Narrating Utopia Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature

Utopian societies exhibit a variety of ways of organizing the financial, political and emotional relationships between people. For all this diversity, however, one thing that exhibits far less variation is the story, the framing narrative that accounts for how the narrator reaches the more perfect society and obtains the opportunity to witness its distinctive excellences.Narrating Utopiais about that story, the curious hybrid of the traveler's tale and the classical dialogue that emerges in the Renaissance, but whose outlines remain clearly apparent even in some of the most recent utopian writing. "... a well-written and worthy addition to the filed of utopian studies."SFRA Review

Chris Ferns is Associate Professor of English at Mount Saint Vincent University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia.