21:352:510: Utopia and Dystopia in American Literature
H. Ehrlich, Spring 2005, Rutgers-Newark, Thursday, 5:30-8:10 pm, Hill 409

Go to Top | Bibliographies and collections | Primary Works | Secondary works | Selected Links | Historical Online Encyclopedias

Notes, Bibliography, Other Courses Online

Go to Top | Bibliographies and collections | Primary Works | Secondary works | Selected Links | Historical Online Encyclopedias

    Primary Works

  1. Plato, Republic (c. 380 BCE): Guardians/philosopher-kings; based on the "necessary lie" and slave labor
  2. Thomas More, Utopia (1516): gold for mercenaries and chamber pots; everyone works; possibly ironic
  3. François Rabelais, "The Abbey of Thélème," Gargantua (1534): "Do what thou wilt"
  4. Valentin Andreae, Christianopolis (1619): medieval cities + Calvin’s quartered and moral Geneva
  5. William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Oxford)
  6. Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis (1627): House of Salomon for scientists in a 1900-year line from Solamona (n.b.: Novum Organum, 1620)
  7. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Penguin)
  8. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888): State Capitalism & Industrial Army
  9. William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890); free, rich society of individuals who have no power over each other; medievalist reply to Bellamy
  10. Willain Dean Howells, A Traveller from Alturia
  11. H. G,.Wells, A Modern Utopia
  12. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1915): isolated, feminist, parthenogenetic utopia highlighting work, safety, and cooperation
  13. Karel Capek, R.U.R. (1920): the humanoids (robots) turn and kill their masters
  14. Eugene Zamiatin, We (1920): Sovietism in extremis: the United State allows privacy only during "sexual hours" & death is the penalty for non-conformity
  15. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932): bottled babies, hypnopaedia, soma, fun sex, but no love; Savage can’t take it
  16. B. F. Skinner, Walden Two (1948): operant conditioning for perfect adaptation to communal life
  17. George Orwell, 1984 (1949): Newspeak, doublethink, & Winston Smith’s fear of Big Brother and rats
  18. Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974): "for the partner" on anarchist Anarres v. monopoly capitalist Urras
  19. Marge Piercy, Woman On the Edge of Time (1976),
  20. WIlliam Gibson, Neuromancer
  21. Richard Powers, Galatea 2.1
  22. Ursula LeGuin, The Dispossessed
  23. Joanna Russ, The Female Man
  24. Samuel Delaney, Triton
  25. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance [also related tales]
  26. Herman Melville, Typee
  27. Herman Melville, Pierre
  28. Thomas Pynchon, Crying of Lot 49
  29. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity''s Rainbow
  30. Don DeLillo, ----

Go to Top | Bibliographies and collections | Primary Works | Secondary works | Selected Links | Historical Online Encyclopedias

    Secondary works

  2. Fran Bartkowski, Feminist Utopias
  3. Donna Harroway, "Cyborg Manifesto"
  4. Krishna Kumar, Utopianism (1991)
  5. Frank Manuel, Utopian and Utopian Thought
  6. Antholy Burgess,1985 (1978)
  7. Carl Guarneri, Fourierism in 19th Century Amsrica (1991)

Go to Top | Bibliographies and collections | Primary Works | Secondary works | Selected Links | Historical Online Encyclopedias

    Selected Links

  1. http://utopia.nypl.org/primarysources.html New York Public Library
  2. http://utopia.nypl.org/links.html New York Public Library
  3. http://www.utoronto.ca/utopia/ Society for Utopian Studies
  4. http://users.erols.com/jonwill/utopialist.htm#LITERATURE%20FOCUSED%20SITES Utopia on the Internet
  5. http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/modlits/engweb.html British and American Literature web sites
  6. http://www.h-net.org/~utopia/ H-Net Forum on Utopia
  7. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/cas/undergraduate/modules/am408/home/ Reading lists for Utopias in the USA course
  8. http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap4/utopian.html Early 19th c.utopian movement
  9. http://www.questia.com/SM.qst Questia: American Utopian Literature (headings only)
  10. http://www.macalester.edu/courses/wgst50/resources.html Feminism and Utopia bibliography
  11. http://www.feministsf.org/femsf/index.html Feminist Science Fiction
  12. http://vos.ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id=2710 VOS Cyberculture
  13. http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/exhibition/utopia/utopia.html Iceberg: Utopia, Dystopia, and Myopia in the Late-19th Century
  14. http://www.spinelessbooks.com/bookviews/url.html List of 150 Utopian books
Go to Top | Bibliographies and collections | Primary Works | Secondary works | Selected Links | Historical Online Encyclopedias

