#10 = Volume 3, Part 3 = November 1976
Darko Suvin
The Alternate Islands: A Chapter in the History of SF, with a Select Bibliography on the SF of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance
In the first part of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), a long discussion of England’s social ills culminates in Hythloday’s famous description of the destruction of the medieval peasantry:
Your sheep ... which are usually so tame and so cheaply fed, begin now, according to report, to be so greedy and wild that they devour human beings themselves and devastate and depopulate fields, houses, and towns.... there are noblemen, gentlemen, and even some abbots, though otherwise holy men, who.... leave no ground to be tilled; they enclose every bit of land for pasture; they pull down houses and destroy towns, leaving only the church to pen the sheep in.1
This passage, embedded in the acute analysis of what the nascent capitalism meant to the people (it is quoted by Marx in Capital), is a masterpiece of humanist sarcasm. The noblemen that turn into earthquakes razing entire districts, the holy men that are brutally indifferent to their spiritual flock and leave churches standing only as profitable sheep-pens, the land which is no longer communal tilling ground for a stable yeomanry but a private enclosure for rich landlords that throw tenants out on the roads to beg and rob, finally the erstwhile meek sheep that have now turned into man-devouring beasts—all this, couched in the careful verisimilitude of a traveler’s report from exotic countries, amounts to a picture of a world upside-down being born in the shambles of the natural one. Rejecting all half-way and reformist solutions to such radical evils, the second part of Utopia will therefore present a radically different model of sociopolitical life—a country that governs itself as a classless extended family.
1. The Sociopolitics of Happiness: Utopia and its SF Context. The country Utopia—whose punning name means a good place which is (as of now) nowhere—is an England recreated in a more perfect shape. It is an island of the same size and subdivisions as England, but round instead of triangular; it has the same natural resources, pegged to an economy based on agriculture, but it is a just and happy country because it has abolished private property in land and other means of production. Instead of the monarchic pyramid where power flows from above downward, it is, at least in principle, a democratic centralism that acknowledges no political elite, with a power pyramid established from below upward. Where Europe slavishly worships obscene war and gold, Utopia despises both; while it sometimes has to fight wars, it uses gold for chamber-pots and slaves’ fetters. It lives a distributive, egalitarian, pre-industrial communism; much like tribal societies, or medieval villages and guilds, it is federalist and patriarchal. Its organization is of a piece with its way of life, the best example being the network of equidistant halls where the daily meals are an occasion for pleasurable communion in both physical and spiritual nourishment. Hythloday’s review of such "laws and customs" in Utopia is a model of clarity and forcefulness, which answers the objections of his dialogue partners (including a "More" manipulated for self-protective irony) simply by the gesture of pointing. It finds this "best state of society" based on the pursuit of a finally ethical pleasure attainable only in a social order with a truly common economy and culture. Happiness for each reached by economic justice for all is the final goal of a possible social organization—a startlingly subversive idea.
Utopia is thus the reaffirmation of a world consonant to human nature. This "new island" at the antipodes puts the upside-down monstrosity of European class society back on its feet: the estrangement is a de-alienation. Yet a static human nature working itself out in a family model—both concepts taken from medieval Christianity makes for a certain clogging rigidity of relationships in Utopia, in contradiction to its fundamental ideal of a higher Epicureanism. The Utopians possess slaves (criminals and war prisoners), an official religion (albeit mostly deistic and tolerant of all creeds except—an unforgivable lapse!—atheists), and barbarous provisions against adultery. Also, the representative democracy is tempered by a permanent rule of the Elders, the family fathers, and the learned. Together with a proper subsistence-economy concern for husbanding resources, this subordinates freedom to an egalitarian balance, enforced where necessary by stringent measures (e.g. the travel restrictions). For all its dry wit, there is an air of schematic blueprint, of groundplan without adornments, about More’s picture of Utopia, But finally, it is an open-ended narrative (the Utopians accept Greek learning and show interest in Christ’s collectivism), the first picture of an egalitarian communism with a relatively well-defined tolerance.
