http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/70/courses70.htm
North American college courses in utopian,scince fiction, and fantasy literature
Utopia: Tentative Bibliography, chronological & grouped:
Anthology of utopian writings: Robert L. Chianese, ed., Peaceable Kingdoms (1971; out of print)
Annotated chronological bibliography: Lyman Tower Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature 1516-1985. New York: Garland, 1988 (out of print)
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Ancient: Aristophanes, The Birds; Plato, Republic
Early: Bible: Isaiah 12:15; 11:1-9; 32-35; Matthew 5-7; Genesis 1-3; Revelation 21-22; St. Augustine, The City of God; St. Catherine, Revelations of St. Catherine of Siena
Late Renaissance: Thomas More, Utopia(1516); Tommaso Campanella, The City of the Sun(1623); Andreae, Christianopolis (1619)
19th/20th century technology and warnings: Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888); William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890); Étienne Cabet, A Voyage to Icaria (1840); Theodor Hertzka, Freeland (1890)
20th century: Jack London, The Iron Heel (1907); Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932); George Orwell, 1984 (1949); Eugene Zamiatin, We (1920)
Robots: Isaac Azimov, I, Robot (1940-50); H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898); K. Capek, R.U.R. (1921); Anson McDonald (=Robert A. Heinlein), Red Planet (1949)
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ALSO: Fiction, Plays, Poetry
16th - 18th century:
François Rabelais, "The Abbey of Theleme" (1542); William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611); Francis Bacon, New Atlantis (1626), "Of Plantations"; James Harrington, Commonwealth of Oceana (1656); Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe(1719); Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726); Voltaire, Candide (1759); William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790); Denis Diderot, Supplement to Bougainville's "Voyage" (1796)
19th century:
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818); Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (1819); Herman Melville, Typee (1846); Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), "Life Without Principle" (1863); Fedor Dostoevsky, The Possessed (1872); Charles Baudelaire, Artificial Paradise; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (1852); Walt Whitman, Song of Myself (1855); Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1858); Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race (1870); Samuel Butler, Erehwon (1872); Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1882); William Henry Hudson, A Chrystal Age (1887); W. D. Howells, A Traveler From Altruria (1894)
20th century:
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895); A Modern Utopia (1905), Men Like Gods (1923), Shape of Things to Come (1933); E. M. Forster, "The Machine Stops" (1909); James Hilton, Lost Horizon (1933); Ayn Rand, Anthem (1938); Austin Wright, Islandia (1942); George Orwell, Animal Farm (1948); B. F. Skinner, Walden Two (1948); John Wyndham, Re-Birth; Arthur Koestler, The Age of Longing (1950); Albert Camus, The Just (1950); Jean Paul Sartre, Devil and God (1951); David Karp, One: Escape to Nowhere (1953); Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953); Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death (1959); Margaret Atwood, Handmaid's Tale (1985)
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ALSO: Political and social philosophy
before 1900:
Michel de Montaigne, "On Cannibals" (1580); Samuel Johnson, Rasselas (1759); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, The Social Contract (1762); Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791); Immanuel Kant, "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View"(1784); Claude de Saint-Simon, "The New Christianity" (1825); Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1840); Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (1847); Friedrich Engels, "On Authority," Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1877); Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism"; Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals (1887); William James, "The Moral Equivalent of War"; Ralph Waldo Emerson, "War" (1838); John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty (1859)"; Auguste Comte, Western Republic; John Ruskin, Time and Tide (1867), Unto This Last; William H. Mallock, New Republic (1877)
20th century
Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902); Bertrand Russell, Proposed Roads to Freedom (1919); Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930); Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (1936); Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945); T. S. Eliot, Notes Toward a Definition of Culture (1948); Joseph Krutch, The Measure of Man (1954); Martin Buber, Paths to Utopia (1958); Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1955); Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (1964); Paul and Percival Goodman, Communitas (1947); Bob Black, "The Abolition of Work" (1985); Robert L. Heilbroner, "Ecological Armageddon" (1970)
America as utopia in immigrants' dreams: see, e.g., the Norton Anthology of American Literature I.
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Ursula Hoffmann, June 1997
http://lib-oldweb.tamu.edu/cushing/sffrd/
Science fiction and fantasy database (Hall W. Hall)
A search for "utopia" returns 1748 records
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Modern American Utopias
Utopia: General Bibliography
The number of books directly relevant to "modern American utopias" is relatively small; the following list contains what is available (either in the Reading University Library or in my collection) and includes more general works on Utopia which are of theoretical or comparative interest.
