ABSTRACT
James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana depicts an agrarian utopia with exhaustive details about voting procedures, taxation, and other such administrative components of a society. But it is the text’s use of wildly disparate document design that Harrington really presents his utopian vision. From varying types and type sizes to inconsistent spacing and blocking, Harrington’s Oceana constitutes what I call a “utopia of print,” i.e., a utopia of complete typographical freedom in its physical manifestation. Print historians and bibliographical scholars have largely ignored Harrington and his Oceana, and in this chapter, I demonstrate how Oceana’s form works in tandem with its content to create a textual utopia whose form and content reflect Harrington’s republican sympathies during the English Civil War. By examining Oceana alongside Foucault’s work on authorship and Lacan’s Real, this chapter demonstrates an impossible reading subjectivity that engenders a malleable reading experience.