More’s Utopia subsumes all the SF forms of its epoch (in which it thus fulfills the same function as Wells does for recent SF history). It fuses the permanent though unclear folk longings for a life of abundance and peace with high-minded intellectual constructs of perfect—i.e. communist—human relations known from Antiquity on: it translates the Land of Cockayne and the Earthly Paradise into the language of the philosophical dialogue on the ideal state and of the Renaissance discovery-literature as reinterpreted by More’s unique blend of medieval collectivism and Christian humanism. Let us take a brief look at these forms and More’s synthesis.2
Cockayne is a universal folk legend of a land of peace, plenty, and sloth, well known already in Antiquity, and refurbished—probably by vagrant student-poets—in the Middle Ages. In that Nowhere, rivers flow with cream or wine, roasted fowls fly into your mouth, and sausages run around crying "Eat me, eat me!" It is already an inverted world which relates to human needs, and like utopia proposes a strictly materialistic solution. It can therefore be transformed into utopia by relying on human intervention instead of on a magical parallel world, and all utopias, beginning with More, will retain its abhorrence of human degradation by war, toil, and hunger. Next in the family of wondrous lands are the Blessed Islands at the limits of the Ocean. Found already in tribal tales, Chinese and Mesopotamian legends, and Homer, such an Elysium was originally a place of magical fertility and contentment to which the blessed heroes were admitted in the flesh. In the Middle Ages, such locations in far-off seas, including the Celtic legendary island, came to be considered as the EARTHLY PARADISE, which was situated in this world and whose inhabitants (before religious rewritings) were not disembodied but simply more perfect, endowed with happiness, youth, and immortality.
Echoes of such folk legends are heard in Dante’s account of Ulysses’ final heroic voyage toward the Earthly Paradise, during which he is sunk by a jealous God intent on preserving his monopoly over the right of passage. In fact, Dante’s Comedy incorporates in its astrophysical and metaphysical universe almost all SF elements transmitted to More through the Middle Ages, when—after Augustine of Hippo’s Civitas Dei—"the utopia is transplanted to the sky, and called the Kingdom of Heaven" (Mumford):3 the Comedy subsumes discussions of several ideal political states, traditions of the damned and blessed places, the search for the perfect kingdom, and Dante’s own superb vision of the perfectly just City of God.
More was well aware of such subgenres as the Earthly Paradise, but he rejected their place outside history, in a magically arrested time (often entailing the hero’s instant aging upon return). Bidding also "a curt farewell" to the mythical conservatism of a Golden Age of happy forefathers, he resolutely located Utopia in an alternative human attainable present, momentous just because non-existent among Europeans. As in Plato’s Republic, which looms large in the background, human destiny consists of men and their institutions; but diametrically opposed to Plato, the just place can result from a heroic deed such as King Utopus’s cutting off the "new island" from the tainted continent. Men’s norms and institutions are not the province of religion and magic but of sociopolitics, and time is measured in terms of creative work. That is why Utopia differs radically from Plato’s curious combination of caste society and ruling-caste communism. Plato’s dialogue develops an argument for a timelessly ideal (today quite anti-utopian) blueprint, set up in order to escape popular, monarchic, or imperfectly oligarchic government. More’s dialogue dramatically unfolds an actually present state of classless self-government. More lacks all sympathy for both Plato’s erotic communism and his caste system. As for the notion that a just state depends on a community of goods, More was much closer to the early Christian fathers and peasant insurgents (such as John Ball) who extolled communism than he was to Plato. Besides, this notion was so widespread in Hellenic literature before and after Plato that Aristophanes could mock in the Ecclesiazusae (i.e. Assembly-women) a female try at instituting egalitarian communism without money or toil, and in The Birds a Cloudcuckooland where "everything is everybody’s" and things illegal in Athens or on Olympus are deemed beautiful and virtuous. All such references—characteristically surviving only in fragments of rebuttals—speak of a set-up where
...all shall be equal, and equally share
All wealth and enjoyments, nor longer endure
That one should be rich, and another be poor.
(Ecclesiazusae §§590-91, tr. Rogers)
Such an omnia sint communia is from that time on the constant principle separating consistent utopian literature from the established society.
