UTOPIAN AND DYSTOPIAN WORLDS IN LITERATURE

What are utopia and dystopia? A utopia is an imaginary place, situated in a special time
and space, which is socially, morally, and politically ideal and perfect. A dystopia is an
imaginary place, also situated in a special time or place, which is socially, morally, and
politically terrific, a society in which people are dehumanized, downtrodden, terrorized, or
completely controlled.
The word “utopia” comes from Greek roots u or ou, meaning “no, not” and topos
meaning “place.” Thomas More (1478-1535) invented the word “utopia” in his book by that
name (Utopia, 1516) as a crank on eutopia, or “good place”, therefore utopia seems like “good
no-place.”
With respect to the definition of utopia, literary critic Northrop Frye defines utopia as an
artistic vision of the telos or finish at which social life, not the individual but the individual as a
member of society, aims. The utopian writer seeks at his or her present society, and noticing its
most meaningful elements, foresees a hypothetical result. That design can have all the feeling of
myth and metaphor, but while people have repeatedly claimed that mythic stories express an
internal, abstract truth, the utopian tale is always speculative rather than true. The utopian vision
is fictive—idealistic rather than realistic. Frye underlines how taking utopian vision literally has
led to many a failed experimental community.
Views can change as quickly and as entirely as styles; yesterday’s utopia can look like
today’s horror play. Moreover, it should be understood that any utopian vision is a distinct
perspective that might seem pinkish to some, while appearing dark and cumbrous to others. One
individual’s “utopia” may become another individual’s “dystopia.” On the whole, the utopian
vision is one that author determines readers to find considerably better than present existing
society; while the dystopian vision is one that the author aims for the reader to find notably
worse than the society as it presently exists.
 CHAPTER I
UTOPIA

I.1. INTRODUCING UTOPIAN WORLD

Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451,
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s
We, and George Orwell’s 1984 are all works of utopian literature. Although they were written
during different time periods, the issues they explore are remarkably similar.
The word “utopia” is derived from Greek roots u or ou, meaning “no, not” and topos
meaning “place.” Thomas More (1478-1535) invented the word “utopia” when he used it in his
book, Utopia, as a quibble on eutopia, which means “good place”, in this case utopia represents
a “good no-place.” A utopia is an unreal place, situated in a distinct time and space, an ideal
place from a social, moral and political point of view. Utopian philosophy represents a leading
principle for humanity, a global agent trying to achieve the best life possible in a complex and
yet fragmented society. Even though we all belong to the human race, we can say that two
persons cannot be exactly the same. Every individual wishes for a better world without crimes,
diseases or poverty and wants the world to change for better; not only for themselves, but also
for others. Often, this simple wish can become more than just a desire alone and transforms into
hope; hope for real transformation, a different possible world in our future. This hope can inspire
action and a determination to perform the imaginary improvement. This is the common vision of
humanity, but the way in which it is rendered, or what utopia means for each single individual
varies and depends on one’s personal vision of life.
Utopia may be considered as one of humanity’s goals and people should try to
accomplish it together and not let everything up to fate. One of the main conditions would be for
people to agree upon the same thought in reaching a better world and upon the means and efforts
essential to carry it out. Because knowledge is the key to utopia, people can obtain anything
through it. Humanity should explore its future more in order to have a utopian world. Utopia
might be considered a new form of knowledge as human beings consist of both a physical and a
mental state, so the latest technologies and views should be used to satisfy both states. A good
knowledge of things opens many doors and provides infinite means of solving problems and
achieving utopia.1 Research and development are the best tools to sustain the cause, while
humanity has discovered some ways of interaction with knowledge.2 Humanity’s dream of a
better life, leads individuals to a common destination – utopia, or “heaven” on earth, as is named
by religion. People must struggle and make all the necessary efforts to reach it. Utopia refers to
people’s efforts and endeavour of creating a perfect society by coming up with views that could
entirely change our society. People must communicate and cooperate in order to carry out such a
demanding task.
Utopia is a literary genre (or rather, more precisely, a sub-genre)3, which has fiction as a
favourite approach of artistic presentation. Together with the utopian genre there is also a
utopian mode,4 known as utopianism. Whilst the utopian genre is constructive and objective and
strives to create a certain type of society, the utopian mode is confined to utopian aspiration and
to the simple suggestion to ideal elements. Utopianism can be defined as the aspiration to
happiness, while utopia can be characterized as a crystallization of the utopian spirit or
utopianism. As a literary genre, utopia means the writing in which the utopian attitude has been
translated into a literary form which presents a specific paradigm whose archetypal model is
More’s Utopia (1516). What needs to be stressed is the extremely close connection between this
mode utopique and utopian writing itself. The “mode utopique,” is the ability to imagine that one
is capable to modify reality by means of the hypothesis of creating an order other than reality.5
Utopianism can be defined as a tension, the aspiration to go beyond the steadiness of the present,
with a vision, which is entirely alternative to the fact in which the writer lives and works.
The utopian imagination assumes a sense of alienation in the face of reality. The utopian
world is a world of possibility. Every utopian text begins with an initial If from which each of its
possible consequences proceeds. Utopia is a connective game; a play on the resources that are

