ABSTRACT
Utopiae Insulae Figura, an illustration included in the original 1516 publication of Thomas More's Utopia, depicts the form of More's fanciful but ideal nation-state. In this woodcut, Utopia's capital city, Amaurotum, is placed in a suitably central position, but even more prominent in the foregrounding is a ship at anchor, presumably the one that brought Raphael Hythlodaeus to the island. More's fictional Utopia establishes an ideal image of how social spaces are to be organized in a modern nation-state. Even more with the often maligned utopia, a word and concept that continues to need to be defended against those forces that militate in favour of the sociopolitical status quo, fantasy is freighted with a rather pejorative sense in modern criticism and theory. In theory and in practice, the alterity of fantasy makes possible new ways of seeing, and of interpreting and, perhaps, even changing, the world in which the authors actually live, for better and for worse.