When Hythloday is introduced to "More," he is compared to Plato, but also secondarily to Ulysses, the hero of wondrous voyages to the island of Circe, of the Phaeacians, etc. The genre of IMAGINARY VOYAGE, as old as fiction, was the natural vehicle of the Earthly Paradise and utopian tales, though it often led simply to entertaining worlds whose topsy-turviness remained more playful than didactic. But it could also lead to just peoples in happy lands at the limits of the world, from the Hyperboreans to Ethiopians, from Plato’s Atlanteans to Euhemerous’s Panchaeans (and in the Middle Ages from Mandeville’s Sumatrans to the subject of Prester John). The nearest in spirit to More is a fragment of Iambulus (circa 100 BC) about the equatorial Islands of the Sun where the usual magically fertile nature enables men to live without private property and state apparatus, in a loose association of communities. In their joyous work, such as picking fruit, each in turn serves his neighbor. They practice erotic communism, eugenics, and euthanasia (at the age of 150); the sciences, especially astronomy, are well developed but the liberal arts are more valued as leading to spiritual perfection. Written at the time of the great Mediterranean slave and proletarian revolts, Iambulus presents a plebeian Hellenic negation of the warring empires, the privatization of man, and the division of labor. His gay islanders live in the fields, under the open southern sun; and his account of their radical collectivism (found by a voyager-narrator later expelled for his harmful habits) is the best that has even fragmentarily survived from the host of similar voyagers’ tales.
Such tales were renewed by the great geographical discoveries: Hythloday is also introduced as a participant in the voyages of that Vespucci who had lent his name to America and set Europe abuzz by describing the "perfect liberty" of Red Indian tribal communism and Epicureanism. Thomas More transformed all such strange new horizons, with their potent dissolving effects, into a systematic verbal construction of a particularized community where sociopolitical institutions, norms, and personal relations are organized according to a more perfect principle than in the author’s community (as literary utopias could be defined). This estranged place is presented as an alternative history; whoever its author, however he twists utopian cognition, it always flows out of the hope of repressed and exploited social classes, and expresses their longings for a different but this-worldly other world. Sudden whirlpools in history which both further and permit its appearance in literature—the times of Iambulus, More, Fourier, Morris, or indeed our own—have therefore the makings of great ages of SF. For utopias are social-science fiction, the sociopolitical variant of the radically different peoples and locations of SF—the sociopolitical subgenre of SF. All later SF, necessarily written against the background of the readers’ societies, will be situated between utopian and anti-utopian horizons—not the least when it attempts to deny its utopian heredity.
More’s greatness resides thus not only in ethics or prose style. Beyond that, Utopia supplied both the name and the logically inescapable model for later literary utopias. Their hallmark is a rounded and isolated location (valley, island, planet) articulated in a panoramic sweep showing their inner organization as a formal, ordered system. This system is utopia’s supreme value: there are authoritarian and libertarian but no unorganized utopias. The coming about of the new order must be explained as the installation of a new social contract; in the Renaissance the contract-maker is usually a founding hero, but later it will increasingly be a democratic revolution openly as in Morris’s socialist revolution or transposed into cosmic analogs as tenuous as Wells’s gas from a cornet. Lastly, utopias are presented by a dramatic strategy which counts on the surprise effects of its presentations upon the reader. Though formally closed, significant utopian writings are in permanent dialogue with the readers, i.e. open-ended—as in More.
2. The Dissociation of Play and Truth: Rabelais to Bacon. More conveyed "full sooth in game." François Rabelais’s imaginative voyage through a sequence of wonderful places boisterously perfected such a fusion of urgent truth and witty play to deal with the full compass of earthly preoccupations and possibilities. But already in the last books of his pentalogy on the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-64) the joke got grimmer and thinner. By the time of Campanella and Bacon, the formal exercise of utopia had dissociated intellectual gravity from plebeian play; in the process, "truth" itself grew increasingly ideological.
Gargantua’s and Pantagruel’s sallying out of Utopia to Paris and the ends of the world, and their insistence on the drink and food of the body as well as of the spirit, are symbolic for Rabelais’s integration of sensual with philosophic materialism, of folk chronicles about the deeds of enormous and valiant giants with an uproarious intellectual critique of the sum total of contemporary life. This critique is inescapable because it reaches from rational argument and farce to the colossal deployment of synonyms and neologisms, idioms taken literally and fields encompassed encyclopedically. Language itself is no longer god-given but a medium of human labor, enjoyment, and folly; it is formally presented as such in the SF parable of the congealed words in Book IV. The sequence of events, too, bodies forth a gay and dynamic process of imbibing knowledge from the various provinces of reality passed in critical review—from war and education in the first two books, through marriage and sex in the third, to the wondrous and horrible island’s religion, law, and finance in fourth and fifth. The basic attitude of this work is "a gaiety of spirit" equated with the wine of the grape as well as the wine of learning and freedom, of friendliness and life itself. Such a draught is a blasphemous transubstantiation in which matter becomes its own conscious and cognitive enjoyment, substituting for service of the divine (divin) that of the vine (du vin). The folk enjoyment in gigantism is not separated from goodness and wisdom. Rather, matter is treated as not only the sole reality but also the supreme good, of which there can never be too much. Rabelais’s whole work is one huge navigation toward liberated matter and unalienated man. This cognitive "imaginary voyage" is the exploration of a dangerous freedom: "You must be the interpreters of your own enterprise" is the final conclusion.
