Introduction

Utopia is generally considered a fictional literary genre, a perspective the author would like to disturb. She would like to disturb it particularly as concerns early modern utopia, specifically in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, because utopia in this time period will not be so easily confined. Early modern utopia, by contrast, whether in its applied or fictional guises, tends to be a prescriptive society—it is a social organization as well as a "place"—bounded by rules that strictly govern the lives of its citizens. Early modern utopia illustrates the dynamic described by Williams in using forms having their own histories with respect to filling specific sociocultural niches, and recognized as such by their audiences. As Williams says, "Forms are thus common property, to be sure with differences of degree, of writers and audiences or readers, before any communicative composition can occur."