This page is maintained by Edward James at the University of Reading
Back to "Modern American Utopias".
Albinski, Nan Bowman. Women's Utopias in British and American Fiction (1988) (823.093-ALB)
Alexander, Peter and Gill, Roger, eds. Utopias (1984) (321.07-COL)
Alkon, Paul. The Origins of Futuristic Fiction (1987)
Baker-Smith, Dominic and Barfoot, C.C. eds. Between Dream and Nature: Essays on Utopia and Dystopia (1987) (809-93-BET)
Bammer, Angelika. Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s (1991) (396-BAM)
Bartkowski, Frances. Feminist Utopias (1989) (813.5409-BAR)
Benford, Gregory. "Reactionary utopias", in G. Slusser, C. Greenland and E.S> Rabkin, eds., Storm Warnings: Sceicne Fiction Confronts the Future (1987), pp. 73-83.
Berneri, Marie Louise. A Journey Through Utopia (1950) (321.07-BER)
Claeys, Gregory. Utopias of the British Enlightenment (1994) (335.12-UTO)
Claeys, Gregory ed., Modern British Utopias, 1700-1850 (1997) (321.07 MOD)
Clark, Christopher. The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association (1995) (335.974423-CLA)
Cousins, A.D. and Grace, Damian, eds., More's Utopia and the Utopian Inheritance (1995) (828.2-MOR)
Daedalus 94 (1965), part 1: Special Issue on Utopias.
Davis, J.C. Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516-1700 (1981) (321-07-DAV)
Donawerth, Jane L. and Kolmerten, Carol A., eds. Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference (1994) (823.093-UTO)
Eliav-Felden, Miriam. Realistic Utopias: The Ideal Imaginary Societies of the Renaissance, 1516-1630 (1982) (321.07-ELI)
Fellman, Michael The Unbounded Frame: Freedom and Community in Nineteenth-Century American Utopianism (1973) (borrow from EJ)
Fitzgerald, Frances. Cities on a Hill: A Journey Through Contemporary American Cultures ()
Fogarty, Robert S. American Utopianism (1972) (335.973-AME)
Fogarty, Robert S. Dictionary of American Communal and Utopian History (1980) (335.973-FOG)
Frankel, Boris. The Post-Industrial Utopians (1987) (300.1-FRA)
Goodwin, Barbara and Taylor, Keith. The Politics of Utopia: a Study in Theory and Practice (1982) (321.07-GOO)
Guarneri, Carl J. The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (on order; borrow from EJ).
Hermand, Jost. Old Dreams of a New Reich: Volkish Utopias and National Socialism (1992) (943.08-HER)
Holloway, Mark. Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America, 1680-1880 (1951) (335.973-HOL)
Holquist, Michael. "How to play utopia: some brief notes on the distinctiveness of utopian literature", in Mark Rose, ed., Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (1976), pp. 132-146.
James, Edward. Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (1994)
Kamenka, Eugene, ed., Utopias (1987) (borrow from EJ)
Kanter, Rosabeth, Moss. Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective (1972)
Kessler, Carol Farley. Daring to Dream: Utopian Stories by United States Women , 1836-1919 (Boston, 1984).
Kessler, Carol Farley. "Bibliography of utopian fiction by United States women, 1836-1988", Utopian Studies 1 (1990), pp. 1-58.
Kumar, Krishan. Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (1987) (809.93-KUM)
Kumar, Krishan. Utopianism (1991) (321.07-KUM)
Lefanu, Sarah. In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (1988)
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Language of the Night. Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (1989) (BULM 809.93-LEG)
Levitas, Ruth. The Concept of Utopia (1990) (borrow from EJ)
McQuarie, Donald. "Utopia and Transcendence: An Analysis of their decline in contemporary science fiction", Journal of Popular Culture, 14 (1980), 242-50.
Manuel, Frank E. and Manuel, Fritzie P. Utopian Thought in the Western World (1979) (321.07-MAN)
Masini, Eleonora, ed. Visions of Desirable Societies (1983) (301.24-VIS)
Mumford, Lewis. The Story of Utopia (1959) (321.07-MUM)
Napier, Susan. The Logic of Inversion: Twentieth-Century Japanese Utopias (1991) (952-NIS/15)
Nelson, William, ed. Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Utopia: A Collection of Critical Essays (1968) (828.2-MOR)
Neville-Sington, Pamela and Sington, David, eds. Paradise Dreamed: How Utopian Thinkers Have Changed the Modern World (1993) (BULM 321-07-NEV)
Nordhoff, Charles. American Utopias (originally published as The Communistic Societies of the United States (1875).