Thus "pantagruelism" is the liberation of a human quintessence from the impure actuality, an unbridled creation of a new human nature scorning contemporary unnatural Europe—as when Pantagruel makes out of the bad, aggressive king Anarch a good though henpecked hawker of green sauce. It oscillates between sheer fantasy and simple inversion. The latter is seen in the anti-abbey or "free university" of Thélème, set against the old educational and monastic institutions; formally, this is the most clearly utopian passage in Rabelais, though it is not his boldest creation but an elite assembly of young people noble enough to follow the inner-directed commandment of "DO WHAT YOU WILL." More important, "pantagruelizing" entails assimilating the whole reality of that age and regurgitating it transmuted by his laughing philosophy, just as Gargantua comprehended whole countries in his throat and regurgitated the narrator who visited them. To that end, Rabelais employs with a serene greediness all available SF traditions and all forms of delighted estrangement—Greek satire and medieval legends, Plato and Villon, More and Lucian. Almost incidentally, he produced some episodes of SF which will stand as its constant yardstick.
Rabelais adapted the episode in Gargantua’s throat and the whole marvelous voyage in the second half of his opus from the classical tradition subsumed in Lucian of Samosate. In True Histories (ca. AD 160), Lucian laughingly settled the score with the whole tradition of vegetative myths, from the mythological tales themselves, through Homer’s voyages, to the popular Hellenistic adventure-romances. His journey to various wondrous islands, his flight to the Moon, Morning Star, and Sun, his life inside a huge whale, in Cloudcuckooland, on the Island of the Blessed, etc., is a string of model parodies each translating a whole literary form into a critical—i.e. cognitive—context. The island of vine-women is a parody of Circe’s and other islands of erotic bliss, and the war of the Selenites against the Heliotes introduces aliens and combats more grotesque than in any romance or myth; but both are also models of later SF meetings and warfare with aliens. Lucian uses the mythical scheme of journeys based on the vegetative cycle of death and rebirth, darkness and day, closing and opening, for ironic subversion. Its spectrum ranges from ironic events, situations, and characters, through parodic allusions and wordplay, to direct sarcasm. For example, his tongue-in-cheek extrapolation of colonial warfare into interplanetary space is rendered utterly ridiculous by a farcically pedantic and scabrous description of the semi-human Selenites. Lucian’s whole arsenal of demystification amounts to a value-system in which vitality is equated with freedom. Being confined to the country within the whale with its oppressive fish-people is Lucian’s equivalent of an infernal descent, after his flight through imperialist heavens. The humanistic irony embodied in esthetic delight of "Lucian the Blasphemer" became the paradigm for the whole prehistory of SF, from More and Rabelais to Cyrano and Swift.
In More and Rabelais, this tradition led to the "alchemical" procedure of creating a new homeland by a transmutation of the baser elements in the old country (England or the Touraine), so that Rabelais’s fictive narrator called himself "Abstractor of the Quintessence." However, in actuality the marvelous countries became colonies, More died beheaded, Rabelais barely escaped the stake: knowledge and sense were again viciously sundered by religious wars and monarchist absolutism. In the profound crisis of the age, the first wave of the revolutionary middle class had separated itself from the people, and been destroyed or absorbed by church and state. At the beginning of the 17th century this was clearly spelled out by the burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno, the philosopher who had proclaimed an infinite universe with an infinite number of autonomous worlds. The new power cast a spell even over utopists. In southern, Catholic Europe Campanella reinstated astrology, that fantastic pseudo-science of absolutism, as the guiding principle of his City of the Sun (pbd 1623); in northern, Protestant Europe Bacon perspicaciously hit upon a natural science behaving as an esoteric religion as the wave of the future in New Atlantis (pbd 1627). Tommaso Campanella, though formally prolonging Iambulus’s and More’s line, describes a perfect theocracy somewhere behind India, in the seas of the old caste empires and on an island so large it is almost a continent. The traditional utopian abolition of private ownership, the stimulating ideas on dignifying labor and education, are of little avail in a community run by a monastic bureaucracy whose impersonal, militaristic order regulates all relations, from times for sexual intercourse to the placing of buttons, in strict and grotesque detail fixed by astrology. For the explosive horizontal explorations of the Renaissance, Campanella substituted a doctrinaire vertical which descends from the Sun of Power to men. More’s urbane talk between friendly humanists became here a one-track exposition from one top oligarch to another.
