Utopian Episodes

Utopian Episodes PDF

Author: Seymour R. Kesten

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 1996-05-01

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9780815603818

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Decades before the communes of the sixties, nineteenth-century radicals set up isolated colonies where they hoped to insulate themselves from a corrupt mainstream America. Throughout the country, experimental utopian settlements promised to fulfill the lives of ordinary citizens through abundance, equality, and free education. Utopian Episodes tells why these early, freethinking rebels could never fully achieve their goals, but how their legacy has become an integral part of today's movement for social reform.

Max Nettlau’s Utopian Vision

Max Nettlau’s Utopian Vision PDF

Author:

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2023-04-11

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1785279173

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Max Nettlau’s Utopian Vision gives a historically grounded presentation of the entire literature of utopianism. Nettlau shows an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject. He passionately believes that the value of utopian thinking and class struggle should not be underestimated as utopian desire exists in all of us. Utopian thinking, according to Nettlau, stimulates the imagination and awakens the desire to attain a better life for everyone. Without it, human progress is impossible.

Utopian and Science Fiction by Women

Utopian and Science Fiction by Women PDF

Author: Jane L. Donawerth

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 1994-07-01

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780815626206

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This collection speaks to common themes and strategies in women's writing about their different worlds, from Margaret Cavendish's seventeenth-century Blazing World of the North Pole to the "men-less" islands of the French writer Scudery to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century utopias of Shelley and Gaskell, and science fiction pulps, finishing with the more contemporary feminist fictions of Le Guin, Wittig, Piercy, and Michison. It shows that these fictions historically speak to each other and together amount to a literary tradition of women's writing about a better place.

The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature

The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature PDF

Author: Gregory Claeys

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-08-05

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1139828428

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Since the publication of Thomas More's genre-defining work Utopia in 1516, the field of utopian literature has evolved into an ever-expanding domain. This Companion presents an extensive historical survey of the development of utopianism, from the publication of Utopia to today's dark and despairing tendency towards dystopian pessimism, epitomised by works such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Chapters address the difficult definition of the concept of utopia, and consider its relation to science fiction and other literary genres. The volume takes an innovative approach to the major themes predominating within the utopian and dystopian literary tradition, including feminism, romance and ecology, and explores in detail the vexed question of the purportedly 'western' nature of the concept of utopia. The reader is provided with a balanced overview of the evolution and current state of a long-standing, rich tradition of historical, political and literary scholarship.

Communal Utopias and the American Experience

Communal Utopias and the American Experience PDF

Author: Robert P. Sutton

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2004-02-28

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 0313039135

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This important study begins with America's first secular utopia at New Harmony in 1824 and traces successive utopian experiments in the United States through the following centuries. For the first time, readers will come to realize that American communalism is not a disjointed, erratic, almost ephemeral part of our past, but has been an on-going, essential part of American history. We have a communal utopian motif that sets the history of the United States apart from any other nation. The utopian communal story is just one other dimension of the Puritan concept that America was a city upon a hill, a beacon light to all the world where the perfect society could be built and could flourish. After discussing New Harmony and other Owenite communities, the author examines nine Fourierist utopias that were built before the Civil War. Next, he analyzes the five Icarian colonies that, collectively, were the longest-lived, non-religious communal experiments in American history. Then, discussion moves to the seven Gilded Age socialist cooperatives, followed by the utopian communities created during President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Finally, Sutton turns to the hippie colonies and intentional communities of the last half of the 20th century.

The Utopia Reader, Second Edition

The Utopia Reader, Second Edition PDF

Author: Gregory Claeys

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2017-02-14

Total Pages: 561

ISBN-13: 1479837075

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The Utopia Reader compiles primary texts from a variety of authors and movements in the history of theorizing utopias. Utopianism is defined as the various ways of imagining, creating, or analyzing the ways and means of creating an ideal or alternative society. Prominent writers and scholars across history have long explored how or why to envision different ways of life. The volume includes texts from classical Greek literature, the Old Testament, and Plato’s Republic, to Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and beyond. By balancing well-known and obscure examples, the text provides a comprehensive and definitive collection of the various ways Utopias have been conceived throughout history and how Utopian ideals have served as criticisms of existing sociocultural conditions. This new edition includes many historically well-known works, little known but influential texts, and contemporary writings, providing an even more expansive coverage of the varieties of approaches and responses to the concept of utopia in the past, present, and even the future. In particular, the volume now includes feminist writings and work by authors of color, and contends with current concerns, such as the exploration of the ecological ideals of Utopia. Furthermore, Claeys and Sargent highlight twenty-first century trends and popular narrative explorations of Utopias through the genres of young adult dystopias, survivalist dystopias, and non-print utopias. Covering a range of original theories of utopianism and revealing the nuances and concerns of writers across history as they attempt to envision different, ideal societies, The Utopia Reader is an essential resource for anyone who envisions a better future.

