ABSTRACT
The literary genre of utopia is over 500 years old, first emerging with Sir Thomas More’s eponymous work in 1516 and evolving from there into countless forms. The earliest examples of utopian literature in the Americas appeared during the colonial period, as European settlers and conquerors crafted narratives that established the surrounding landscape as a source of wonderment while simultaneously writing their stories “as a cognitive process of familiarization with an unknown setting”. Dystopia crawled out of the grave of enlightenment and rationality, reminding that structural problems always existed in utopia’s reliance on organization and centralized authority, particularly as these fictions became familiar realities. The flaws within this novel and its exploration of the problem of technologically-mediated bodies signals how utopian fiction towards the end of the century remained unsteadily poised between the promise of progress and the return of the very structures the genre was supposedly dismantling.