1
Arthur Bestor, Backwoods utopias: the sectarian origins and the Owenite phase of communitarian socialism in
America, 1663-1829, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971, pp. 120-155
2
Electronic publication: Utopian philosophy, The ultimate philosophy, book I, book II, book III, [Online]. 2011.
Available via http://users.erols.com/jonwill/
3
For an interpretation of the utopia as a literary genre, see Ricoeur 1980, 51 and 1986, 269.
4
On utopian mode, see Ruyer 1950, 9ff.
5
Ruyer Raymond. — L'utopie et les utopies, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1950
offered us by experience, a speculative play with reality which is taking the form of a political
proposal that is set up in contrast with a political reality. There is always a close connection
between the whimsical utopia and the social environment in which its author is placed, the
alternatives given, the representation of a radically different society, invariably springing from a
lucid critique of what the present is for the writer. Utopian literature represents a social
commentary, a criticism of what is and some suggestions of what could be. Its method consists in
social rearrangement, a crucial characteristic which distinguishes utopian literature from science
fiction and fantasy, even when the line between is not obviously perceptible. In an utopian novel
the author visualises a society with a given set of social conditions, few in number, which are
undeniably different from those of his own society: they are much different, there is an
abruptness between the author's actual and his pictured society, but the difference is not so great
as to make his imagined utopian society unrecognizable to his colleague citizens. The author
then draws up the consequences of his chosen set of social conditions in giving substance to the
social arrangement of his utopian society.
Utopian narrative represents the detailed and systematic description – obtained either in
a positive sense or in an ironic-negative (or dystopian, anti-utopian) sense – of another society,
one which arises in opposition to that within which the writer operates. The Utopian genre has
been led by two tendencies, two spirits, from its very beginning. The first of these is best
expressed by Thomas More’s Utopia, and can be spotted by its positive, lay design, which is, an
optimistic faith in human beings’ continuous ability to reform by means of a just social order.
The second guiding tendency is best illustrated by Joseph Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem (1607),
which afterwards influenced Jonathan Swift, Samuel Butler, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell;
it is the negative, the critical, the disruptive spirit which impairs the model of Utopian
perfectibility with its lucid but hopeless allegation of the fact that human beings are essentially
evil.
The essence of utopia is descriptive and description represents a priority over narration in
Utopian writings, which means that it literally passes narration: the action, the plot, and the
hero’s adventures occur only before and after the utopian event, not during it, because the
utopian place is characterised by the abeyance of the action and time. The utopian place is
always depicted in detail, with an obsession for elements that seems to have been set up in
diametric antithesis to the historical and geographical vagueness of reality. The maximum of
concreteness corresponds to the outmost of abstraction, along with a clarity that would hide no
detail of the mechanisms at work in its “other” place. The opaqueness of our real world fades
away and in its place we have the hyaline transparency of this world that is “other.”
One of the main characteristics of utopia as a literary genre is its relationship with reality.
Utopian writers start from the observation of the society they live in, write down the aspects that
need to be replaced and create a place where all the problems have been solved. Frequently, the
imagined world is contrary to the real one, representing a sort of inverted image of it. It should
not be considered just a frail echo of the real world; utopian worlds are essentially dynamic, and
in spite of the fact that they appeared from a set of circumstances, their purpose is not limited to
criticising the present.
The journey in Utopia is not just a technical tool used to enter utopian otherness. For the
traveller, Utopia, is the place of harmony and of absolute good, and does not instantly appear as a
whole, it is never a beginning but it is the end of a path, a gradual discovery, the final step of a
preliminary itinerary. On this line, the journey influences the structure of the utopian plan, for the
knowledge of the country as other is gradual and proceeds either through the dialectic dialogue
between the character-narrator and his guide or through the traveller’s real journey inside Utopia.
The fact that the utopian traveller leaves from a real place, visits a pictured location and
goes back home, places utopia at the limit between reality and fiction. Utopia is a game which
implies the celebration of a sort of pact between the utopist and the reader in which the utopist
tells the reader about a world that does not exist, while the reader acts as if he believes the
author, even though he is aware of the non-existence of such a society. However, the reader’s
percept of reality cannot be forced too much; otherwise he will refuse to act as if he believed the
writer. Actually, the fiction cannot mock logic, and the transition from has to be done gradually.
This transition can be eased by introducing, into the imaginary world, of some objects and
structures that already exist into the real world, but which have a distinct function.
By inviting the reader to take an imaginary journey to a better place, literary utopia
causes a rupture with a real place. This geological rupture causes a fracture between the history
of the real place and that of the imagined society. At the beginning of literary utopianism, the
reader can find static, not historical utopias, which reject their past, offer a cold image of the
present, and discard the idea of a future from their field of vision, there is no progress after the
ideal society has been set. The fancied society is put forward as a model to be followed and
models are frozen images that don’t deal with historical change after they have been instituted.
The connection between these utopias and the future is doubtful, since the model is given as a
term of comparison with real society; it is used by the utopist to judge the present and not to
open new paths to the future. The concept of time, as we know it, has been chased away from
these utopias.
From a structural viewpoint, the utopian text is labelled by a stereotype of both form and
plot. Plot consists in the journey, which may be divided into the journey there, the dwelling, and
the return; the depiction of the utopian place is undeniably privileged over that of the journey
there and back, and the main part of the text is given over the description-exposition of the socio-
political principles on which it is based. As already outlined, the utopian writer is not concerned
with the portrayal of psychological states or self-analysis.
In utopian texts, the character’s roles are actually two: the main character who is both
traveller and narrator, and the guide. The function of this traveller-narrator within the text is to
introduce an outside point of view to the illustration of the exact society which is being
described, an unknown object, seen in this light. However, this character-traveller is a double
character because his role is that of intermediating two worlds, the ancient and the new one;
therefore, his function proves to be questionable in this acting both inside and outside Utopia.
The traveller must proceed with a double movement of detachment and assimilation to get in
contact with the otherness. This double displacement is obvious in the techniques used for the
description of the place that is other: a series of stylistic tools which are very important in this
kind of narration (the utopian and the travel literature) because they must induce a reverie in the
reader. The technical device of the alienation is characterised by a double movement of
detachment from what is other and its consumption. The traveller is a character breaking out
from the society to which he belongs; he is a foreigner able of being different and then
identifying with others and integrating. He symbolizes the point of connection between two
entities that could not communicate otherwise. His act as mediator underlines the doubtful
relationship between Utopia and otherness- Utopia must cope with the imperfection of the
outside world in order to be perfect.6
A structural symbol of the utopian text is its verbal ingeniousness represented by the
making of extravagant meaningful place names. It will be enough to mention some of the

