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A utopia typically describes an imaginary community or society that possesses highly desirable or near-perfect qualities for its members. It was coined by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, which describes a fictional island society in the New World. It can also refer to an intentional community.
Utopian and dystopian fiction are genres of speculative fiction that explore social and political structures. Utopian fiction portrays a setting that agrees with the author's ethos, having various attributes of another reality intended to appeal to readers. Dystopian fiction offers the opposite: the portrayal of a setting that completely disagrees with the author's ethos. Some novels combine both genres, often as a metaphor for the different directions humanity can take depending on its choices, ending up with one of two possible futures. Both utopias and dystopias are commonly found in science fiction and other types of speculative fiction.
Joshua Barnes FRS, was an English scholar. His work Gerania; a New Discovery of a Little Sort of People, anciently discoursed of, called Pygmies (1675) was an Utopian romance.
Ernst Simon Bloch was a German Marxist philosopher. Bloch was influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, as well as by apocalyptic and religious thinkers such as Thomas Müntzer, Paracelsus, and Jacob Böhme. He established friendships with György Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Bloch's work focuses on an optimistic teleology of the history of mankind.
Looking Backward: 2000–1887 is a utopian science fiction novel by Edward Bellamy, a journalist and writer from Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts; it was first published in 1888.
Ruth Levitas is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Bristol. She is well known internationally for her research on utopia and utopian studies.
Sidney Parker, also known as S. E. Parker, was an English egoist and a former individualist anarchist who wrote articles and edited several journals from 1963–1993. Notably Parker wrote the introductions to the books Might is Right and The Ego and Its Own by Max Stirner.
Science fiction studies is the common name for the academic discipline that studies and researches the history, culture, and works of science fiction and, more broadly, speculative fiction.
2894, or The Fossil Man is an 1894 utopian novel written by Walter Browne. It is one entrant in the major wave of utopian and dystopian literature that characterized the final decades of the nineteenth century.
Spensonia is a fictional Utopian country created by the English author and political reformer Thomas Spence. Spence laid out his ideas about Spensonia in a series of literary works published in the late 18th century:
A dystopia, also called a cacotopia or anti-utopia, is a speculated community or society that is undesirable or frightening. It is often treated as an antonym of utopia, a term that was coined by Sir Thomas More and figures as the title of his best known work, published in 1516, which created a blueprint for an ideal society with minimal crime, violence, and poverty. The relationship between utopia and dystopia is in actuality, not one simple opposition, as many utopian elements and components are found in dystopias as well, and vice versa.
Gregory Claeys is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of London.
Kenneth Morrison Roemer, an Emeritus Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, an Emeritus Fellow, UT System Academy of Distinguished Teachers, and a former Piper Professor of 2011, Distinguished Scholar Professor, and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is the author or editor of four books on utopian literature, including The Obsolete Necessity (1976), nominated for a Pulitzer, and three books on American Indian literatures, including the co-edited Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (2005). His collection of personal essays about Japan, Michibata de Dietta Nippon (2002) (A Sidewalker’s Japan), was a finalist for the Koizumi Yakumo Cultural Prize. He is the project director of a digital archive of tables of contents of American literature anthologies Covers, Titles, and Tables: The Formations of American Literary Canons.
Thomas Patrick Moylan is an American-Irish academic, literary and cultural critic, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Language, Literature, Communication and Culture at the University of Limerick. Moylan's academic interests are in utopian studies and critical theory, science fiction studies, cultural studies, American studies, and Irish studies.
Utopian studies is an interdisciplinary field of study that researches utopianism in all its forms, including utopian politics, utopian literature and art, utopian theory, and intentional communities. The term utopia was created by Sir Thomas More in a book with the same name in 1516. Utopian studies can be subdivided into three major parts: study of utopian works, communitarianism and utopian social theory.
The Society for Utopian Studies is a North American interdisciplinary association devoted to the study of utopianism in all its forms, with a particular emphasis on literary and experimental utopias.
The Utopian Studies Society is a European interdisciplinary association devoted to the study of utopianism in all its forms. The Society was established by a group of British scholars following an international conference on the subject at New Lanark, the site of a famous experiment in industrial organisation by the early socialist Robert Owen. The Society was re-launched in 1999, following the "Millennium of Utopias" conference at the University of East Anglia. Although the scholarly journal Utopian Studies is published by the North American Society for Utopian Studies, as of 2016 its editor, editorial assistant and book review editors were located in Europe and were members of the Utopian Studies Society. Prominent utopian studies scholars associated with the European Society include Gregory Claeys, Lyman Tower Sargent, Ruth Levitas, Tom Moylan, Raffaella Baccolini, Artur Blaim, Vincent Geoghegan, Lucy Sargisson and Fatima Vieira.
Howard Paul Segal was an American historian who was a professor of history at the University of Maine. Specializing in the history of American technology and American utopianism, he wrote well over 200 articles and authored or edited eight books including Technology and Utopia, Technology, Pessimism, and Post-Modernism ; Future Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of Technology in America;Utopias: A Brief History;Technology in America ; Technological Utopianism in American Culture; and Recasting the Machine Age.
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- ↑ "Faculty Profiles". Archived from the original on 2013-03-15.
Lyman Tower Sargent is one of the world's foremost scholars on utopian studies. He was the founding editor of Utopian Studies, serving in that post for the journal's first fifteen years, and the recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award from both the Society for Utopian Studies and the Communal Studies Association.
