LITR 4632: Literature of the Future     

University of Houston-Clear Lake

Utopian Literature & Communities

The word “utopia” comes from the title of Sir Thomas More’s utopian novel / tract of 1512, Utopia.  The word is made up of Greek parts, formed either from ou (no) + topos (place, as in “topography”) to mean “no place,” or from eu (good, as in “euphoria”) + topos (place) to mean “good place.”

In late 20th-century popular or scholarly usage, the word “utopia” may be used in several ways:

·        “Utopia” may refer to an actual or historical community in which participants agree to particular rules or modes of behavior that distinguish them from everyday society and are designed to promote greater happiness, fulfillment, or harmony between humans and their environment. (see list of examples below) Some scholars call actual instances "Intentional Communities."

·        “Utopia” and especially the adjective “utopian” may describe visionary political attempts to improve or reform society.  Usually such usage is negative or contemptuous.  For instance, slogans associated with a leftist like Hillary Clinton such as “It takes a village [to raise a child]” may be criticized by right-wingers like Rush Limbaugh as “utopian,” meaning “hopelessly impractical.”

·        A “utopia” may also describe a novel or a non-fiction book or essay describing an ideal or planned community or the adventures of a person within one.

 

Famous historical utopias in American history:

Puritan settlement of Boston (1600s): often seen as utopian in purpose, as the Puritans aimed to create a model society that Europe would observe and imitate.

Shaker Communities (1800s, early 1900s); celibate lifestyle, dignity of labor, “simple gifts”; celibacy practiced because Shakers thought they were the last generation before the Apocalypse; thus only a few Shakers are left.

Brook Farm (1840s): “Transcendentalist” community outside Boston; attempted to reconcile intellect and labor, later remodeled on principles of Fourier.  Attended by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, R. W. Emerson

Oneida Community (mid-1800s): "complex marriage" community in New York state; eventually became corporation marketing Oneida silverware & stainless

Twin Oaks in Virginia (1960s—present), functions partly on behavioral principles outlined in B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two

*Cult compounds such as the Branch Davidians in Waco, TX, or survivalist or militia compounds like those in the Pacific Northwest, Idaho, and Montana, are analogous to utopian communities, but are usually not considered utopian.  Why not?  They are usually isolated and hostile to the rest of the world rather than serving as a model for the larger society; they react against social trends rather than trying to reform them; or they are seen as “charismatic cults,” centering less around ideas than around the leadership of a charismatic figure.

Utopian texts (fiction and nonfiction, sometimes both)

Genesis (“Eden”); Revelation (Heaven)

Plato, The Republic; Laws (ca. 375 BCE)

St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei (The City of God)  (413-426)

Sir Thomas More, Utopia (1516)

Campanella, The City of the Sun (1602)

Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis (1627)

James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656)

Daniel Defoe, Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719)

Charles Fourier, Theory of the Four Movements (1808)

James Fenimore Cooper, The Crater (1847)

Etiene Cabet, Voyage in Icaria (1840)

Bulwer Lytton, The Coming Race (1871)

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872)

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887  (1888)

William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890)

William Dean Howells, A Traveller from Altruria (1892-3); Through the Eye of the Needle (1907)

Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan (1904)

H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1909); The World Set Free (1914)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1915)

Eugene Zamiatin, We (1920)

James Hilton, Lost Horizon (1933) (i. e., Shangri-La)

B. F. Skinner, Walden Two (1948):

Aldous Huxley, Island (1962)

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974); Always Coming Home (1985)

Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia (1975)

Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)

Iain M. Banks, The Culture Series (Consider Phlebas , The Player of Games , The State of the Art , Look to Windward)

 

Dystopias or satirical utopias

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels 1727

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (1852) (based partly on Hawthorne’s brief stay at Brook Farm in the 1840s)

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945)

William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954)

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932); Brave New World Revisited (1958)

Ayn Rand, Anthem (1937, 1946)

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1984)

 

 

Northrop Frye, "Varieties of Literary Utopias." Utopias and Utopian Thought, ed. Frank E. Manuel (Cambridge: Riverside, 1966). 25-49.

27-28 Since More, utopias have appeared regularly but sporadically in literature, with a great increase around the close of the nineteenth century.  This later vogue clearly had much to do with the distrust and dismay aroused by extreme laissez-faire versions of capitalism, which were thought of as manifestations of anarchy. . . .

            Naturally, since the Industrial Revolution a serious utopia can hardly avoid introducing technological themes.  And because technology is progressive, getting to the utopia has tended increasingly to be a journey in time rather than space, a vision of the future and not of a society located in some isolated spot on the globe (or outside it: journeys to the moon are a very old form of fiction, and some of them are utopian).

 

28 two kinds of utopian romance: the straight utopia, which visualizes a world-state assumed to be ideal, or at least ideal in comparison with what we have, and the utopian satire or parody, which presents the same kind of social goal in terms of slavery, tyranny, or anarchy.

 

29 In the literature of the democracies today we notice that utopian satire is very prominent (Golding's Lord of the Flies) but that there is something of a paralysis of utopian thought and imagination.  We can hardly understand this unless we realize the extent to which it is the result of a repudiation of Communism.  In the U. S. particularly the attitude toward a definite social ideal as a planned goal is anti-utopian . . . .