6
Georges Benrekassa. Le concentrique et l’excentrique. Marges de Lumières. Paris, 1980
fantastic evocative names of islands marked on the map of Utopia: Oceania, Christianopolis,
Jansenia, Gerania, Lewistania, Icaria, or some of those given by the Italian writer Calvino in his
Le città invisibili, such as Ipazia, Armilla, Eutropia and so on. Language is essential to the
utopian text, both as a linguistic game of creativeness (e.g., anagrams, puns), a sort of semantic
challenge the reader must carry on in an effort of decoding the text correctly, and as the necessity
to make a new idiom which will be the means of the new society, a set of authentic and perfect
terms in which to express the new world’s perfection. Utopia must be seen as the rich linguistic
tone of lexicon-grammatical invention and discovery.
As a literary genre, Utopia is characterized by a specific structural paradigm as well as by
some semantic constants which can be seen as deriving from the utopian frame of mind 7. These
are: insularism - the geometrical attitude, dirigisme - the myth of absolute transparency,
collectivism, and pedagogism. These thematic constancies can modify because of the different
historical contexts and the various personalities and biographies of the utopian writers. There is a
complicated interplay between biographical events and utopian writing which utopian
psychoanalytical criticism has tried to underline. There can be outlined some characteristics and
features typical for the utopian frame of mind: the utopian writer is a reformer, a pedagogist who
believes that teaching can modify man, a law maker who uses the laws to create a society of
reasonable and more righteous men. The historical events which the utopian writer is involved
in, and especially his particular oddities and his personality introduce in Utopia those new
elements through which the genre can renew and modify itself.
There is a constant interaction between utopia and other literary genres. Since its very
inception utopian literature was strictly connected with travel literature and the imaginary
voyage. These genres are connected by an interesting intertextuality and circularity that
generates a series of recurrent topoi and stereotypes being connected not only to the description
of a place of otherness, but also to its inhabitants. It is enough to mention the clear references in
Utopia by Thomas More, to Amerigo Vespucci’s travels and to the features of the expert seaman
that More gives to Raphael Hythloday. The rhetoric strategies were used to describe the place
that is other as well as the paradoxical play between reality and fiction, with a continuous
connection to Lucian who made lies the basic element of his narration.

7
Ruyer Raymond. — L'utopie et les utopies, Paris, 1950
 The other genre to which utopia is usually related is satire. Firstly, these genres do not
concentrate on psychological characterization, but rather illustrate the characters as the speakers
of the ideas they represent. Secondly, they are characterised by a sort of intellectual fabrication
which has always had a didactic purpose. Thirdly, even the device of dialogue seen as a conflict
of ideas is at the basis of both genres. But, the satirical writer does not have the global attitude of
rejection towards his society which would lead him to create a new or alternative world or, in the
case of negative utopia, he does not have the total rejection to be expressed in a systematic
description of the reality made absurd; indeed, the satirical writer analytically ridicules and
denunciates the social values he judges false and hypocrite. Utopia is always a criticism of the
writer’s society but, unlike satire, it always aims at a systematic description of society as it
should be.
Utopia is also exactly connected to romance, fantasy and the fantastic genre. The world
of utopia is, as it has been mentioned, the world of possibilities; a category of the fantastic genre.
The world of utopia is inhabited not by gnomes, goblins, dragons, fairies, but by human beings.
Therefore, utopian fantasy is not like the marvellous or the fabulous, which are realms dominated
by their own laws with no reference to everyday life.
Over the century, Utopia had been influenced by similar genres, such as the journal, the
novel and science fiction. Actually, it became so closed to the last one that it has been often
confused with it. When science fiction firstly appeared, it was not difficult to distinguish it from
literary utopia, as the former made an obvious investment in the creation of a fabulous world
achieved by technological and scientific progress, which is taking the reader into a journey to
remote planets, while the latter remained focused on the description of other ways of organising
the imagined worlds.
Utopia is a genre suffering sustained contamination, a cross-breed genre in which
elements of both the high tradition (like the influence of the myth of the Golden Age) and the
popular custom (like the influence of the Land of Cockaigne) are mixed and in which elements
of both the great tradition of classic thought (Plato) and of Hebrew thought are present. Utopia is
a “hybrid plant, born of the crossing of the paradisiacal belief of Judeo-Christian religion with
the Hellenic myth of an ideal city on earth”.8

