ABSTRACT
It has been widely acknowledged, since Ernst Bloch identified a utopian impulse in phenomena as widely varied as religious and philosophical tracts, daydreams and high art and advertisements, that Thomas More in 1516 named both a new genre and an ancient instinct. That a special issue of Green Letters should be dedicated to exploring the way the kind of dreaming known as the utopian imaginary intersects with environmental concerns should come as no surprise. This is especially so because, in an era of looming ecological crisis, the inability of governments worldwide to change business as usual stands as an enormous failure of resolve. It is up to the artists – in this case authors – to imagine forwards new ways of being that respond to an issue so great it potentially threatens to compromise the ability of life to flourish on this planet. And it is up to critics, scholars, writers and thinkers everywhere to consider these possibilities, their complexities and built-in conflicts, and the sociopolitical and environmental contexts within which such experiments may be supported or condemned. It is because creative and critical thinkers must work together on this issue that the idea of the critical utopia, coined by Tom Moylan in response to fiction of the 1970s, has become so ingrained in the common argot and emerges so often in this special issue. Here was a new development in the genre that combined self-reflexivity and multiple perspectives within its dreaming, representing the postmodern spirit in its most regenerative aspect.
