Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England

Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England

by: Robert Appelbaum (Author) › Visit Amazon’s Robert Appelbaum Page See search results for this author Robert Appelbaum (Author)

Publisher: Cambridge University Press; Illustrated edition (4 April 2002)

Language: English

Print length: 270 pages

ISBN-10: 0521810825

ISBN-13: 9780521810821

Book Description

Hundreds of writers in the English-speaking world of the seventeenth-century imagined alteative ideal societies. Sometimes they did so by exploring fanciful territories, such as the world in the moon or the nations of the Antipodes; but sometimes they composed serious disquisitions about the here and now, proposing how England or its nascent colonies could be conceived of as an ‘Oceana,’ or a New Jerusalem. This book provides a comprehensive view of the operations of the utopian imagination in literature from 1603 to the 1660s. Appealing to social theorists, literary critics, and political and cultural historians, this volume revises prevailing notions of the languages of hope and social dreaming in the making of British modeity during a century of political and intellectual upheaval.