ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relationship between myth and utopia should in practice be kept separate from belated ideological interpretations, in order to measure fully the literary specificity of the utopian genre and the complex relationship which links it to a particular mythical structure. To the extent that Utopia converges with myth, it is primarily in the sense current today that sees myth as an idealized representation of a state of humankind, either in the past or in a fictional future. America, long the miraculously preserved continent seen as the location predestined for all utopias until the last century, is the very place where the end of positive and culturalist utopias is portrayed. Bradbury's counter-utopia proclaims the impossibility of all culturalist and humanist utopias in a world in which books are no longer consumed by their readers but by flames.