8
Frank Edward Manuel & Fritzie Prigohzy Manuel, Utopian thought in the western world, Harvard University
Press, 2009
 I.2. MORE’S FOLLOWERS

“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it
leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands
there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”9
Oscar Wilde’s snappy analysis suggests that there are three important aspects of the
Renaissance and the Enlightenment Utopia. The first aspect recognized by Wilde consists in a
persistent omnipresence of utopian lust in humans’ history. Utopia arose from the same impulse
as myths or from humans’ eschatological desire for a better afterlife and it yearned to realize a
state of happiness, welfare and social harmony. Myths such as those of the Island of the Blessed,
Elysium, Shangri-La and the Garden of Eden tormented writers, philosophers and travellers for
centuries and paved the way for the geographical utopia of the Renaissance period and the
voyage utopia of the eighteenth century which believed in the transformative quality of
otherness. Wilde’s aphorism also indicates that neither the genre’s father Thomas More, nor
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century followers could claim perfection and universality as
invariable principles. What the reader discovers later in the period is recognition of the human
restlessness that renders the classical idea of human nature and thus the ideal of static idle
utopianism. Utopias can be defined as discourses on change itself rather than simply sketches.
In 1516 Thomas More (1478–1535), the counsellor of King Henry VIII, a Catholic
martyr and saint, published his most controversial book, Of the best state law and of the new
island Utopia, truly a golden booklet, as beneficial as it is cheerful now known as Utopia. Whilst
More’s Utopia was unique in its ‘atopic’ quality, it also rekindled classical utopianism and
adapted it to the early modern context.10
The term ‘utopia’ despite its allegorical meaning, has always carried a spatial dimension
that created imaginary geographies. Renaissance and early modern utopias removed their ideal
and other worlds by locating them in remote, unknown countries and secluded uncharted islands
and planets. Utopia exists because of Abraxa (the original name of the country) and its people
were forcefully colonized by King Utopus. Gonzalo’s famous micro-Utopia in “The Tempest”

9
Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose , ed. Linda Dowling (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 2001 ).
10
Michèle Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. Colin Gordon (Stanford University Press, 1989 ).
borrows from the 1609 Bermuda pamphlets11 but also paraphrases Michel Montaigne’s
primitivist argument on natural justice and virtue which he made in his essay “On Cannibals”.
Michael Drayton’s poem “Ode to the Virginian Voyage”, has taken from Hakluyt’s, projects
‘Earth’s onely Paradise’ onto the New World but at the same time calls upon ‘You brave heroic
minds,/Worthy your country’s name’ to refuel England’s eminence in the colonization of
America. The extensive appropriation and settlement of the ‘New World’ is justified by a model
of progressive socialization: such narratives use the displacement of fantastic voyages,
Robinsonades and Utopia, to define society and civilization as progressive alienation from
barbarism to civilization.
Paradoxically, More’s “Utopia” inspired utopian projects that attempted to reverse the
colonial process or at least to create peaceful relations between colonizers and colonized. In
1520, initially supported by Charles I, Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566) tried to establish a
network of farm communities in Venezuela inhabited by both Spanish and free Indians, but had
to forsake his plans in 1522. Vasco de Quiroga (1470–1565), who was a translator and a
passionate disciple of Utopia, attempted on several occasions to make More’s blueprint in
Mexico. His hospital villages of Santa Fe and the free Indian communities in Lake Pátzcuaro
were highly successful until the prohibition of slavery was lifted by Charles V in 1534.
Quiroga’s book “Information on the Law”, 1535 designs the utopian vision of a Christian state
into the New World. Like More and Montaigne, who were disenchanted by some aspects of the
European society, Quiroga greets the native justice and virtue of Mexican Indians as exemplary,
and outlines the scheme of an elective Christian monarchy to govern the Mexican Indians freely
and peacefully without colonial force and intervention. Both de Las Casas and Quiroga
precluded the eighteenth-century Jesuit utopian colonies in Paraguay which sought to reconcile
primitive Christianity and aboriginal primitivism.
Utopia is innate from the imaginary voyage. Prester John’s Indian realm, the voyage of St
Brendan and St Brendan’s Isle and the icy north of the kingdom of Thule, voyages within the
earth and beyond the stars are all expressions of the utopian desire. Medieval and Renaissance
maps interpolated the contemplative geographies of Eden, the Island of the Blessed, St

