1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910817846203321

Autore

Hogan Sarah (Professor of English)

Titolo

Other Englands : utopia, capital, and empire in an age of transition / / Sarah Hogan

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Stanford, California : , : Stanford University Press, , 2018

ISBN

1-5036-0613-9

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (269 pages)

Disciplina

823.009/372

Soggetti

Utopias - England - History - 16th century

Utopias - England - History - 17th century

English fiction - Early modern, 1500-1700 - History and criticism

Utopias in literature

Imperialism in literature

Capitalism in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION: ORIGIN STORIES -- CHAPTER 1. THOMAS MORE’S “PENINSULA MADE AN ISLAND” -- CHAPTER 2. UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT IN BACON’S NEW ATLANTIS -- CHAPTER 3. UTOPIA, IRELAND, AND THE TUDOR SHOCK DOCTRINE -- CHAPTER 4. DISPOSSESSION AND WOMEN’S POETRY OF PLACE -- CHAPTER 5. REFORMING UTOPIA IN MACARIA AND AREOPAGITICA -- CONCLUSION -- NOTES -- INDEX

Sommario/riassunto

Other Englands examines the rise of the early English utopia in the context of emergent capitalism. Above all, it asserts that this literary genre was always already an expression of social crisis and economic transition, a context refracted in the origin stories and imagined geographies common to its early modern form. Beginning with the paradigmatic popular utopias of Thomas More and Francis Bacon but attentive to non-canonical examples from the margins of the tradition, the study charts a shifting and, by the time of the English Revolution, self-critical effort to think communities in dynamic socio-spatial forms. Arguing that early utopias have been widely misunderstood and maligned as static, finished polities, Sarah Hogan makes the case that



utopian literature offered readers and writers a transformational and transitional social imaginary. She shows how a genre associated with imagining systemic alternatives both contested and contributed to the ideological construction of capitalist imperialism. In the early English utopia, she finds both a precursor to the Enlightenment discourse of political economy and another historical perspective on the beginnings and enduring conflicts of global capital.