From Historical Online Encyclopedias

  • 1911 Encyclopedia

    UTOPIA, an ideal commonwealth, or an imaginary country whose inhabitants are supposed to exist under the most perfect conditions possible. Hence the terms Utopia and Utopian are also used to denote any visionary scheme of reform or social theory, especially those which fail to recognize defects inherent in human nature. The word first occurs in Sir -Thomas Mores Utopia, which was originally published in Latin under the title De Optimo Reipublicae Statu, deque Nova Insula Utopia (Louvain, 1516). It was compounded by More (q.v.) from the Greek o~, not, and rb,ros, a place, meaning therefore a place which has no real existence, an imaginary country.
    The idea of a Utopia is, even in literature, far older than Mores romance; it appears in the Timaeus of Plato and is fully developed in his Republic. The idealized description of Sparta in Plutarchs life of Lycurgus belongs to the same class of literary Utopias, though it professes to be historical. A similar idea also occurs in legends of world-wide currency, the best known of these being the Greek, and the medieval Norse, Celtic and Arab legends which describe an earthly Paradise in the Western or Atlantic Ocean (see ATLANTIS). Few of these survived after the exploration of the Atlantic by Columbus, Vasco da Gama and others in the 15th century; but in literature Mores Utopia set a new fashion. An ideal state of society is described in the writings of Hobbes, Sir Robert Filmer and J. J. Rousseau. In Bacons New Atlantis (162429) science is the key to universal happiness; Tommaso Campanellas Cw1tas Solis (1623) portrays a communistic society, and is largely inspired by the Republic of Plato; James Harringtons Oceana (16~6), which had a profound influence upon political thought in America, is a practical treatise rather than a romance, and is founded on the ideas that property, especially in land, is the basis of political power, and that the executive should only be controlled for a short period by the same man or men. Bernard de Mandevilles Fable of the Bees is unique in that it describes the downfall of an ideal commonwealth. Other Utopias are the Voyage en Salente in FCnelons Tilemaque (1690); Etienne Cabets Voyage en Icarie (1840); Bulwer Lyttons The Coming Race (1871); Samuel Butlers Erewhon (1872) and Erewhon Revisited (1901); Edward Bellamys Looking Backward (1888); \Villiam Morriss News from Nowhere (1890); H. G. Welits Anticipations (1901), A Modern Utopia (1905) and New Worlds for Old (1908). Many Utopias, such as the Fable of the Bees and Erewhon, are designed to satirize existing social conditions as well as to depict a more perfect civilization. There are separate articles on all the authors mentioned above. A large number of the more recent Utopias have been inspired by socialistic or communistic ideals; among these may be mentioned Freiland, em soziales Zukunftsbild (1890) and Reise nach Freiland (1893), by the Austrian political economist Theodor Hertzka (b. Budapest, 1845), which portray an imaginary communistic colony in Central Africa.


  • Columbia Encylopedia, 6th ed

    Section: The Utopian Ideal over Time
    Related: Political Science

    The name utopia is applied retroactively to various ideal states described before More's work, most notably to that of the Republic of Plato. St. Augustine's City of God in the 5th cent. enunciated the theocratic ideal that dominated visionary thinking in the Middle Ages. With the Renaissance the ideal of a utopia became more worldly, but the religious element in utopian thinking is often present thereafter, such as in the politico-religious ideals of 17th-century English social philosophers and political experimenters. Among the famous pre-19th-century utopian writings are François Rabelais's description of the Abbey of Thélème in Gargantua (1532), The City of the Sun (1623) by Tommaso Campanella , The New Atlantis (1627) of Francis Bacon , and the Oceana (1656) of James Harrington .

