Feigned Commonwealths

In this work, Hugh Jenkins seeks to retrieve from early modern texts a utopian vision of community - and cites Karl Marx, Christopher Hill and Raymond Williams as explanatory authorities. He argues that however congealed or residual the ideology of communality and charitable festivity may seem in the work of Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, Andrew Marvel, Aemilia Lanyer and Anne Finch, one would be short-sighted not to recognize in their efforts the value of their feigning, at least, some sense of ideal community. Jenkins advises readers to consider these country-house poems, along with Milton's Comus and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, as documents of the exploitation of labour - barbarism - and of the magical resolution of social conflict - utopian desire.