Pacific Pioneers

Pacific Pioneers PDF

Author: John E. Van Sant

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2019-06-30

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0252051955

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Shipwrecked sailors, samurai seeking a material and sometimes spiritual education, and laborers seeking to better their economic situation: these early Japanese travelers to the West occupy a little-known corner of Asian American studies. Pacific Pioneers profiles the first Japanese who resided in the United States or the Kingdom of Hawaii for a substantial period of time and the Westerners who influenced their experiences. Although Japanese immigrants did not start arriving in substantial numbers in the West until after 1880, in the previous thirty years a handful of key encounters helped shape relations between Japan and the United States. John E. Van Sant explores the motivations and accomplishments of these resourceful, sometimes visionary individuals who made important inroads into a culture quite different from their own and paved the way for the Issei and Nisei. Pacific Pioneers presents detailed biographical sketches of Japanese such as Joseph Heco, Niijima Jo, and the converts to the Brotherhood of the New Life and introduces the American benefactors, such as William Griffis, David Murray, and Thomas Lake Harris, who built relationships with their foreign visitors. Van Sant also examines the uneasy relations between Japanese laborers and sugar cane plantation magnates in Hawaii during this period and the shortlived Wakamatsu colony of Japanese tea and silk producers in California. A valuable addition to the literature, Pacific Pioneers brings to life a cast of colorful, long-forgotten characters while forging a critical link between Asian and Asian American studies.

A Socialist Utopia in the New South

A Socialist Utopia in the New South PDF

Author: William Fitzhugh Brundage

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780252065484

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"A definitive account of the Ruskin colonies and of their place in the larger social radical strivings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. . . . Well written and solidly researched, it gives us an understanding of an important quest for heaven on earth." -- Edward K. Spann, author of Brotherly Tomorrows: Movements for a Cooperative Society in America, 1820-1920 This first book-length study of the Ruskin colonies shows how several hundred utopian socialists gathered as a cooperative community in Tennessee and Georgia in the late nineteenth century. The communitarians' noble but fatally flawed act of social endeavor revealed the courage and desperation they felt as they searched for alternatives to the chaotic and competitive individualism of the age of robber barons and for a viable model for a just and humane society at a time of profound uncertainty about public life in the United States.

Feminist Utopian Novels of the 1970s

Feminist Utopian Novels of the 1970s PDF

Author: Tatiana Teslenko

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2003-08-19

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1135885176

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This book presents an exploration of the reinvented utopia that provided second-wave feminists of the 1970s with a conceptual space to articulate the politics of change. Tatiana Teslenko argues that utopian fiction of this decade offered a means of validating the personal as well as the political, and of criticizing a patriarchal social order. Teslenko reveals feminists' attempt through fiction to envision a new political order.

The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More's Utopia

The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More's Utopia PDF

Author:

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-11-30

Total Pages: 817

ISBN-13: 0198881037

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Thomas More's Utopia is one of the most iconic, translated, and influential texts of the European Renaissance. This Handbook of specially commissioned and original essays brings together for the first time three different ways of thinking about the book: in terms of its renaissance contexts, its vernacular translations, and its utopian legacies. It has been developed to allow readers to consider these different facets of Utopia in relation to each other and to provide fresh and original contributions to our understanding of the book's creation, vernacularization, and afterlives. In so doing, it provides an integrated overview of More's text, as well as new contributions to the range of scholarship and debates that Utopia continues to attract. An especially innovative feature is that it allows readers to follow Utopia across time and place, unpacking the often-revolutionary moments that encouraged its translation by new generations of writers as far afield as France, Russia, Japan, and China. The Handbook is organized in four sections: on different aspects of the origins and contexts of Utopia in the 1510s; on histories of its translation into different vernaculars in the early modern and modern eras; and on various manifestations of utopianism up to the present day. The Handbook's Introduction outlines the biography of More, the key strands of interpretation and criticism relating to the text, the structure of the Handbook, and some of its recurring themes and issues. An appendix provides an overview of Utopia for readers new to the text.