"Decades before the communes of the sixties, nineteenth-century radicals set up isolated colonies where they hoped to insulate themselves from a corrupt mainstream America. Throughout the country experimental utopian settlements promised to fulfill the lives of ordinary citizens through abundance, equality, and free education. Utopian Episodes tells why these early, freethinking rebels could never fully achieve their goals, but how their legacy has become an integral part of today's movement for social reform." "Seymour Kesten focuses on three of the most renowned colonies: New-Harmony, Indiana; Brook Farm, Massachusetts; and Icarian Communities in Iowa and Illinois. Many more experimental groups are also discussed, including Alphadelphia in Michigan, Fruitlands and Hopedale in Massachusetts, Ohio Phalanx, and La Reunion (now Dallas, Texas)." "Unlike other studies on similar groups, Kesten's book gives us a unique insider's view into the day-to-day lives of these American radicals and thus provides a study of the human spirit. He lets us see utopian life through the eyes of those who knew it firsthand. A look at individuals' activities, work, dress, and food brings us into the realm of their souls. He draws on rare memoirs and early accounts (some published here for the first time) by well-known participants, including A. Bronson Alcott, Horace Greeley, and George Ripley, as well as relatively unknown colonists, such as Albert Brisbane, John Dwight, Elijah Grant, and Amelia Russell." "The book spans the rebirth of an intellectual movement and explores the newspapers, literature, poetry, and music of its social consciousness. Education for the masses was the essence of the utopian process, for it alone, they believed, would regenerate a civic-minded, compassionate society. Ultimately, they would eradicate evil, which was the goal of every colony."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Utopian ventures are worth close attention, to help us understand why some succeed and others fail, for they offer hope for an improved life on earth. Utopias and Utopians is a comprehensive guide to utopian communities and their founders. Some works look at literary utopias or political utopias, etc., and others examine the utopias of only one country: this work examines utopias from antiquity to the present and surveys utopian efforts around the world. Of more than 600 alphabetically arranged entries roughly half are descriptions of utopian ventures; the other half are biographies of those who were involved. Entries are followed by a list of sources and a general bibliography concludes the volume.

American communalism is not a disjointed, erratic, almost ephemeral part of our past, but an on-going, essential part of American history. This important study begins with an examination of America's first religious utopia at Ephrata, near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1732 and traces successive utopian experiments in the United States through the following centuries. The author demonstrates that the utopian communal story is an integral facet of the Puritan concept of America as a city upon a hill and a beacon light for the world where the perfect society could be built and where it could flourish. After discussing the Ephrata Cloister (1724-1812), the author turns to the dozen or so Shaker communities that spread utopian communalism from New England to the Ohio Valley frontier in the antebellum years. Next, he examines the various Separatists, as well as the Oneida Community. He traces the history of the Hutterite utopias from Russia to the Great Plains and Canada between the Civil War and World War I. In a chapter on California counter culture communities, he analyzes the Theosophist communes at Pint Loma and Temple Home. Finally, he discusses modern religious utopias ranging from the Koreshian Unity at Estero, Florida, to Zion City near Chicago, Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker Movement, the Sufi Utopia in the Berkshire Mountains, and the Pandanaram Settlement in Indiana.

The tensions between utopian dreams and dystopian anxieties permeate science fiction as a genre, and nowhere is this tension more evident than in Star Trek. This book breaks new ground by exploring music and sound within the Star Trek franchise across decades and media, offering the first sustained look at the role of music in shaping this influential series. The chapters in this edited collection consider how the aural, visual, and narrative components of Star Trek combine as it constructs and deconstructs the utopian and dystopian, shedding new light on the series’ political, cultural, and aesthetic impact. Considering how the music of Star Trek defines and interprets religion, ideology, artificial intelligence, and more, while also considering fan interactions with the show’s audio, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of music, media studies, science fiction, and popular culture.

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERBLACKWELL'S BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021Essential lessons on the world we live in, from one of our greatest young thinkers - a guide to what everybody is talking about today'Unparalleled and extraordinary . . . A bracing revivification of a crucial lineage in feminist writing' JIA TOLENTINO'I believe Amia Srinivasan's work will change the world' KATHERINE RUNDELL'Rigorously researched, but written with such spark and verve. The best non-fiction book I have read this year' PANDORA SYKES-------------------------How should we talk about sex? It is a thing we have and also a thing we do; a supposedly private act laden with public meaning; a personal preference shaped by outside forces; a place where pleasure and ethics can pull wildly apart. To grasp sex in all its complexity - its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power - we need to move beyond 'yes and no', wanted and unwanted. We need to rethink sex as a political phenomenon. Searching, trenchant and extraordinarily original, The Right to Sex is a landmark examination of the politics and ethics of sex in this world, animated by the hope of a different one.SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2022LONGLISTED FOR THE POLARI FIRST BOOK PRIZE 2022LONGLISTED FOR THE BRITISH ACADEMY BOOK PRIZE 2022