11
The so-called Bermuda Pamphlets were accounts of a shipwreck that occurred in the summer of 1609. News
reached England in 1610 and the earliest account by William Strachey, True Reportory (1625), possibly circulated
in manuscript form in 1610. See Alden T. Vaughan, ‘William Strachey’s True Reportory and Shakespeare: A Closer
Look at the Evidence’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59:3 (Fall 2008), 245–73.
Brendan’s Isle and the mythical island of Brazil into their navigational charts, making unstable
the boundaries of the world. The lunar voyage defied the boundaries of the cosmos. The tradition
of the lunar voyages which was popular since Lucian and Plutarch’s The Face of the Moon was
reignited both by the geographical discoveries of the age of Columbus and by the heliocentric
discourse of the Copernican revolution. In that sense, imagining a world on the moon was
perhaps a response to the Renaissance world in which systems of hierarchy, authority, religion,
as well as planetary revolutions, were questioned. Reflecting on the consequences of Copernicus,
John Donne concludes that ‘new philosophy calls all in doubt’ (An Anatomy of the World: The
First Anniversary, 1611). Literature on moon travel was also fundamentally satirical, assuring a
safe medium to censure contemporary society.
The mathematician, astronomer and disciple of Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, wrote his
lunar dream, “Somnium” partly as a defence of the non-geocentric solar system but also to
speculate on the possibilities of interplanetary travel and life. Kepler’s endeavour to forward
Copernican science and challenge his contemporaries’ scientific view by providing a ‘lunar’
perspective on planetary science would have clashed with a detailed utopian blueprint of an
idealized lunar society. His Somnium, however, paved the way for subsequent lunar utopias and
science fiction.12
In 1638, Bishop Francis Godwin issued the first English lunar novel, “The Man in the
Moone”, a book which takes the form of a travel narrative, combining elements of adventure
narration and literary utopia with scientific description. What makes Godwin’s voyage utopia so
interesting is that the picaresque wanderings of the main character take him to different worlds
that all function as a critical contrast to his own, not so utopian world. Thus prefiguring the
critical utopian voyage of the eighteenth century, Godwin does not suggest one simple utopian
blueprint, but employs the picaresque, Robinsonade and the lunar voyage to reflect critically on
his own society and world.
Although geographical utopian voyages of this period are connected to contemporary
narratives of explorers, conquerors and merchants, they also outline archaic ideals of Paradise
into new worlds. If Paradise or the Golden Age had been lost, then it could be found and it could
become a utopian paradigm. The settlement of America was recorded as the discovery of Eden,
Paradise, Canaan and a chiliastic ‘new Heaven and a new Earth’. Even the later Cotton Mather’s

12
Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo’s Dream (London: HarperCollins, 2009).
“Magnalia Christi American” (1720) and the writings by the Shaker Ann Lee described America
as Eden. This quest for Paradise, embodied in the iconographic tropes of the Golden Age and
Arcadia, was modeled by either a nostalgic grief for the lapsarian loss or, in the case of Thomas
More, a dynamic utopian impulse that sought to recreate the terrestrial Paradise. Arcadia’s
yearning for privacy forges an ‘artful’ harmony (Philip Sidney) that reassures the individual in
an immediate natural environment but at the same time alludes to the conflicts in the ‘non-
pastoral’ world. Instead of merely returning to the memory of a long-lost Golden Age, the
pastoral juxtaposes an idea of moral economy with the historical troubles of war, feudal
exploitation and the increasing split between court and country. Arcadia thus has always been a
classical literary trope and appears in different guises and cultures.
The most surprising example of an anarchistic pastoral text is the medieval Land of
Cockaygne (Land of ‘small cakes’). Blending the classical myths and fantasies of Lucian’s True
History and Hesiod’s Golden Age of Kronos and the chiliastic yearning for Heaven and Eden, it
adds to the history of early modern utopianism the element of the carnivalesque. Addressing
similar issues to More’s preoccupation in Book I with rural poverty, land migration and agrarian
capitalism, the Land of Cockaygne tells of a land of wealth where peaceful peasants once lived in
abundance and welfare with no restrictions of private property or laws, adjoining the ideal of
galore with the reality of feudal serfdom and rural poverty. In the same vein, the Spanish
novelists Antonio de Guevara in his Libro Llamado Menosprecio de Corte y Alabança de Aldea
(1591) and Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote de La Mancha (1605) use the utopian fantasy of
a rural Arcadia to comment on the conflict between rural migrants and farmers.
Whilst obliged to classical utopianism, early-modern travel writing, the pastoral/Arcadian
tradition and finally Christian Chiliasm, Utopia borrowed its invented generic from classical
literature, particularly Menippean and Lucian travel writing, satire and the romance novel. The
Platonic dialogue is prominent in More’s Utopia and doubled by the dialogue between Books I
and II. It offers a systematic and detailed description of Utopian society and contrasts historical
reality with the alternative history/society. Through this ‘cognitive estrangement’ (Darko Suvin)
or the imagination of strange worlds, the reader learns to see its own world from a new
perspective.13

13
Darko Suvin, ‘Defining the Literary Genre of Utopia: Some Historical Semantics, some Genology, a Proposal
and a Plea’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 6 (Fall 1975), 121–45.
 Utopia’s literariness and didacticism arise from Renaissance poetics. In particular, Philip
Sidney’s “Defence of Poesy” (1595) provides a useful model for Utopia’s commitment to
expectation but also rhetorical ambivalence. His central premise is that poetry is an art of
imitation, that is a ‘representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth’ not unlike a ‘speaking
picture’.14 More’s thought-experiment to resolve early-modern Europe’s problems is thus a
literary counterfeit, an imaginary history of a ‘Not-Yet’ better world (Ernst Bloch).15 With the
emergence of new literary genres, especially the early novel, the generic creation of utopias
diversifies.
Thomas More’s Utopia provides the model for a type of utopianism that believes in
strong governmental control to achieve the common good. Emphasizing More’s Utopia is the
idea of (original) sin. Certainly, ‘the chief and progenitor of all plagues’, Pride, is sought to be
eradicated in the utopian environment where strict social control, education and the threat of the
death penalty replace self-interest with the idea of common good and real friendship. The lack of
privacy, private property and the idea of self-interest in an isolated social environment forces
pride to fade. In “La Città del Sole” by Tommaso Campanella (1623) and Johann Valentin
Andreae’s “Reipublicae Christopolitanae Descriptio” (1619), the peccancies that are aimed are
Tyranny, Sophistry and Hypocrisy, variations on Pride and self-interest. Once more, social
engineering and education are proposed to eradicate these great evils. Still, the danger of sin is
not overcome in these Renaissance utopias. Conversely human nature is reprogrammed and
disciplined (often through the threat of the death penalty).
“The City of the Sun” by Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), was originally written in
Italian in 1602, just after Campanella was sentenced to life imprisonment for sedition and heresy
in Naples. The City of the Sun is very much a result of Campanella’s active role in the Calabrian
rebellion against the Spanish in 1599. Convinced that great political and social changes were
imminent and that he was both a prophet and a leader of the millennium, Campanella wanted to
replace the existing form of the Spanish rule with a utopian commonwealth. His City of the Sun,
written in prison, took the principles of Utopia to the next level as every institution of the state is
set in motion towards the education of the community spirit in the Solarians. Set within a short

