The early modern period was not only an age of discoveries, in which Europeans became aware of a whole “new world” in the Americas, it was also an age of imagining better worlds – an age of utopian fiction. While the twenty-first century has been rather sceptical about utopian thinking in the face of overwhelming global challenges such as climate change and shortage of resources, the early moderns vividly imagined and desperately hoped for better worlds. They dreamt of worlds in which tyrants and warmongers would be brought to heel, where God would be worshiped purely and without idolatry, and where humanist learning and eloquence would overcome ignorance and superstition. Some of their visions did indeed come true – but the outcome rarely ever met their expectations. When Thomas More coined the term ‘utopia’ in 1516 in order to describe an ideal commonwealth, he captured this fundamental ambivalence of utopian thinking with a characteristic pun: ’utopia’ means ‘good place’ (gr. eu-topos) – but also ‘no place’ (gr. ou-topos). Can perfect worlds and societies ever exist? And what price is to be paid for attempting to bring them into being?
In this lecture, we will consider such questions in utopian prose fiction from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) over Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World (1666) and others up to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). We will also read drama that engages with utopian ideas, such as William Shakespeare’s Tempest (c. 1611), as well as poetry, e.g. selections from John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). Topics to be discussed in more detail include the relationship between utopian writing and other genres and modes of writing such as travel writing and satire, the relationship between utopian writing and early colonialism, or utopian writing as a form of social and political critique and philosophical speculation more generally.
- Enseignant·e: Kilian Markus Schindler