Francis Bacon’s "great instauration," based on the rising force of capitalist manufacture and its technological horizons, was in the following three centuries to prove more virulent than Campanella’s monastic nostalgia. For Bacon the social system is an open question no more; rather, the key for transforming the world is a power of nature exercised by, and largely for, a politically quite conservative, quasi-Christian priestly hierarchy. The organized application of technology in New Atlantis is not a breakthrough to new domains of human creativity or even (except for some agricultural and biological techniques) of natural sciences; the only use mentioned for "stronger and more violent" engines is in artillery, for the old destructive purposes. Conversely science becomes a patriarchal, genteel, and highly ceremonial religion, and it could be characterized—much like its later offshoot, Saint-Simonism—as "Catholicism minus Christianity." Scientists are a self-sufficient aristocracy of experts manipulating or "vexing" nature and other men; as opposed to Plato, More, and Rabelais, their "science does not so much exude from wisdom as wisdom exudes from science" (White)4 and gold is not a sign of baseness but of permanent abundance in possessions and power. The very name of Bacon’s country aims to improve Plato both by correcting his account of Old Atlantis and by presenting a New Atlantis whose old perfection has withstood not only political but even geological contingencies (the narration ends with an indication that its science can prevent earthquakes, floods, comets, and similar).
The major positive claim of New Atlantis is that it delivers the goods—abundance of things and years, and social stability—by employing the lay miracles of science. At that historical epoch, even such a filling in of extant technical possibilities, without a radical change in human relationships, constituted a huge and euphoric programme, and the goal of the "research foundation" of Salomon’s House is formulated as "the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible," but though this science is guarded by experts who can, interestingly enough, refuse to divulge dangerous discoveries, it is by its own definition ethically indifferent: nuclear bombs and gas ovens in concentration camps are some of the "things possible to effect." New Atlantis is starry-eyed over inquiring into the "secret motions and causes" of fruits, winds, sounds, and clocks, yet it does not think of inquiring into motions and results with respect to the mother of the family condemned to seclusion, or to the population sundered from Salomon’s House. It is thus a foretaste of that combination of technology and autocracy which in fact became the basis of European empires at home and abroad. At this point, the utopian tradition fell under the sway of an upper-class ideology which staves off human problems by technocratic extrapolation, by quantitative expansion promising abundance within a fundamentally unchanged system of social domination. Bacon’s "science" thus turns out to be as mythical as Campanella’s astrology, though more efficient. As a verbal vision, New Atlantis—with its heavy insistence on a power hierarchy and resplendent signs of public status, observation which becomes interesting only when enumerating grandiose projects, and a general adman’s abuse of adjectives suggesting opulence—is in fact much inferior to the fanatic splendor of The City of the Sun. It is symptomatic for the quality of imagination in the ensuing age that his work (one of Bacon’s poorest) should have become the master of its thought. The "outrageous piece of ‘miraculous evangelism’" (Chambers) which founded New Atlantis, its stuffy ceremonials and barbarous human relations completes the picture of this "curious alliance of God, Mammon and Science" (Dupont).5
Thus the developing utopian tradition dragged into the open the latent contradictions in More’s crypto-religious construction of Utopia. After the Rabelaisian flowering, Campanella and Bacon mark a reaction against Renaissance libertarian humanism, whose logical next step was the end of utopia as an independent form. The official repression would have worked toward this in any case; but it would not have succeeded so swiftly and well had not the utopian camp been betrayed from within. Having lost a fertile connection with the popular longings, utopia—for all the tries of the 18th-century "state novel" (Staatsroman)—disappears from the vanguard of European culture until Fourier and Chernyshevsky. Ironically, Bacon fought medieval scholasticism but inaugurated a new dogmatism of technocracy, and Campanella rotted for decades in papal prisons but announced a return to the closed, mythic world-model of Plato. History is cruel to "final solutions."
