Sarah Hogan

Other Englands

Utopia, Capital, and Empire in an Age of Transition

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

This book examines the rise of the early English utopia in the context of emergent capitalism, one that foreshadows the Enlightenment discourse of political economy while giving us another historical perspective on the beginnings and enduring conflicts of global capital.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 272
• Erscheinungstermin: 29. Mai 2018
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 157mm x 23mm
• Gewicht: 576g
• ISBN-13: 9781503605169
• ISBN-10: 1503605167
• Artikelnr.: 48896061

Autorenporträt

Sarah Hogan is Assistant Professor of English at Wake Forest University.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: Origin Stories
chapter abstract
The introduction presents the book's central argument that early English
utopias reimagined the transformative geographies and social formations of
emergent global capital. While explaining how this thesis builds on a rich
history of Marxist readings of Utopia by important thinkers from Marx to
Fredric Jameson, it also provides a lengthy overview of the modern
transition debate on primitive accumulation, narrating the agrarian,
mercantile, and imperial changes that initiated the transition to
capitalism and shaped the formation of the utopian literary genre. The
introduction locates a need for a Marxist approach to early utopias that is
attentive to utopia's multifaceted, and especially colonial origins, and
also to the full range of the Renaissance utopia's politics and
otherworldly forms. Several early modern poetic and prose works, especially
those that are shown to demonstrate the syncretic, intertextual
relationship between utopian fiction, New World travel writing, and
colonial propaganda, help to make this case.
1Thomas More's "Peninsula Made an Island"
chapter abstract
This chapter offers an inquiry into the problems of conceptualizing
historical transition and periodizing cultural innovation, explored through
Thomas More's Utopia. It argues that Utopia was an innovative departure in
the tradition of ideal states philosophy and literature, more rational and
systemic in its representation but also more critically engaged with the
era's problems. Examining the debate frame and class-coded character
construction in Book One of Utopia, the chapter suggests that More adapts
late feudal estates satire by combining it with more worldly
discourses-both classical and Atlantic-in a way that reconceptualizes the
social in broadening geopolitical frameworks. This reading is also
supported through a genealogical exploration of Utopia's origin story, a
fiction that is shown to rework ancient narratives about England's own
prehistorical condition as a "peninsula made an island" into a topos that
reflects the socio-spatial, Atlantic-oriented changes of the early
sixteenth century.
2Uneven Development in Bacon'sNew Atlantis
chapter abstract
This chapter explores early modern literature's fascination with
fantastical feats of territorial engineering, considering how the spatial
topoi of the island and the land bridge together represent a desire for
nationalist sway over an increasingly global marketplace, and also reveal
empire's contradictory desire for contact and containment. At the center of
this chapter is a study of Bacon's New Atlantis, the story of Bensalem, an
imaginary, insulated island that simultaneously occupies a privileged
position of oversight in the world. This study argues that Bacon's text
negotiates anxieties about a burgeoning world system, by allowing Bensalem
to benefit from global relations without actually participating in them.
3Utopia, Ireland, and the Tudor Shock Doctrine
chapter abstract
Pairing two colonial tracts on late sixteenth-century Ireland, the
much-neglected A Letter Sent by I.B., by Thomas Smith and his son, and
Edmund Spenser's infamous, genocidal A View of the Present State of
Ireland, this chapter considers Ireland's place in the early English
utopian imaginary. Focusing in particular on Spenser's tract, the chapter
demonstrates that he advances a highly specific kind of colonial project,
imagined in terms of moral virtue but driven by novel kinds of economic
motive. The chapter considers Spenser's Irish utopia as a vision of
intensified, accelerated primitive accumulation that positions the colony
as a site of social experimentation meant to challenge policy at home. It
also concludes with a sustained interpretation of Spenser's dismissal of
greed and theft in The Faerie Queene, explored as the epic's attempt to
morally differentiate English methods of land expropriation from other
imperial practices and customary Irish economic relations.
4Dispossession and Women's Poetry of Place
chapter abstract
This study on the poetry of Isabella Whitney and Aemelia Lanyer grants
mourning, loss, and women writers their long ignored place in the early
utopian tradition. In particular, the chapter considers how discourses of
death and dispossession in women's poetry of place gesture toward utopia in
its absence, but in such a way that progressively portrays utopia as a
historical possibility. While Whitney's mock testament "The maner of her
Wyll" and Aemelia Lanyer's country-house poem turned elegy "To Cooke-ham"
have only very recently been interpreted separately as utopian poems, a
comparison of these two works, considered in the context of Silvia
Federici's Marxist-feminist intervention into the transition debate,
suggests a female counter-tradition of utopian writing that adopts
dispossession as a theme and imagines utopia from an explicitly
socio-spatial vantage point of marginalization.
5Reforming UtopiainMacariaandAreopagitica
chapter abstract
This chapter concerns seventeenth-century bourgeois utopias, exploring how
writers like Gabriel Plattes and John Milton transformed the earlier
literary tradition in a revolutionary context in order to attack state
monopolies and defend the free exchange of ideas. That is, it complicates
the easy but false equivalences between utopianism and anti-capitalism.
While Plattes's utopian tract, Macaria, is shown to anticipate classical
political economy's defense of free trade and discourse of "improvement,"
outlining the economic agenda of parliamentarian Samuel Hartlib's circle,
the more famous work by Milton, Areopagitica, is shown to be a more
radical, early example of critical utopianism.