Pfaelzer, Jean. The Utopian Novel in America, 1886-1896: The Politics of Form (1985)
Pitzer, Donald E., ed. America's Communal Utopias (1997) (335.10973-AME)
Rabkin, Eric S; Greenberg, Martin H.; and Olander, J.D., eds. No Place Else: Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (1983) (borrow from EJ)
Russ, Joanna. To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction (1995) (823.093-RUS)
Segal, Howard P. Technological Utopianism in American Culture (1985) (borrow from EJ).
Stein, Stephen J. The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers (1992) (289.8-STE)
Storm, Rachel. In Search of Heaven on Earth (1991) (299-STO)
Taylor, Anne. Visions of Harmony: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Millenarianism (1975) (borrow from EJ)
Taylor, Keith. The Political Ideas of the Utopian Socialists (1982) (335.1-TAY)
Williams, Raymond. "Utopia and science fiction", in Patrick Parrinder, ed., Science Fiction: A Critical Guide (1979), pp. 52-66.
Wu Qingyin, Female Rule in Chinese and English Literary Utopias (1995) (820-93-WU)
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Astrofuturism
Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space
De Witt Douglas Kilgore
2003 | 304 pages | Cloth $55.00 | Paper $19.95
Cultural Studies
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Wonderful Dream
1. Knocking on Heaven's Door: David Lasser and the First Conquest of Space
2. An Empire in Space: Europe and America as Science Fact
3. Building a Space Frontier: Robert A. Heinlein and the American Tradition
4. Will There Always Be an England? Arthur C. Clarke's New Eden
5. The Domestication of Space: Gerard K. O'Neill's Suburban Diaspora
6. Ben Bova: Race, Nation, and Renewal on the High Frontier
7. On Mars and Other Heterotopias: A Conclusion
Abbreviations
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Penn Press | University of Pennsylvania
http://users.erols.com/jonwill/utopialist.htm
http://www.zeitfuerzeit.net/
Encyclopedia of American Literature (REF PN 56.U8.S66 1995)
American Communes to 1860: A Bibliography (REF HX 654 .D37 1990)
American Communes, 1860 to 1960: A Bibliography (REF HX 653 .M54 1990)
Utopian Literature: A bibliography with a Supplemental Listing of Works Influential in Utopian Thought (REF Z 7164 .U8 N43)
http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/1.2/coverweb/Harris/literat2.htm
A Utopian Literature course in MOO space
The Utopia Reader ed. by Gregory Claeys, Lyman Tower Sargent
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~still/utopia.htm
Utopian communes in New Jersey
Thoreau’s Natural Community and Utopian Socialism, Newman L.
American Literature, 1 September 2003, vol. 75, no. 3, pp. 515-544(30)
FEMINISTSF@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU
friendly discussion of feminist SF, fantastic & utopian literature and other media (339 subscribers)
http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/rws1001/utopia/default.htm
http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/rws1001/utopia/default.htm
Utopian writing, a course at Cambridge 2002
Introductory Reading:
Thomas More, Utopia [1516], ed. by G. M. Logan and R. M. Adams, trans. by R. M. Adams (Cambridge, 1989)
J. C. Davis, 'Utopianism', in The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450-1700, ed. by J. H. Burns and M. Goldie (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 329-44
Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Oxford, 1979)
Utopian writing 1516-1789
DR C JACKSON AND DR R SERJEANTSON
The genre of utopian writing was born in 1516 with the publication of one brilliant book: Thomas More's Utopia. The title (a Greek pun) means both 'no place' and 'good place'. More exploited this ambiguity to the full, articulating a vision of a society that, whilst clearly superior to contemporary England in many ways, also raises serious doubts in the reader's mind. The Utopians have ample food, housing and leisure to improve their minds and bodies, but they live in communal households and their clothes are all the same. They are good and need few laws, but they keep slaves. They are pious and believe in a deity, but they are not Christian. Their government is elective and participatory, but they bribe their enemies and employ mercenaries to keep down their neighbours. And, most extraordinarily of all, the Utopians live without money, which, as the character of Thomas More himself says at the end of his book, 'utterly subverts all the nobility, magnificence, splendour and majesty that are (in the popular view) the true ornaments and glory of any commonwealth.'
