448 Pages
by
Routledge
Perfect Worlds offers an extensive historical analysis of utopian narratives in the Chinese and Euro-American traditions. This comparative study discusses, among other things, More's criticism of Plato, the European orientalist search for utopia in China, Wells's Modern Utopia and his talk with Stalin, Chinese writers constructing their Confucianist utopia, traces of Daoism in Mao Zedong's... Read more
Introduction, The Utopia of Thomas More, From Rational Eutopia to Grotesque Dystopia, Interlude: The Island Syndrome from Atlantis to Lanzarote and Penglai, Enlightenment Utopias, Orientalism: European Writers Searching for Utopia in China, Chinese Philosophers and Writers Constructing Their Own Utopias, Small-Scale Socialist Experiments, or “The New Jerusalem in Duodecimo”, Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? and Dostoevsky’s Dystopian Foresight, When Socialist Utopianism Meets Politics …, Bellamy’s Solidarity and Its Feminist Mirror Image in Herland, Chinese Occidentalism: The Nostalgia for a Utopian Past Gives Way to the Idea of Progress, H. G. Wells and the Modern Utopia, Dystopian Fiction in the Soviet Union, Proletkult, and Socialist-Realist Utopianism, Mao Zedong’s Utopian Thought and the Post-Mao Imaginative Response, Utopias, Dystopias, and Their Hybrid Variants in Europe and America since World War I, Concluding Observations, References, Subject Index, Index of Names
Biography
Douwe Fokkema is Professor emeritus of Comparative Literature, Utrecht University, the Netherlands.
