Abstract
In 2016, Thomas More’s Utopia is 500 years old, a quin-centenary celebrated by innumerable articles, conferences and exhibitions.1 However, the genre and mode which he invented continue to be repeatedly mis-prisioned as both static and finished (Eagleton 2015; Kumar 2010), and are substituted instead by apocalyptic and dystopian visions of the contemporary and near-future world(s).2 The term ‘utopian’ is used often by contemporary cultural critics as a broad term of insult to apply to a pie-in-the-sky naive political blueprint, is opposed to the term ‘reality’, or to ‘the end of times’ in Slavoj Žižek’s terms (Zizek 2011). However, this mis-prisioning and death-knell of both the original and the genre depends on an over-literalised reading, one that blinds readers to the nuances of the narratorial process and places utopia as a discursive debate, not as a place: to ‘utopia’ as genre, not content.
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Aughterson, K. (2016). Teaching Utopia Matters from More, to Piercy and Atwood. In: Shaw, K. (eds) Teaching 21st Century Genres. Teaching the New English. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55391-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55391-1_5
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