turn out to be transforming reading experiences. Only by actually envisioning that we have a future can we start mobilising towards that future, and the path to this sustainable future do not have to be frugal in every sense.

JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION, 2022

The concept of utopia, which seems to have lost its conceptual power in the second half of the twentieth century, is increasingly returning to the center of debates on the relationship between literature and social change. Utopian thinking is now seen as a fundamental space for coming to terms with the present age-an age defined by pandemics, environmental destruction, and the threat to the narrative of freedom. But how do we go about rehabilitating utopia-itself a product of the long history of European domination-and make it adaptable to our postcolonial situation? How can the utopic be harnessed as an alternative way of imagining postcolonial futures? And is it capable of restoring idealism as a horizon of our expectations and as a precondition for freedom? Drawing on texts from the discourse of decolonization debates about utopian thinking in works of postcolonial literature and neo-Marxist criticism, my paper will address some of the ways in which the imaginative is asked to sustain the idea of an alternative society in moments of crisis and atrophy.

New Literary History

2013

Since the earliest known works of literature three-thousand years ago, the vision for a better society, an ideal society, has driven and inspired cultures to improve their social conditions. These visions were written around themes of voyage and discovery, the classical age, and medieval Christianity, that culminated in Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516. Since More’s vision of the imaginary society on the island of Utopia, writers have envisioned practical societies that transform our economic, political, technological, and cultural infrastructures taking us to uncharted lands, distant planets, and unimaginable futures that challenge and alter our society’s foundations. These utopian, and sometimes dystopian, visions show us what our society could be like and how we could achieve it, for better or for worse. This exhibition will showcase a selection of these utopian and dystopian visions ranging from Plato’s Republic and Augustine’s City of God to Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.