NOTES
1. Thomas More, The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, Volume 4, ed. Edward Surtz, S.J., and J.H. Hexter (US 1965), pp 65-67.
2. The following paragraph is argued at greater length in my essay "Defining the Literary Genre of Utopia," Studies in the Literary Imagination 6(Fall 1973):121-45.
3. Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias (1922; US 1962 iv+315), p 59.
4. H.B. White, Peace Among the Willows: The Political Philosophy of Francis Bacon (The Hague 1968), p 106.
5. R.W. Chambers, Thomas More (1935; UK 1938 416p, p 362); V. Dupont, L’Utopie et le roman utopique dans la littérature anglaise (Toulouse and Paris 1941), p 146.
WORKS ON THE SF OF ANTIQUITY, THE MIDDLE AGES, AND THE RENAISSANCE: A SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
General histories of society, culture, literature, or science have not been included, nor works of methodological importance only. As a rule, the first English-language edition is cited, and the short form of the title is used. The city of publication is given only for books not published in the United States or the United Kingdom.
1. General works (including those on history and theory of utopian thought).
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. US 1968.
Beer, Max. The General History of Socialism and Social Thought. I-II. UK 1957.
Berneri, Marie Louise. Journey Through Utopia. UK 1950.
Biesterfeld, Wolfgang. Die literarische Utopie. Stuttgart 1974.
Bloch, Ernst. Das Prinzip Hoffnung I-II. Frankfurt 1959.
Cawley, Robert Ralston. Unpathed Waters. US 1940.
Ceserani, Gian Paolo. I falsi Adami. Milan 1969.
Cioranescu, Alexandre. L’avenir du passé. Paris 1972.
Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Dec 1973)—special issue on "Utopian Social Thought in Literature and the Social Sciences."
Desroche, Henri. Les Dieux révés. Paris 1972.
Dupont, V. L’Utopie et le roman utopique dans la littérature anglaise. Paris 1941.
Duveau, Georges. Sociologie de l’utopia. Paris 1961.
Elliott, Robert G. The Shape of Utopia. US 1970.
Eurich, Nell. Science in Utopia. US 1967.
Gibson, R.W., and J. Max Patrick. St. Thomas More: A Preliminary Bibliography. US 1961.
Gove, Philip Babcock. The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction. US 1941.
Marin, Louis. Utopiques. Paris 1973.
Morton, A.L. The English Utopia. UK 1952.
Mucchielli, Roger. Le Mythe de la cité idéale. Paris 1960.
Mumford, Lewis. The Story of Utopias. US 1922.
Negley, Glenn, and J. Max Patrick. The Quest for Utopia. US 1952.
Revue des sciences humaines 155 (1974)—special issue on "l’Utopie."
Ruyer, Raymond. L’utopie et les utopies. Paris 1950.
Schwonke, Martin. Vom Staatsroman zur Science Fiction. Stuttgart 1957.
Seeber, Hans Ulrich. Wandlungen der Form in der literarischen Utopie. Göttingen 1970.
Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Fall 1973)—special issue on "Aspects of Utopian Fiction."
Suvin, Darko. La Science-fiction entre l’utopie et l’anti-utopie. Montreal 1976.
Villgradter, Rudolf, and Friedrich Krey, eds. Der utopische Roman. Darmstadt 1973.
Wandlungen des Partadiesischen und Utopischen. Berlin 1966.
2. Antiquity and the Middle Ages. See also section 1 above, especially Beer, Biesterfield, Bloch, Ceserani, Cioranescu, Eurich, Gove, Morton, Mumford, Villgradter-Krey, and Wandlungen, and section 3 below, especially Beger, Förster, LiIjegren, Patch, Seibt, and Süssmuth.
Ackermann, Elfriede Marie. "Das Schlaraffenland" in German Literature and Folksong. US 1954.
Altheim, Franz. Der unbesiegte Gott. Hamburg 1957.
Babcock, W.H. Legendary Islands in the Atlantic. US 1922.
Baldry, H.C. Ancient Utopias. UK 1956.
