Utopia

Ideal societies, better worlds, more just and peaceful ways of living: these have long been the stuff of human beings' social dreaming. In this compact volume, two leading scholars from different disciplines join to consider the life of utopian imagining within the frame of literature and politics. Duncan Bell, a political scientist and intellectual historian, opens the book with a critical overview of the Anglophone utopian tradition and a fresh definition of utopia. He then shows how the threat of technological annihilation, and the promise of transcendence of human limitations, has shaped utopian and dystopian writing of the last hundred years. Douglas Mao, a scholar of literature, begins the second part of the book by delving into utopian literature's vexed relation to sentimental feeling, especially as this is signalled by speculation on how inhabitants of utopia themselves would read literary works. He then shows how utopian writing's orientation to problem-solving puts it into surprising relation with both politics and literature in general. An interview in which the two authors compare their methods and conclusions closes out the book.

Duncan Bell is Professor of Political Thought and International Relations at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Christ's College. He is Co-Director of the Cambridge Centre for Political Thought, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His most recent monograph is Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America (Princeton UP, 2020). Douglas Mao is Russ Family Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent monograph is Inventions of Nemesis: Utopia, Indignation, and Justice (Princeton UP, 2020). A former president of the Modernist Studies Association, he has held a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and currently serves as editor of Hopkins Studies in Modernism, a book series from Johns Hopkins University Press.