DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England

Robert Appelbaum author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:12th Aug '10

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England cover

Appelbaum surveys the utopian imagination in literature from 1603 to the 1660s.

Appelbaum surveys literature from 1603 to the 1660s and shows how its ideal politics was engaged in the reality of political and social struggle. This study will interest political and cultural historians, literary critics and social theorists.Hundreds of writers in the English-speaking world of the seventeenth-century imagined alternative 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 modernity during a century of political and intellectual upheaval.

Review of the hardback: '… thoughtful and scholarly study … Breadth of texts distinguishes Appelbaum's work from earlier scholars of utopia …'. Literature & History

ISBN: 9780521009157

Dimensions: 228mm x 153mm x 17mm

Weight: 440g

270 pages