Bar, Francis. Les Routes de l’autre monde. Paris 1946.
Barker, Ernest. The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle. UK 1959.
Bidez, Joseph. La Cité du Monde et la Cité du Soleil chez le Stoïciens. Paris 1932.
Boas, George. Essays on Primitivism and Related Ideas in the Middle Ages. US 1948.
Bompaire, J. Lucian écrivain. Paris 1958.
Bonner, Campbell. "Dionysiac Magic and the Greek Land of Cockaigne." Trans. & Proc. Amer. Philological Assn. 41 (1910).
Cocchiara, Giuseppe. Il paese di Cuccagna. Turin 1956.
Coli, Edoardo. Il Paradiso Terrestre dantesco. Florence 1896.
Cornford, Francis M. Plato’s Cosmology. UK 1937.
Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. US 1953.
Ferguson, John. Utopias of the Classical World. US 1975.
Finley, M.I. "Utopianism Ancient and Modern." In The Critical Spirit, ed. Kurt H. Wolff and Barrington Moore, Jr. US 1967.
Fredericks, S.C. "Lucian’s True History as SF." SFS 3 (1976).
Giannini, A. "Mito e Utopia nella letteratura Greca prima di Platone." Rendiconti del Ist. Lombardo, Classe di Lettere 101 (1967).
Graf, Arturo. Miti, Leggende e Superstizioni del Medio Evo. Bologna 1965.
Gronau, Karl. Der Staat der Zukunft von Platon dis Dante. Braunschweig 1933.
Guggenberger, Alois. Die Utopie vom Paradies. Stuttgart 1957.
Kampers, F. Mittelalterliche Sagen vom Paradiese. Köln 1897.
Lovejoy, Arthur O., and George Boas. Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity. US 1935.
Manuel, Frank E., and Fritzie P. Manuel. "Sketch for a Natural History of Paradise." Daedalus 101(1972).
Merkelbach, Reinhold. Roman und Mysterium in der Antike. Munich & Berlin 1962.
Patch, Howard Rollin. The Other World. US 1950.
Pöhlmann, Robert von. Geschichte der sozialen Frage und des Sozialismus in der Antike I-II. Munich 1912.
Rohde, Erwin. Der griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer. Leipzig 1876.
Salin, Edgar. Civitas Dei. Tübingen 1926.
——. Platon und die griechische Utopie. Munich & Leipzig 1921.
Schuhl, Pierre-Maxime. Etudes sur la fabulation platonicienne. Paris 1947.
Swanson, Roy Arthur. "The True, the False, and the Truly False: Lucian’s Philosophical SF." SFS 3 (1976).
Vallauri, G. Euhemero di Messene. Torino 1956.
Visser, Elizabeth. Iamboulos en de eilanden uan de Zon. Groningen 1947.
Westropp, Thomas Johnson. "Brasil and the Legendary Islands of the North Atlantic." Proc. R. Irish Acad. 30 (1912).
Winston, David. "Iambulus’ Islands of the Sun and Hellenistic literary Utopias." SFS 3 (1976).
3. More’s Utopia. See also section 1 above, especially Beer, Berneri, Bloch, Cawley, Cioranescu, Dupont, Duveau, Elliott, Gibson-Patrick, Gave, Martin, Morton, Suvin, Villgradter-Krey, and Wandlungen; section 2, especially Kampers, Patch, and Westropp; and section 4 below, especially Bierman and Massò.
Adams, Robert P. "The Philosophic Unity of More’s Utopia." Studies in Philology 38 (1941).
——. "The Social Responsibilities of Science in Utopia, New Atlantis, and After" J. of the History of Ideas 10 (1949).
Ames, Russell. Citizen Thomas More and His Utopia. US 1949.
Beger, Lina. "Thomas Morus und Plato." Zc. für die gesamte Staatswiss. 35 (1879).
R.W. Chambers. Thomas More. UK 1935.
Dermenghem, E. Thomas Morus et les Utopistes de la Renaissance. Paris 1927.
Donner, H.W. Introduction to Utopia. UK 1945.
Dudok, G. Sir Thomas More and His Utopia.
Förster, Richard. "Lucian in der Renaissance." Archiv für Literaturgesch. 14 (1937).
Gallagher, Ligeia, ed. More’s Utopia and Its Critics. US 1964.