    In the 18th-century Enlightenment, Jean Jacques Rousseau and others gave impetus to the belief that an ideal society—a Golden Age—had existed in the primitive days of European society before the development of civilization corrupted it. This faith in natural order and the innate goodness of humanity had a strong influence on the growth of visionary or utopian socialism. The end in view of these thinkers was usually an idealistic communism based on economic self-sufficiency or on the interaction of ideal communities. Saint-Simon , Étienne Cabet , Charles Fourier , and Pierre Joseph Proudhon in France and Robert Owen in England are typical examples of this sort of thinker. Actual experiments in utopian social living were tried in Europe and the United States, but for the most part the efforts were neither long-lived nor more than partially successful.

    The humanitarian socialists were largely displaced after the middle of the 19th cent. by political and economic theorists, such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who preached the achievement of the ideal state through political and revolutionary action. The utopian romance, however, became an extremely popular literary form. These novels depicted the glowing, and sometimes frightening, prospects of the new industrialism and social change. One of the most important of these works was Looking Backward (1888), by Edward Bellamy , who had a profound influence on economic idealism in America. In England, Erewhon (1872), by Samuel Butler , News from Nowhere (1891), by William Morris , and A Modern Utopia (1905), by H. G. Wells , were notable examples of the genre; in Austria an example was Theodor Hertzka's Freiland (1890). The 20th cent. saw a veritable flood of these literary utopias, most of them “scientific utopias” in which humans enjoy a blissful leisure while all or most of the work is done for them by docile machines.

    Connected with the literary fable of a utopia has been the belief in an actual ideal state in some remote and undiscovered corner of the world. The mythical Atlantis , described by Plato, was long sought by Greek and later mariners. Similar to this search were the vain expeditions in search of the Isles of the Blest, or Fortunate Isles , and El Dorado .


  • Catholic Encyclopedia (1912)

    Utopia
    (Greek ou no or not, and topos place), a term used to designate a visionary or an ideally perfect state of society. The name was first used by Sir Thomas More in his work entitled "De optimo reipublicae statu deque nova insula Utopia" (Louvain, 1615), and has since been used as a generic term for political romances. Such a romance, to which More was indebted for many of his ideas, is Plato's "Republic". In this work Plato prescribes a communistic mode of life for the guardians and auxiliaries (not for the productive classes) of the State. The superior qualities of the guardian and auxiliary class were to be maintained by the practice of stirpiculture and state control of the bringing up of children. In the "Republic", the ends sought are political rather than economic. Sir Thomas More, on the other hand, does not confine his attention to the governing class but includes the whole social structure in his plan. He puts most of his narrative into the mouth of a certain Raphael Hythloday, a Portuguese traveller, who criticizes trenchantly the laws and customs of European states, and paints in glowing colours the ideal institutions which he had observed in a five years' sojourn among the Utopians. Hythloday contends that English laws are badly administered. The thief and the murderer alike are punished with death with no consequent diminution of the crime of theft. Means should be taken rather to see that men are not driven to steal. The servant class, for example, should learn trades, so that they need not have recourse to highway robbery when dismissed by their masters. Also some provision should be made for agricultural labourers that they might not follow a like profession when the arable lands were converted into sheep runs, a crying evil in England at that time. He contended further that most of the difficulties of European government grew out of the institution of private property. The objection is made that a nation cannot be prosperous where all property is common because there would be no incentive to labour, men would become slothful, and violence and bloodshed would result. Hythloday answers this objection by giving an account of the institutions and customs of the Utopians.

