Shape of Utopia

Robert C. Elliott (1914-1981) was a Professor of English Literature and one of the founders of the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego. He received his PhD from Brown University, and taught at Ohio State University from 1946-1964. He was also the author of The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (1960) and The Literary Persona (1982).Phillip E. Wegner is the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar in the Department of English at the University of Florida, and the President of the Society for Utopian Studies. He received his PhD from the Literature Program at Duke University. He is the author of Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (2002), Life Between Two Deaths, 1989-2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties (2009), and the forthcoming Ralahine volume Ontologies of the Possible: Utopia, Science Fiction and Globalization.

• Contents: Saturnalia, Satire, & Utopia – The Shape of Utopia – Swift’s Utopias – Hawthorne and Utopia: The Blithedale Romance – The Fear of Utopia – Aesthetics of Utopia – Anti-Anti-Utopia: Walden Two and Island.

«In 1970, Robert C. Elliott wrote, ‘the theme of utopia no longer engages the imagination. … Utopia is a bad word today not because we despair of being able to achieve it but because we fear it.’ His groundbreaking study, ‘The Shape of Utopia’, confronted this fear of utopia eloquently. A still challenging and important study of the formalistic, literary and anthropological aspects of utopia, it has now been reissued with a thoughtful Introduction by Phillip E. Wegner and a wonderful tribute by Kim Stanley Robinson. Elliott influenced scholars and thinkers such as Darko Suvin, Fredric Jameson, Louis Marin and Tom Moylan and it is timely to confront our fear of utopia again under the guidance of Elliott.» (Nicole Pohl, Reader in the Department of English Literature and Modern Languages at Oxford Brookes University and General Editor of ‘Utopian Studies’)«The originality of Elliott’s book on Utopia lay not only in its unsurpassed generic placement of such texts (their structural opposition to the satiric curse), but also in situating the fear of Utopias at the center of analysis, along with the centrality of Utopian aesthetics. Future Utopias will raise new problems and develop new answers, but they will always contain within themselves the origins Elliott so ably dramatizes here.» (Fredric Jameson, Professor in the Program in Literature at Duke University, author of ‘Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions,’ 2005, and, most recently, ‘Representing Capital’, 2011).