Heiserman, A.R. "Satire in the Utopia." PMLA 78 (1963).
Herbrüggen, Hubertus Schulte. Utopie und Anti-Utopie. Bochum-Langendreer 1960.
Hexter, J.H. More’s Utopia. US 1952.
Liljegren, S.B. Studies on the Origin and Early Tradition of English Utopian Fiction. Uppsala 1961.
Marc’hadour, Germain. L’Univers de Thomas More. Paris 1969.
Miles, Leland. "The Literary Artistry of Thomas More." Studies in English Literature 6 (1966).
Morris, William. "Introduction." In Thomas More, Utopia, UK 1893. (Reprinted in this issue of SFS.)
Nelson, William, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Utopia. US 1968.
Sanderlin, George. "The Meaning of Thomas More’s Utopia." College English 12 (1950). Schoeck, R.J. "‘A Nursery of Correct and Useful Institutions’: On More’s Utopia as Dialogue." Moreana 22 (1969).
Seibt, Ferdinand. "Utopie in Mittelalter." Historische Zc. 208 (1969).
Sullivan, Frank, and Maijie Padberg Sullivan. Moreana [annotated bibliography] I-IV. US 1964-68. Index US 1971.
Surtz, Edward L., S.J. The Praise of Pleasure. US 1957.
——. The Praise of Wisdom. US 1957.
——. and J.H. Hexter. "Introduction." In The Complete Works of St. Thomas More IV, US 1965.
Süssmuth, Hans. Studien zur Utopia des Thomas Morus. Münster 1967.
Sylvester, R.S. "‘Hythlodaeo Credimus.’" Soundings 51 (1968).
Traugott, John. "A Voyage to Nowhere with Thomas More and Jonathan Swift." In Swift, ed. Ernest Tuveson. US 1964.
L’Utopie à la Renaissance. Bruxelles and Paris 1963.
4. Other Renaissance Works. See also section 1 above, especially Bakhtin, Beer, Berneri, Bloch, Cawley, Cioranescu, Desroche, Dupont, Duveau, Gove, Mumford, Schwonke, Suvin, Villgradter-Krey, and Wandlungen; and section 3, especially Adams 1949, Dermenghem, Süssmuth, and L’Utopie.
Badaloni, Nicola. Tommaso Campanella. Milan 1965.
Beaujour, Michel. Le Jeu de Rabelais. Paris 1969.
Bierman, Judah. "Science and Society in the New Atlantis and Other Renaissance Utopias." PMLA 78 (1973).
Blodgett, Eleanor Dickinson. "Bacon’s New Atlantis and Campanella’s Civitas Solis." PMLA 46(1931).
Bock, Gisela. Thomas Campanella. Tübingen 1974.
Diéguez, Manuel de. Rabelais par lui-même. Paris 1960.
Doren, Alfred. "Campanella als Chiliast und Utopist." In Kultur und Universalgeschichte. Walter Goetz su 60. Geburtstag, Leipzig & Berlin 1927.
Farrington, Benjamin. The New Atlantis of Francis Bacon. UK 1965.
François Rabelais: IVe Centenaire de sa Mort. Geneve & Lille 1953.
Greene, Thomas M. Rabelais. US 1970.
Kaiser, Walter. Praisers of Folly. US 1963.
Lefebvre, Henri. Rabelais. Paris 1955.
Lefranc, Abel. Les Navigations de Pantagruel. Paris 1905.
Marin, Louis. "Les Corps utopiques rabelaisiens." Littérature (Feb 1976).
Massò, Gildo. Education in Utopia. US 1927.
Nicolson, Marjorie. Science and Imagination. US 1956.
Paris, Jean. Rabelais au futur. Paris 1970.
Sainéan, Lazare. La Langue de Rabelais. Paris 1922.
Saulnier, V.L. Le Dessein de Rabelais. Paris 1957.
Scholtz, Harald. Evangelischer Utopismus bei J.V. Andreae. Stuttgart 1957.
Spitzer, Leo. "Le pretendu realisme de Rabelais." Modern Philology 37 (1939).
White, H.B. Peace Among the Willows: The Political Philosophy of Francis Bacon. The Hague 1968.
Wiener, Harvey S. "‘Science or Providence’: Toward Knowledge in Bacon’s New Atlantis." Enlightenment Essays 3 (1972)
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