14
Philip Sidney, ‘Defence of Poetry’, in Selected Writings , ed. Richard Dutton (London: Carcanet Press, 1987 ), pp.
102–48, 114.
15
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (3 vols., Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1995 ).
frame narrative, the best part of the text is the ‘poetical dialogue’ between a Genoese sailor who
had accompanied Columbus on his voyage to America and a Knight Hospitaller.
“The City of the Sun” was devised as a ‘body politic’ with its individual parts integrated
so as to form a unitary organism and its various limbs, specialized on definite functions, entirely
coordinated to serve the communal well-being. In that way, Campanella anticipated Thomas
Hobbes’s metaphorical use of the biblical figure of the Leviathan. The city state of Campanella is
a theocracy, governed by twenty-four priests and the head of the state, Sol. There is no division
between the state, church and judiciary system. The city is radial, divided into seven large
networks, named after the seven planets. The city walls bear educational murals, time lines and
samples of metals, stones, minerals, fluids, specimens of trees, herbs and other objects, moving
from the representation of mathematics on the inland wall of the first internal circuit, to
geography, social anthropology, geology, medicine, evolutionary biology and mechanical arts,
and culminating in a depiction of Jesus Christ and the twelve Apostles, of Caesar, Alexander and
other famous historical and religious figures. These educational murals are used for the
elementary teaching of the children but also for the perpetual and subliminal instruction of the
adults. But despite these elaborate technologies of the self, the ‘Utopian Paradox’ shows up in
the City of the Sun, too. Similarly to More’s Utopia, the commonwealth is based on agriculture
and some minor trade with the outside world. But, in opposition to More’s world, agricultural
technology is, as the murals suggest, advanced and used to maximize efficiency on a minimum
of work.
The period between 1620 and 1638, at least in England, is characterized by a distinct
change in ideal politics due to variations in the political arena, an increasing global trade and a
historicized consciousness of time. It can be identified the gradual shift from geographical
utopias to chronological utopias, and more importantly, a period of paradigmatic overlap where
the ideal commonwealth is located in an imaginary, undiscovered, remote place and at the same
time, reforms are revealed as utopian hope and utopian possibilities. This becomes particularly
visible in the utopian experiments of the New England Puritans, where utopian mastery is
practiced not in an imaginary but an actual utopia.
What defined the utopianism of the 1640s was a steadfast evolution towards concrete
political and social reform. The outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, the death of Charles I, and the
Protectorate document the radical changes that different religious and Cambridge political
groups wanted to implement. Utopianism spread throughout the whole nation through public
debates, petitions and millenarianist reform proposals.
These now also provided a space for women writers. Mary Cary’s fanciful text, “A New
and More Exact Mappe” (1651), brought together the millenary ideal of a correct society with
the pragmatic political questions surrounding the establishment of the English Republic.
According to Cary’s writing, the millennial society will be a just and egalitarian one, a society
which will be based on the ‘holy use’ of reason which makes no distinction of class or gender.
On the other side of the political spectre is Margaret Cavendish’s work “The Description of a
New World Called the Blazing World” published in 1666, which is a fictional utopia of an
absolute monarchy ruled by an enlightened Empress and her alter-ego, Margaret, Duchess of
Newcastle. It has as its basic guiding principles – one monarch, one language, and one religion –
and it is clearly a reaction to the disruptions of the Civil War in England at the time.
In the eighteenth century, the geographical utopia evolved into different models.
Eighteenth-century utopias made use of Enlightenment discourses on progress, perfectibility,
reason, sociability and reform. Utopian writers stated a range of alternative possibilities in their
stances against absolutism, against the sycophantic existence of the aristocracy and, in the case
of the French writers, against the dogmas of the Catholic Church.
Ethnological utopias speculated on diverse models of progressive socialization from a
‘state of nature’ culminating in an ‘Age of Commerce’ (Adam Smith), or in modern civil society
(Samuel Pufendorf). Natural histories of civil society developed an idea of a gradual progression
of at least a portion of humanity through comparisons between European and non-western
societies. Such narratives served to demarcate western achievements in science and technology,
in arts and culture, in short, civilization. This conjectural historiography not only reinforced the
superiority of the ‘Old World’ but justified and naturalized the extensive appropriation and
colonization of the ‘New World’ – as we have seen in Thomas More. A more relativist
representation of human nature and human values drew attention to fundamental geographical,
climatic and historical differences between peoples and cultures. Inside this framework, progress
and the concept of civilization itself were redefined as relative, not absolute. This is also where
utopia intersected with non-utopian historiographies of civil society and political economy and
literary genres such as the pastoral, and indeed became another stepping stone for contemporary
anthropology and political knowledge. Historical pessimism created utopias that idealized the
‘state of nature’ and defined society and civilization as progressive alienation from an original
good – they thus opposed Hobbes’s anti- social notion of the ‘natural’ man. Here utopia
promised the regeneration of society to its original state of innocence and peace.
The projection of utopian expectations and wishes onto the New World continued in the
eighteenth century. These utopias forwarded domestic, self-sufficient economies of production,
based on Native American economies, accompanied by the abolition of private property and
money within the utopian society. The fast-expanding geographical knowledge of the New
World put an important sub-genre of eighteenth-century fantastic voyage and utopias onto the
still-unknown Antipodes. As the essential upside down world, early representations of the
Antipodes projected the monstrous and the grotesque onto the continent and offered, in the
eighteenth century, an important new locus for the anti-utopian satire. By the second half of the
eighteenth century, Pacific explorations forced authors to review their dystopian projection.
Denis Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s ‘Voyage’ (1772) made a case for the mere,
genuine ways of a South Sea Island culture as reported by Bougainville, a French pathfinder. The
European lifestyle is undermined in comparison. Communal property represents the mainstay of
their philosophy, although there are given few details of law, economy and government.
The continent of Africa was less used in eighteenth-century utopian writings than in the
utopias of the nineteenth century. This was partly due to the lack of geographical knowledge and
exploration. However, Gabriel de Foigny’s La Terre Australe connue (1676) locates two of his
four utopian episodes in the kingdoms of Congo and Madagascar, Simon Berington’s The
Adventures of Sig. Gaudentio di Lucca (1737) sets his utopian city state in the centre of the
continent and the Pirate Commonwealth in the General History of the Pirates (1728, attributed to
Daniel Defoe) is located in Madagascar. A perhaps more ambivalent utopian resettlement project
was the relocation of former African slaves by the Sierra Leone Company in 1792. Three
colonies in Sierra Leone, Bulama and Port Jackson were devised as quasi-utopian ‘Provinces of
Freedom’ for former slaves. Furthermore, ‘the Blessings of Industry and Civilisation’ were to be
introduced into Africa, with a focus on profit and economics, and Freetown was eventually
renamed ‘A Town of Slavery’.
Eighteenth-century utopias might be collectively identified as showing a “poly-utopia’ or
‘critical utopia’. These texts oppose a plurality of social models in one text without offering one
satisfactory utopian solution. These poly-utopias are real critical utopias; meaning, they are
aware of the limitations of the classical utopian model and at the same time aspire to lively
utopia. Their structure is episodic and moves from philosophical exemplum to adjoin and debate
contrasting arguments about visions of utopia and human happiness.
More pessimistic and overtly anti-utopian is Swift’s satire “Gulliver’s Travels”
(published in1726 and revised in 1735), which echoes in some modes the formal characteristics
of More’s “Utopia”. Structured as an imaginary voyage with elements of the Robinsonade, the
first-person narrator travels through imaginary geographies and encounters very different
societies and people. “Gulliver’s Travels” sets up a complex antinomy between Gulliver, the
reader and eighteenth-century Europe. Although Swift’s book was a great and immediate success
with contemporaries who particularly enjoyed the unforgiving witty political satire, its careful
and sustained parody on Enlightenment philosophy and religion is probably more significant to
the reader. Ultimately, though, Swift’s construction of Gulliver as a myopic and unreliable
narrator has its greatest satirical design on the reader himself.
“Gulliver’s Travels” brings on the questions about the fault lines that developed during
the eighteenth century on thoughts of language, history, perfectibility and, indeed, utopianism
itself. Whilst Gulliver finds near-utopias in the Brobdingnagian and Houyhnhnm societies, Swift
concluded that human nature itself (including Gulliver’s) baffles the realization of any utopian
society. This becomes particularly visible in Book IV, often interpreted as the only true utopia
encountered by Gulliver. The society of the Houyhnhnms is based on the immutable principles
of ‘Temperance, Industry, Exercise, and Cleanliness’. But this homogenized, prelapsarian
paradise reveals itself ultimately as a system of mental and political slavery. The Houyhnhnms’
insistence on ‘the Perfection of Nature’ (which is indeed the etymology of their name) was to
parody and perhaps question the possibility of perfectibility in an Anglican or philosophical
reason.16 Like the critical utopia, Gulliver’s Travels identifies the paradoxical complexity of the
Enlightenment project and its fundamentally utopian nature. Swift’s satire determined a long
tradition of sequels, often termed Gulliveriana. The first response was by Abbe Pierre
Desfontaines, the French translator of Gulliver’s Travels, who published in 1730 “The New
Gulliver or John Gulliver’s Travels, the son of Captain Lemuel Gulliver” echo Swift’s anti-
utopian attitude. Whilst Thomas More started a powerful conversation about Utopia as ‘a very

16
David Womersley, ‘Dean Swift hears a Sermon: Robert Howard’s Ash Wednesday homily of 1725 and Gulliver’s
Travels ’, Times Literary Supplement (20 February 2009), 14–15.
good, or excellent, state of the commonwealth’, the eighteenth-century utopian satires declared
this conversation to be over.
The ‘individualistic’ utopias contain another strand of geographical utopias, the
Robinsonades, which prefigured the critical voyage utopias in their celebration of the self-
imposed exile or involuntary refuge from the world as the only place where true happiness,
contentment and self- fulfilment can be assured. It is thereby not surprising that Jean-Jacques
Rousseau celebrated Robinson Crusoe as a man in a ‘state of nature’ who lived a solitary life of
simple virtue. The Robinsonade is connected to the utopian satire and the imaginary voyage but
is essentially a genre in its own right. The main difference is that the ‘worldview implicit in the
English Robinsonade does not envisage the construction of a perfect world beginning from the
zero point of history (the state of nature)’.17 While Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” defined
the genre in 1719, other texts such as Henry Neville’s “The Isle of Pines” (1668) and Hendrik
Smeeks’s “The Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes” (1708) provided former models. Defoe’s
novel was likely influenced by the real-life castaway Alexander Selkirk, who was shipwrecked
for four years on the Chilean island Más a Tierra.
The eighteenth-century sensibility results in two paradoxically antithetical attitudes. On
the one hand, ‘sympathy’ binds human beings in a world of affectionate tenderness to one
another’s pleasures and sorrows. On the other hand, sentimentalism, a novelistic outcome of the
cult of sensibility, leads to the ‘individualist utopia’, which means the private return to nature,
the alternative micro-societies of Scott’s Millenium Hall , Rousseau’s Julie: ou, La nouvelle
Héloïse (1761) and Sarah Fielding’s David Simple.
If the relationship between utopia and the novel from the sixteenth to the nineteenth
century is not unchanging, it gets crucial in the present times. Actually, the anti-utopian novels of
the twentieth century are marked by the insertion of psychological reference, where the character
is described in his conflict with the totalitarian state system he resists. The crisis of the utopian
novel is followed by the end of the harmony between the individual and society, between the
individual and all the other individuals. Utopia introduces, starting from this antithesis between
the hero and the surrounding world, the main components of the novel: action, plot, the
development of a story which is no longer external to utopia but its very essence. In twentieth

