ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses utopia as a literary genre, a set of political practices, and a psychological impulse. It traces the history of the concept in the English-speaking world from the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516 to the present day, paying particular attention to the ways in which the literary and extra-literary manifestations of utopia—including socialism, Marxism, and eugenics—have influenced one another across its long history. It discusses at length the rise of dystopia and the difficulty of disentangling dystopia from utopia, and highlights the many, perhaps inherent, negative aspects of utopian programs, particularly in the wake of degeneration discourse in the nineteenth century and totalitarianism in the twentieth. It focuses on English-language utopias published since the publication of Thomas More’s inaugural text, Utopia , and occasionally gestures toward utopias in other languages and cultures. Rather than attempting to artificially separate the literary, the pragmatic, and the theoretical, it sketches a historical overview that describes the relationship among all three utopian registers before turning to a consideration of where utopia is today.
