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The Epistemology of Utopia: Rhetoric, Theory and Imagination
Author(s): Jorge Bastos da Silva (Author, Editor)
- Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
- Publication Date: 6 Jun. 2013
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 235 pages
- ISBN-10: 1443846252
- ISBN-13: 9781443846257
Book Description
The emergence of Utopian Studies as a dynamic field of inquiry situated at the crossroads of several disciplines is a striking development of the past few decades. It is symptomatic of a general trend towards the overcoming of epistemological and institutional boundaries, and has borne fruit in a number of ways. The traditions of utopianism have come to be valued as an important nurturing of possibilities, devoted to the critique and the transformation of the world. By undertaking the critical interrogation of the given, utopia is a figure not only of inversion, but of transcendence and fulfilment. The present volume takes into account the international development of Utopian Studies in recent decades. Its aim is to provide critical revisions (revisitings) of the assumptions and methods of the discipline through a set of theoretically-informed essays that focus on a number of different manifestations of utopianism. The topics covered range from Plato’s Republic and More’s Utopia to modern-day cosmopolitics, “glocalization”, and the intersections of fiction with esotericism and science.
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Jorge Bastos da Silva teaches in the Department of Anglo-American Studies, University of Porto. His main fields of research are English literature and culture, utopian studies, and intellectual history. He has authored books on utopianism, on the literature of the long eighteenth century and Romanticism in England, and on the reception of Shakespeare in Portuguese Romanticism. He has also edited several collections of essays, mostly on utopias and on the British Augustan Age.
