Utopia / Duncan Bell, Douglas Mao.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bell, Duncan, 1976- author.

Mao, Douglas, 1966- author.

Series:

Literature and politics

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Utopias.

Utopias in literature.

utopian literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource.

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2026]

Summary:

Bringing together an historian of political thought and a literary scholar, this book offers a historically wide-ranging and theoretically sophisticated discussion of utopia--one of the most vexed concepts in the humanities and social sciences as well as a mode of imagining that continues to inspire an extraordinary range of cultural productions.

Ideal societies, better worlds, more just and peaceful ways of living: these have long been the stuff of 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.

Contents:

Cover

Utopia

Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgements

Series Editors' Introduction

Chapter 1

1.1: What is Utopia? History, Theory, Tradition Duncan Bell

Introduction

Utopian Traditions: Fragmentary, Recursive, Meta

Epistemic Infrastructures: Beyond the Land of Chimeras

Programmatic Utopia

1.2: Utopia in Technopolis Duncan Bell

The Age of Technopolis

That Now Devastated Terrain: Narrating Twentieth-Century Utopianism

Beyond the Devastated Terrain

Utopia Plus: Transhumanism

CHAPTER 2

2.1: Utopian Sentiments Douglas Mao

Literature in Utopia

Sentimental Scenes

Troubling Feelings

2.2: Problem-Solving Douglas Mao

Problem Plots

Hard Feelings

Literature, Politics, Feeling

Interview with the Authors

Select Bibliography

Index.

Literature in Utopia.

Sentimental Scenes

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (Oxford Academic, viewed on August 11, 2026).

Other Format:

Print version: Bell, Duncan, Utopia.

ISBN:

9780198922919

0198922914

9780198922902

0198922906

9780198922896

0198922892

OCLC:

1570330321

Publisher Number:

CIPO000344457

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license