1st Edition
Lacan, Foucault, and the Malleable Subject in Early Modern English Utopian Literature
Theoretically informed scholarship on early modern English utopian literature has largely focused on Marxist interpretation of these texts in an attempt to characterize them as proto- Marxist. The present volume instead focuses on subjectivity in early modern English utopian writing by using these texts as case studies to explore intersections of the thought of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. Both Lacan and Foucault moved back and forth between structuralist and post-structuralist intellectual trends and ultimately both defy strict categorization into either camp. Although numerous studies have appeared that compare Lacan’s and Foucault’s thought, there have been relatively few applications of their thought together onto literature. By applying the thought of both theorists, who were not literary critics, to readings of early modern English utopian literature, this study will, on the one hand, describe the formation of utopian subjectivity that is both psychoanalytically (Oedipal and pre-Oedipal) and socially constructed, and, on the other hand, demonstrate new ways in which the thought of Lacan and Foucault inform and complement each other when applied to literary texts. The utopian subject is a malleable subject, a subject whose linguistic, psychoanalytical subjectivity determines the extent to which environmental and social factors manifest in an identity that moves among Lacan’s Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real.
List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgements
SECTION 1: INTRODUCTORY MATTERS
Chapter 1
Introducing Utopia
Chapter 2
Utopian Studies, Modern and Early Modern: A Nice Place to Visit
Chapter 3
Lacan avec Foucault
Chapter 4
"If Only this were some day possible": The Execration, Consecration, and Catechization of Humanist Optimism in Thomas More’s Utopia
SECTION 2: the UTOPIAN symbolic
Chapter 5
Stealth Self on the Shelf: Surveillance, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, and Symbolic Subjectivity
Chapter 6
Power is Knowledge: Surveillance, Biopower and Linguistic Subjectivity in John Eliot’s Christian Commonwealth
Chapter 7
Linguistic Subjectivity and Linguistic Utopia in Francis Lodwick’s A Country not Named
SECTION 3: the UTOPIAN imaginary
Chapter 8
"Out of the Authority of the Arabians": Orientalism and Utopian Intellectual History in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy
Chapter 9
Gerrard Winstanley’s Utopian Mission
Chapter 10
Margaret Cavendish’s Book of Imaginary Beings: Philosophical Animals and Physiognomic Philosophers in The Blazing World
SECTION 4: The Three UTOPIAN reals
Chapter 11
Joseph Hall’s Mundus alter et idem and Geo-satirical Indictment of the English Crown
Chapter 12
James Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana and Typographical Utopia
Chapter 13
Pornographic Miscegenation and Dystopic Apocalypse in Henry Neville's Isle of Pines
Chapter 14: CONCLUSIONS AND AN ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Biography
Dan Mills has an MA and PhD in English from Georgia State University, where he focused his studies on early modern English literature and theory and wrote his dissertation on early modern English utopian literature. He recently completed an MA in Latin at the University of Georgia. In addition to early modern English literature and theory, his research interests include bibliography and print culture, translation studies, and neo-Latin.