More's portrait of an imaginary society that is, in some sense, ideal was widely imitated by writers throughout early modern Europe. They used the conceit of a traveller's report from the New World to comment upon the customs and political arrangements of their own societies. In this course we will study how a wide range of early modern utopian writers used the genre to articulate novel ideas about politics, education, religion and science. We will explore some of the genre's roots in writings from the ancient world, most notably Plato's Republic. And we will look at visual and architectural representations of utopias and ideal cities.
The course thus gives students the opportunity of studying early modern society not as it was, but as some of its most engaged critics thought it might be. The disjunction between their utopian societies and the actual conditions of early modern Europe raises some fundamental questions about the nature of historical interpretation. Hence as well as introducing utopian writing in its early modern heyday, the course also offers an accessible and stimulating introduction to intellectual history and the history of political thought.
Introductory Reading:
Thomas More, Utopia [1516], ed. by G. M. Logan and R. M. Adams, trans. by R. M. Adams (Cambridge, 1989)
J. C. Davis, 'Utopianism', in The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450-1700, ed. by J. H. Burns and M. Goldie (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 329-44
Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Oxford, 1979)
"http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/rws1001/utopia/syllabus.htm
Course Syllabus
http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/rws1001/utopia/bibliog.htm
Utopian bibliography, Cambridge 2002
http://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/faculty/campbell/howells/confs00.htm#Matthew R. Davis, University of Washington
Matthew R. Davis, University of Washington
"William Dean Howells, Failed Utopianism, and the Promise of 'Supernatural' Brotherhood"
The last decades of the nineteenth century are notable as a time of great social unrest, giving rise to the first national strike – the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 – and its ensuing riots as well as the Haymarket Square Riot of 1886 and the great Pullman strike of 1894. As labor was increasingly pitted against capital, and strikes and talk of strikes gripped the national consciousness, authors and critics began to reimagine the ends to which relationships structure in brotherhood could be deployed in response to these uncertain times. The literary enterprise embarked upon by the men of William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes, through its egalitarian goals, represents one early utopian effort to restructure bonds around the thematic of brotherhood in the midst of great social upheaval. The talk begins with Howells’s 1890 novel, follows Howells’s involvement in the Nationalist movement initiated by Edward Bellamy’s incredibly successful utopian novel Looking Backward, and then focuses on Howells’s own utopian imaginings about the possibility of universal brotherhood in his Altrurian romances. I conclude with an article penned by William Dean Howells for The Century Magazine in 1896 entitled “Who Are Our Brethren?” In this essay, Howells challenges unsuccessful conceptions of brotherhood and offers “supernatural” brotherhood as a solution – one which appears more likely of success given its own ability to mirror larger societal changes coincident with the rise of capitalism.
A Hazard of New Fortunes begins rather optimistically with the promise that the literary magazine for which Fulkerson has secured March as editor is to be run cooperatively. What follows, however, proceeds as an extended ironic commentary on the inability of these or any other men to successfully utilize brotherhood as a panacea to social and economic pressures: relationships become strained between all involved with the magazine, money interferes with the purported cooperative effort, and differing opinions toward labor and the strikers who populate the urban landscape of New York taint the possibility of successful fraternal relations. This novel, then, by highlighting the changing economic and social landscape of late nineteenth-century America, presents the problem of utopian enterprise and the need of new conceptions of brotherhood in response.
One possible response actually chronologically precedes A Hazard of New Fortunes: Edward Bellamy’s best-selling 1887 novel Looking Backward. This novel, through its promulgation of universal human brotherhood in the service of the nation, promotes one possible solution to the economic and social unrest described in A Hazard of New Fortunes. Howells’s interest in the movement spawned by this novel – the Nationalist movement – is important: not only did Howells suggest to Bellamy that clubs be formed to further his interests, but he later left the organization and went on to imagine his own utopian societies in the form of his A Traveller from Altruria, his “Letters of an Altrurian Traveller, I-V,” and his Through the Eye of the Needle. Much of these works, meanwhile, set out to describe utopian constructs and conceptions of human radically different from Bellamy’s earlier conception. My readings of these texts, however, will demonstrate the failure of both these texts and Bellamy’s Looking Backward to imagine a truly viable form of universal human brotherhood. I conclude, therefore, with Howells’s “Who Are Our Brethren?” and its assertion that we need “supernatural” forms of brotherhood instead of universal ones. By separating the institution of brotherhood from either biological models or larger universal ones, and instead insisting upon the importance of individual choice, “supernatural” brotherhood models itself upon the capitalist society it emerges in response to and therefore remains as the one remaining viable form.
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