How the utopian tradition offers answers to today’s environmental crises In the face of Earth’s environmental breakdown, it is clear that technological innovation alone won’t save our planet. A more radical approach is required, one that involves profound changes in individual and collective behavior. Utopianism for a Dying Planet examines the ways the expansive history of utopian thought, from its origins in ancient Sparta and ideas of the Golden Age through to today's thinkers, can offer moral and imaginative guidance in the face of catastrophe. The utopian tradition, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption and luxurious indulgence, might light a path to a society that emphasizes equality, sociability, and sustainability. Gregory Claeys unfolds his argument through a wide-ranging consideration of utopian literature, social theory, and intentional communities. He defends a realist definition of utopia, focusing on ideas of sociability and belonging as central to utopian narratives. He surveys the development of these themes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before examining twentieth- and twenty-first-century debates about alternatives to consumerism. Claeys contends that the current global warming limit of 1.5C (2.7F) will result in cataclysm if there is no further reduction in the cap. In response, he offers a radical Green New Deal program, which combines ideas from the theory of sociability with proposals to withdraw from fossil fuels and cease reliance on unsustainable commodities. An urgent and comprehensive search for antidotes to our planet’s destruction, Utopianism for a Dying Planet asks for a revival of utopian ideas, not as an escape from reality, but as a powerful means of changing it.

Thomas More's Utopia is one of the most iconic, translated, and influential texts of the European Renaissance. This Handbook of specially commissioned and original essays brings together for the first time three different ways of thinking about the book: in terms of its renaissance contexts, its vernacular translations, and its utopian legacies. It has been developed to allow readers to consider these different facets of Utopia in relation to each other and to provide fresh and original contributions to our understanding of the book's creation, vernacularization, and afterlives. In so doing, it provides an integrated overview of More's text, as well as new contributions to the range of scholarship and debates that Utopia continues to attract. An especially innovative feature is that it allows readers to follow Utopia across time and place, unpacking the often-revolutionary moments that encouraged its translation by new generations of writers as far afield as France, Russia, Japan, and China. The Handbook is organized in four sections: on different aspects of the origins and contexts of Utopia in the 1510s; on histories of its translation into different vernaculars in the early modern and modern eras; and on various manifestations of utopianism up to the present day. The Handbook's Introduction outlines the biography of More, the key strands of interpretation and criticism relating to the text, the structure of the Handbook, and some of its recurring themes and issues. An appendix provides an overview of Utopia for readers new to the text.

This volume is a study of the interdisciplinary nature of prison escape tales and their impact on European cultural identity in the eighteenth century. Prison escape narratives are reflections of the tension between the individual’s potential happiness via freedom and the confines of the social order. Contemporary readers identified with the prisoner, who, like them suffered the injustices of an absolutist regime. The state imprisons such renegades not just out of a desire to protect the public but more importantly to protect the state itself. Hence, prison escape tales can be linked with a revolutionary tendency: when free, such former detainees equipped with a pen openly and justly challenge the status quo, hoping to inspire their readers to do the same. Escape tales have had a considerable impact on cultural identity, because they embody the interdependent relationship between literature and myth on the one hand and literature and history on the other.

Star Trek has transcended science fiction through its use of elements that have crucial roles in classical utopian tradition. New technologies change a civilization, a miniature society unfolds on a spaceship, and an android teaches humanity. Star Trek has been answering many questions about our own world for 50+ years, and since the days of Captain Kirk, the franchise has become one of the world's best-known cultural phenomena. This book documents what the Star Trek franchise has in common with classic utopias. Chapters analyze how technology changes society and how the Federation embodies utopian ideals. Also explored are the political relations among alien species that reflect past and present conflicts in our real world and how the Borg resembles an anti-utopian society.

H. G. Wells—the inventor of the concept of the time machine and the phrase "the Shape of Things to Come"—described his life's work as one of "critical anticipation." Shadows of the Future identifies the attempt to imagine possible futures as the unifying principle behind Wells's diverse and sometimes wayward literary career. The book unravels the complex layers of meaning in The Time Machine, and shows how throughout his life he sought to exploit the potential of literary and cultural prophecy in new ways. Described by John Middleton Murry as "the last prophet of bourgeois Europe," he was also its first futurologist. In Shadows of the Future Wells's assumption of the prophet's role is related to his championship of the modern scientific outlook, and to the theory and practice of science fiction and utopian literature. Parrinder explores the connections between novelty and repetition, between imagining the future and imagining the past, and between prophecy and parody as literary modes. Wells's science fiction is reexamined both as a projection of the cosmology implicit in the writings of Darwin and Huxley, and as a new variation on the Romantic and Enlightenment themes of such earlier authors as Blake, Gibbon, and Mary Shelley. Later chapters relate Wells's fiction to his nonfiction and look at the uneasy relationship of his utopianism to literary prophecy, and at the paradoxes inherent in the militant internationalism of the " prophet at large." Finally, Wells's influence is traced in a study of the antiutopian fictions of Zamyatin and Orwell, and in a broad account of the connections between science fiction and the scientific outlook down to our own time.