Bruce S. (Ed.) Three Early Modern Utopias: Thomas More: Utopia; Francis Bacon: New Atlantis; Henry Neville: The Isle of Pines

Oxford University Press, 1999. — 258 p. — ISBN 9780192838858, 0192838857.Utopias have existed almost since the beginnings of literature, but some eras have produced more utopian literature than others. The early modern period was one such time. The geographical and scientific discoveries of the age, as well as its profound social conflicts, provided a context in which the fusion of ideas about the ideal with representations of «other» fictitious communities became a natural mode of conceiving how things might be different in a world elsewhere. But early modern utopias rarely offered «simple» solutions to the problems that they confronted. Their writers frequently offered representations of other worlds not in order to answer questions about the social, cultural, and political mores of their own times, but rather to raise the issues in their readers’ minds. In other words very few early modern utopias are merely blueprints for ideal societies: their meanings emerge only through the juxtaposition of the utopia represented with the writer’s own world. In different ways this is true of all three of the utopias reprinted in this volume: Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), which addresses the social problems of early sixteenth-century England; Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), which foregrounds England’s shortcomings in the nurture of scientific endeavour; and Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines (1668), which engages with issues of colonialism and sexual propriety.
These three texts illustrate the range of the utopian imagination in the early modern period, and the different uses to which it could be put.Acknowledgements.
Note on the Texts.
Select Bibliography.
Chronologies of the Authors.
Thomas More. Utopia (translated by Ralph Robinson).
The First Book of the New Island of Utopia.
The Second Book of the New Island of Utopia.
Appendix. Ancillary Materials From Other Early Editions of «Utopia».
Francis Bacon. New Atlantis.
Henry Neville. The Isle of Pines.
Explanatory Notes.
Glossary.