    In the Island of Utopia Iying south of the equator there are fifty-four cities of which no two are nearer together than twenty-four miles. The government is representative in form. From each city three wise and experienced men are sent each year to the capital to deliberate on public affairs. The rural population live in farm-houses scattered throughout the island, each of which contains at least forty persons besides two slaves. For every thirty farm-houses there is a leader called a philarch. Ten philarchs together with their groups of families are under an officer called a chief philarch. The prince of the island is chosen for life by the philarchs from four candidates nominated by the people. He may be deposed if he is suspected of tyranny. The laws are few in number and seldom violated. Among the Utopians agriculture is a science in which all are instructed. The children in the schools learn its history and theory. From each group of thirty farms twenty persons are sent annually to the neighbouring cities to make room for an equal number who come from the city to the country. In the course of time all have a taste of farm life. In addition to agriculture each person is taught a trade. Usually he selects his father's trade, but if he desires to learn another he is allowed to do so. The Utopians work only six hours a day but this is sufficient to provide them with all the necessaries and comforts of life, for the reason that there are so few idlers and that no time is spent in supplying useless or vicious luxuries. In the cities groups of families have common dining-halls, although anyone who chooses to do so may dine at his own house. The menial service in these dining-rooms is performed by slaves, while the women of the various families by turns superintend the preparation of the meals. When the Utopians have produced a supply sufficient to last them for two years, they use any surplus which they may have to carry on commerce with neighbouring nations, securing from them gold, silver, iron, and such other things as they need. They do not use gold and silver as money, since they have common ownership of property, but they procure it principally in order to hire mercenaries from among their neighbours. In music, arithmetic, and geometry they are not surpassed by the Europeans, and in astronomy and meteorology they far outstrip them.

    There are different varieties of religion, but their public worship is of such a general nature that they are able to worship together. All beliefs except Atheism are tolerated. Their ethics is Hedonistic and very few of them are attracted by an ascetic life. Those convicted of heinous crimes are reduced to slavery, and persons sentenced to death in other countries are also procured as slaves. Children of slaves do not retain the status of their parents. Persons afflicted with incurable and painful diseases are advised by the priests and magistrates to take their own lives. If they do not wish to do so, however, they are not compelled to. Those who commit suicide without the consent of the priests and magistrates are given dishonourable burial, and those who meet death cheerfully have their bodies cremated as a mark of honour. Women are not allowed to marry under the age of eighteen nor men under the age of twenty-two. Much care is taken to make those contracting marriage acquainted with each other so as to avoid unhappy unions. Divorces are permitted for one cause, and only the innocent party may remarry. The Utopian priests are of extreme holiness but their numbers are small. They are elected by the people by secret ballot. Women are not excluded from the priesthood, though few of them - and these widows and old women - are chosen. The priesthood is held in high honour. The traveller concludes his account by attributing the happiness and concord prevailing in Utopia to the absence of private property.

    It is sometimes asked whether More meant to have the proposals in the Utopia taken seriously. Undoubtedly he did not. They were merely a means by which he could call attention to some of the abuses of his day without being taken to task by the king for his freedom. While he shows that he appreciates the weakness of communism, he allows Hythloday to present only its strength. Since More's day many ideal commonwealths in imitation of the Utopia have flourished in literature. Among the best known are:

    Bacon's "New Atlantis" (1624), in which the author dreams of the happiness of mankind attained through the progress of the natural sciences;
    Campanella's "City of the Sun" (1637), which emphasizes community of property and stirpiculture;
    Harrington's "Oceana" (1656); Fénelon's "Telemaque" (1699); Cabet's "Voyage in Icaria" (1840);
    Bellamy's "Looking Backward" (1889);
    William Morris's "News from Nowhere" (1890);
    Hertzka's "Freiland" (1891); and
    H. G. Wells's "A Modern Utopia" (1905) and "New Worlds for Old" (1908).
    Morley's "Ideal Commonwealths" contains an English translation of More's "Utopia" as well as of Bacon's "New Atlantis", Campanelia's "City of the Sun", and other imaginary states.

    Raw notes from here ...


    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)

    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)

    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    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)

    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    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.

    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    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

    ******************

    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)

    **************

    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.


    http://www.umsl.edu/~polisci/faculty/sargent.html
    Sargent homepage