Utopian Studies

Chloë Houston’s The Renaissance Utopia: Dialogue, Travel and the Ideal Society traces two main developments in utopian literature from 1516 until its proliferation in the middle years of the seventeenth century. The first is the transition from utopia as philosophical satire to utopia as an imaginative means to achieve social reform. Second is the movement from utopias primarily being written as dialogues to utopias being written as narratives. Houston argues that as writers sought to reach a wider readership they rejected the dialogue form, which prompted a shift from a reliance on the dialogue in the sixteenth century to the adoption of a narrative form in the mid-seventeenth century. Her chronological approach is useful, as the texts are placed in context with the political and social changes of the early modern period in order to trace the developmental changes. Houston draws on the earlier work of Nina Chordas, Forms in Early Modern Utopia: The Ethnography of Perfection (2010). Both authors selected similar texts to explore within the same period, from 1516 to the mid-1660s. However, their treatments vary, as Chordas focuses more [End Page 370] on ethnographic representation and Houston focuses on the presentation of philosophical satire and eventually social reform. Both critics demonstrate that although the dialogue form was widely used during the sixteenth century, it devolved into first-person narrative from the mid-seventeenth century on, eventually to become a precursor of the utopia novel.

Houston examines a series of utopias in context from 1516 to the 1650s in order to explain how utopia changed from a playful, intellectual mode of philosophical inquiry to a serious attempt at describing and achieving practical social reform. She looks in detail at how utopias aspired to improve the forms of their own societies as part of a changing discourse of human perfectibility. The Renaissance Utopia is a study of texts; both literary and social forms are central to the reading of utopia. The aim is to bring disparate texts into dialogue with one another: importantly, to explore how the utopia text changed from an ironic interrogation of the notion of the ideal society to a tool employed in a fervent attempt to make it real. The development of the utopian form is considered mainly within English literature, except for chapter 3, which discusses Johann Andrea and Tomasso Campanella. The consistent thread throughout is that utopias are read as dialogues, arguing that the utopian literature of this period is characterized by an engagement with dialogue in the wake of More’s Utopia (1516). Moreover, Houston argues that the concept of dialogue continued to be central to utopian literature even as it ceased to employ the conventional forms of dialogue and, eventually, utopia itself. The main objective of the study is to highlight that utopian literature of the Renaissance period merits reassessment. Paying attention to sixteenth-century utopias will help us gain an understanding of the explosion of utopianism in the mid-seventeenth century. Houston also demonstrates how the sociopolitical and literary conditions of the preceding period shaped utopian literature in new and distinctive ways. She argues that Renaissance utopia, both travel narrative and dialogue, is rooted in forms of writing that contain multiple layers of meaning. These forms maintain an uncertain relationship with the truth and draw the reader into the process of making sense of the text. This parallels the reader’s experience of reading the text and the author’s experience within it.

The question of whether the changes in utopian forms and content made the utopias of the seventeenth century different from those of the early sixteenth, such as Thomas More’s Utopia, is addressed through detailed contextual and chronological reading of the texts. In chapter 1, on More’s Utopia, Houston demonstrates the usefulness of the structure of the dialogue form. She examines [End Page 371] how it enables the juxtaposition of a series of viewpoints through the presence of multiple voices. This is explored in...