The Shape of Utopia

«In 1970, Robert C. Elliott wrote, ‘the theme of utopia no longer engages the imagination. … Utopia is a bad word today not because we despair of being able to achieve it but because we fear it.’ His groundbreaking study, ‘The Shape of Utopia’, confronted this fear of utopia eloquently. A still challenging and important study of the formalistic, literary and anthropological aspects of utopia, it has now been reissued with a thoughtful Introduction by Phillip E. Wegner and a wonderful tribute by Kim Stanley Robinson. Elliott influenced scholars and thinkers such as Darko Suvin, Fredric Jameson, Louis Marin and Tom Moylan and it is timely to confront our fear of utopia again under the guidance of Elliott.» (Nicole Pohl, Reader in the Department of English Literature and Modern Languages at Oxford Brookes University and General Editor of ‘Utopian Studies’)
«The originality of Elliott’s book on Utopia lay not only in its unsurpassed generic placement of such texts (their structural opposition to the satiric curse), but also in situating the fear of Utopias at the center of analysis, along with the centrality of Utopian aesthetics. Future Utopias will raise new problems and develop new answers, but they will always contain within themselves the origins Elliott so ably dramatizes here.» (Fredric Jameson, Professor in the Program in Literature at Duke University, author of ‘Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions,’ 2005, and, most recently, ‘Representing Capital’, 2011).