Editorial Reviews
Book Description
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.
Three Early Modern Utopias: Thomas More: Utopia / Francis Bacon: New Atlantis / Henry Neville: The Isle of Pines (Oxford World's Classics),Thomas More,Francis Bacon,Henry Neville,Susan Bruce,Oxford University Press, USA,0192838857,General,History & Theory - General,History & Theory - Radical Thought,Literary Criticism,Literature - Classics / Criticism,Political Ideologies - Communism & Socialism,Politics/International Relations,Utopias,16th to 18th century fiction,Constitution: government & the state,English,Novels, other prose & writers: 16th to 18th centuries,Philosophy / Political,Philosophy | Political
Books Info:
Recommended Books