Three Early Modern Utopias is a book edited by Susan Bruce. Released in 1999, it collects three utopian tales from before the eighteenth century.
Works within[]
Included within is an introduction by editor Susan Bruce which provides a basis for what an "early modern utopia" is and adds context to the three stories within it.
Publisher's summary[]
With the publication of Utopia (1516), Thomas More provided a scathing analysis of the shortcomings of his own society, a realistic suggestion for an alternative mode of social organization, and a satire on unrealistic idealism. Enormously influential, it remains a challenging as well as a playful text. This edition reprints Ralph Robinson's 1556 translation from More's original Latin together with letters and illustrations that accompanied early editions of Utopia.
This edition also includes two other, hitherto less accessible, utopian narratives. New Atlantis (1627) offers a fictional illustration of Francis Bacon's visionary ideal of the role that science should play in the modern society. Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines (1668), a precursor of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, engages with some of the sexual, racial, and colonialist anxieties of the end of the early modern period.
Bringing together these three New World texts, and situating them in a wider Renaissance context, this edition - which includes letters, maps, and alphabets that accompanied early editions - illustrates the diversity of the early modern utopian imagination, as well as the different purposes to which it could be put.
See also[]
- An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction
- An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Writing
- The Tempest by William Shakespeare
- The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish