Search

This collection addresses the ways in which the contributors approach their study of the objects and practices of utopianism (understood as social anticipations and visions produced through texts and social experiments) and of how, in turn, those objects and practices have shaped their intellectual work and research perspectives.

"A.L. Morton's classic 1952 study of utopias in the context of British social history constitutes one of the earliest sustained engagements with the social and ideological sources of the utopian imagination, the transformation of its function, content and direction in different historical moments, the importance of the class struggle for literary production and of literary production for cultural, if not political hegemony. Traversing English literary history from the medieval poem on the Land of Cockaygne to Sir Thomas More and his Puritan revisions in the seventeenth century, to Defoe's and Swift's paradigmatic adaptations of utopian and dystopian themes and from thence to William Morris's towering achievement in News from Nowhere and the subsequent decline of the genre and the eventual rise of anti-utopian and dystopian strains in the early twentieth century, The English Utopia remains provocative and critically engaging more than seventy years after its original publication, testifying to the vitality of British Marxist Literary Criticism from its earliest inception. In addition to charting its significance as an intervention, the present edition also brings to light Morton's complex role as Left political activist, historian, scholarly catalyst and cultural critic-a paradigmatic instance of the engaged and public intellectual"--

A year in the life of an eight year old girl who lives in New York.