Title: Utopia : an elusive vision /
Authors: Fox, Alistair.
Publisher: Twayne Publishers,
Year: 1993
Subjects: More, Thomas,; More, Thomas,
Abstract: Thomas More's Utopia remains indisputably the most potent work in the genre of writing that it initiated and in fact named. Since it was published in 1516 - in a Tudor-ruled England responding to the wave of humanist thought sweeping across Europe - this fantasy voyage has inspired centuries of social reformers, who have embraced More's fiction as a realistic blueprint for a new, ideal society. On the literary side, writers from Jonathan Swift to George Orwell have plied the genre More invented, and yet none has arrived at a conclusion more prophetic than the original: that the dogged quest for an imagined ideal generates doubt that this ideal would be as attractive in practice as in theory, and that, given what we know of human nature, such an ideal could ever be implemented.
Contents: Humanism and reform -- The importance of the work -- Critical reception -- Approaching Utopia -- "O sacred society!" : the eutopia within book 2 -- Incursions of doubt : irony and satire in book 2 -- Confidence restored : religious faith in Utopia -- More's dilemma : the context and argument of book 1 -- "Si quid sit in ambiguo" : the inconclusiveness of Utopia -- More's equivocal masterpiece.