17
Artur Blaim, Failed Dynamics: The English Robinsonade of the Eighteenth Century (Lublin: Uniwersytet Marii
Curie-Slktodowskiej, Wydział Humanistyczny, 1987 ), p. 134.
century anti-utopia the reader gets himself at once within utopia and the classical character of the
traveller becomes his critical inner self, and the jumpy centre of the narration is represented by is
the journal, like in Nineteen Eighty-Four or in We, which signals a new awareness of the
protagonists, and it is the sign of difference they endure, like in Brave New World, which make
them unlike any other character.
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is an alternative vision of England written in 1932. It
depicts a society which is trained through hypnotic conditioning methods and placated into a
satisfied stupefaction through mind-altering drugs. The community operates on the opinion that
the secret to happiness consists in liking what you have to do and conditioning aims at making
people like their implacable social destiny. There is a department which makes the poetry, songs,
and news for the citizens to enjoy, but these are stern, low imitations of real literature. Reading is
dismayed because it is a solitary activity and the society emphasizes social interaction at all
times. Conditioning is so intense and solid for all citizens and all they can do is behave as they
ought to. Reproduction takes place in machines and factories where embryos receive changeable
levels of nursing and diet according to which part of society they are foredoomed. Children are
raised in conditioning centers by a group of workers; the idea of “family” doesn’t exist. All
citizens live in their own private apartments, but they often amuse guests due to various social
requirements.
Written in 1921, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We presents a highly structured society with strict
programs assured for each citizen. A characteristic aspect of this community is that none of its
members consider themselves to be individuals, but they consider themselves to be just a part of
a greater cohesive whole, “nobody is ‘one,’ but ‘one of’”. The head of the government is a
mysterious individual called “the Benefactor”, who is the only instigator of change in this
community. He authorizes all books and controls the only newspaper, which are forms of
literature with little creativity or originality. The conditions in this novel regarding literature are
similar to those in Brave New World. The main character relates literature to dance. These two
novels have similarities in each theme, as the members of this community also live in individual
apartments, but these have glass walls and family life is also non-existent in this novel, and
social life is severely regimented, and “friends” are all but assigned.
Written in 1949, George Orwell’s classic, 1984, depicts the worst living conditions
portrayed, as the most basic of goods are not readily available, and the apartments in which the
citizens live suffer extensive impairment. This novel is similar to Brave New World and We in
that there is a great deal of reading material, but all of it has been made or dramatically altered by
the government. A unique aspect of Orwell’s novel is that the transformation to the body of
literature are ongoing; every time the government modifies its position on a topic, or switches
sides in the war, anything that was ever written and/or archived is destroyed and rewritten in
accordance to the new policies and attitudes. This creates an unceasing cycle of rewriting and
destroying out of date documents. Families are instruments of the government, whose only
purpose was to engender children for the service of the Party. Through various youth groups the
children have all been recruited as government spies. These children frequently report against
their parents and neighbours, and are then praised as heroes by the Party.
In the nineteenth century, the utopian tradition kept prospering in the appearance of
utopian socialism, and the cooperative movement. The nineteenth-century novel and utopian
romance became a fixed medium to popularize utopian political and economic convictions.
Likewise, a number of mutual chances were undertaken by Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon in
the form of held, usually short-lived, utopian communities intended to test the feasibility of a
fully cooperative society (as a converse to the Industrial Revolution). What the nineteenth
century learnt from its utopian predecessors was that, in the words of H. G. Wells, the ‘Modern
Utopia must be not static but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage
leading to a long ascent of stages.’18

18
H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1908) (London: J. M. Dent, 1998), p. 5.