Three Early Modern Utopias: Thomas More: Utopia / Francis Bacon: New Atlantis / Henry Neville:...

book: Three Early Modern Utopias: Thomas More: Utopia / Francis Bacon: New Atlantis / Henry Neville: The Isle of ... | Thomas More, Francis Bacon, ...

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Three Early Modern...

	Three Early Modern Utopias: Thomas More: Utopia / Francis Bacon: New Atlantis / Henry Neville: The Isle of ... Thomas More, Francis Bacon, ... Oxford University Press, USA, 2000 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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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.

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Prose which still affects our thinking

Literature before James Joyce, before Jane Austen, before Daniel Defoe: No Ulysses, no Emma, no Robinson Crusoe - for modern readers it is hard to imagine a stock of English literature without the existence of these and other important writers and their `novels'. What kind of literature could one refer to in a pre-novelistic age? As a matter of fact, there were authors, such as Sir Thomas More and Sir Francis Bacon, who wrote prose which, indeed, still affects our thinking. However, neither More nor Bacon used English, but chose Latin as their original means of expression. For what reasons? And none of these authors was in fact a free-lance writer - they were all occupied in public and political spheres. What made them actually write fictional works? How does their fiction relate to their cultural environment - or, what was regarded as `fiction'? These texts cover a century of political, religious, scientific and literary debates and gave rise to a new understanding of knowledge, and introduced influential literary devices.

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