ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the literary Utopias of early modern Europe, focusing mainly on Thomas More’s Utopia (1516-17) and dealing briefly with Tommasso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1623) and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1629). All three authors set their narratives in distant geographical sites, and More and Campanella use the device of presenting their narratives as tales heard from fictional others, while Bacon tells the story of a sea voyage from Peru to China in the first person plural, echoing the convention of the genre of travellers’ tales. Distancing allows a criticality which might in a more overt form have endangered the writer’s liberty. It also allows a distinct, imaginative realm to emerge in which to construct a counter-image of the reality of the writer’s own society. Yet the distancing of a utopian world from reality separates the ideal from the real, and this in time becomes a convention in which the utopian world is viewed as unattainable except in literary texts or visionary dreams. In reality, there was a parallel current of millenarianism and popular insurrection seeking to proclaim a new world in the here and now; so utopian ideals ironically become the reassuring foil to social rupture, in that the idea of a better world is set in a not-to-be-attained future that in turn tends, as a lost Eden or Arcadia, to be based upon the ideal of a remote and unknown place. This shift occurs over the modern period as a whole but appears inherent in the critical distancing that is a key characteristic of More’s text; it is a flaw that haunts the whole history of the utopian imagination and begins in what can reasonably be claimed as its foundational text, Utopia.
