ABSTRACT
The city in modernity has the potential to solicit latent desires and energies that dilate the activity of consciousness and exceed any limited experience of the self. This chapter argues many utopian representations of the city thus amplify or maximize these underlying potentialities with a view to extending dynamic new forms of community. The utopias of the early nineteenth century are explicitly linked to the new conditions created by industrial revolution and mass society and thus the focus of the first chapter of this study is the literary production of the Saint-Simonians. Saint-Simonianism provides a privileged point of departure for this study, given its impact on social and political discourse and in view of the exploration by writers belonging to this movement of a poetic vision animated by the latent technological, associative and other possibilities of the modern city. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
