Utopia and Its Discontents: Plato to Atwood

Utopia and Its Discontents traces literary representations of ideal communities from Plato to the 21st century. Each chapter offers close readings of key utopian and anti-utopian texts to demonstrate how they construct, challenge and explore the ideas and forms of earlier utopian writings and the social and political ideals of their own periods. In this original and insightful study, Sebastian Mitchell demonstrates how literary utopias are often as much about the past as they are about the present and the future. Utopia and Its Discontents concludes by arguing against the idea that the utopian has been eclipsed by the dystopian in contemporary culture. Topics covered include: - Early political and philosophical authors, such as Plato and Thomas More - Literary works, from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four - Speculative-fiction writers such as H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley and Margaret Atwood - Ecological and feminist texts by Ernest Callenbach, Ursula Le Guin and Marge Piercy - Twenty-first century utopianism This is an essential study for scholars and students of utopian literature.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Plato versus Plato: Art and Idealism 2. Oxymorus: Thomas More and Utopia 3. Hippophilia: Swift, Kant and Eighteenth-Century Utopia 4. The Machine Age: Carlyle to Morris 5. English Triptych: Wells, Huxley, Orwell 6. Post-Utopia: America in the 70s 7. Atwood's Scar; or, the Origins of Ustopia Conclusion: The Utopian Prospect Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Sebastian Mitchell is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at University of Birmingham, UK. His publications include Visions of Britain, 1730-1830: Anglo-Scottish Writing and Representation (2013).

Review :
Sharp, committed, and compelling ... a welcome addition to the syllabus of a course on utopian fiction. [A] rich and engaging study of utopian literature which brings the texts into dialogue with one another in new and productive ways. Utopia and Its Discontents will be essential and rewarding reading not only for scholars and students of utopian literature, but for any reader looking towards utopia, in all its many manifestations, in a dystopian age. This is a readable but penetrating survey of the main trends in utopian literature from the ancients to the present. Mitchell engages enthusiastically with both the key utopian literary writers and the more intractable and ambiguous contributors to the tradition - the "discontents", some satirists, like Swift, some dystopians. Many of these are conceived as engaging with Plato above all; the tradition itself is glued together by Platonism. Mitchell writes with sympathy as well as authority about its leading authors. The main literary thinkers are all assessed, and there are some unusual but welcome guest appearances in the cast of characters too, notably by Thomas Carlyle, whose Past and Present has remained a long-neglected contribution to utopian ideas. Mitchell controversially suggests that a close proximity exists between utopian and dystopian modes of thought, but modern readers have increasingly warmed to this once-provocative notion. Yet to Mitchell the literary concept still has life and an enchantment about it which still enjoins new generations of readers to reconsider its implications. This is a thoughtful and welcome addition to utopian scholarship. Utopia and its Discontents is a thoughtful and lucid trans-historical study of literary utopianism from Plato to Margaret Atwood. It successfully explores the formal and generic aesthetics of literary utopias in a variety of case studies of prominent writers. The author reminds us that despite the dystopian turn of the twentieth and twenty-first century, the literary utopian 'expressiveness' is still going strong, if in varied and complex new forms. From Plato’s Republic to Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, literary and philosophical visions of the good society have wrestled with the relationship between utopian dream and authoritarian control. Dystopian narratives might be popular right now but, as Mitchell insists in Utopia and Its Discontents, utopia is far from an abandoned mode of literary representation – indeed, it remains a vital imaginative resource in the 21st century.