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Utopian literature provides a compelling vision of epistemological and moral clarity: a dream of harmony and justice. But in an age of surveillance, utopia is also the nightmare of a perfectly controlled, sealed and monitored world that leaves no room for ambivalence or discretion. In The Good Place, leading scholars of comparative literature explore this tension and examine the richness and diversity of utopian writing, from the genre's earliest manifestations to the present. Utopia is seen as a tenacious force of the human imagination: a desire for renewal that manifests itself in the tension between social reality and the virtual worlds of unlived possibility. Notable for its engagement with a wide range of texts from different periods and national traditions, this book invites the reader to rethink 'the good place' from the specific perspective of literary studies and suggests that utopia, in the realm of fiction, is more than just a philosophical abstraction. Mediated by the experience of authors, characters and readers, utopian literature offers a transient but genuine experience of perfection, beyond the horizon of everyday lived experience.
List of contents
Contents: Florian Mussgnug: Introduction: Utopian / World / Literature - Gillian Beer: 'Our Natural Loneliness': Solitude and Utopia - Laura Caretti: She Exits to Utopia - Matthew Beaumont: The Bourne Identity: On Utopian Psychopathology - Neil ten Kortenaar: Utopia, Village, Nation-State - Simona Corso: Pastoral, History and Utopia - Simona Micali: Alternate History: Travels to Elsewhen - Francesco Giusti: Nature as Definitive Utopia, or the End of the Subject - Gioachino Chiarini: Utopia ante litteram - Maria Di Battista: The Great Good Place - Julien Zanetta: Utopian Collections: Goncourt and Huysmans Against the Grain - Matthew Reza: Struggling Against Utopia: Defoe, Wells, Atwood - Giovanni de Leva: Vasco Pratolini's Neighbourhood as Utopia - André Hansen: Strategy Games in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake - Vita Fortunati: Afterword: Time for Meta-Utopia?
About the author
Florian Mussgnug is Reader in Italian and Comparative Literature and director of the graduate programme in comparative literature at University College London.
Matthew Reza is an Italian language tutor at the University of Oxford and the events coordinator for the research network Italian Studies at Oxford.
