Figures of Utopia

Literature, Politics, Philosophy
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-80584-200-2
Verlag: Peter Lang Group AG

Buch, Englisch, Band 39, 346 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 563 g

Reihe: Ralahine Utopian Studies

This volume examines the concept of the utopic figure, focusing on the textual procedures through which utopian texts negotiate the limits of the imaginable. Drawing from literary theory and criticism, political philosophy, social history, cartography and geography, urban studies and visual culture, it discusses utopian figuration in relation to classical, early modern, and (post)modern contexts, dwelling on the aversion to stasis or civil war and the import of animality in the classical philosophical context; anxieties about value, the transformation of the geographical imaginary, the social place of the humanist intellectual and the specter of surplus populations in early modernity; the literary engagement with the possibilities and risks involved in daydreaming, everyday life, and the strange dialectic between utopia and spectrality in modernity. Lastly, it examines the dialectic of utopianism and Marxism from the 19th century to the present.
With surefooted dialectical rigor, Figures of Utopia proposes a narratologically and philosophically astute new accounting of utopia’s enigmatic figural labors. Revivifying foundational texts, theories, and constitutional antinomies alike, Balasopoulos’s lucid, timely, and sweeping study not only maps the allegorical dynamics of utopian form but also affirms the unique ways that utopia’s multivalent estrangements live in and contend with history.

— Eric D. Smith, Professor of English, University of Alabama in Huntsville
Figures of Utopia brims with literary and philosophical brilliance and establishes Balasopoulos as a preeminent scholar of both Utopian Studies and Marxist hermeneutics. With daunting conceptual rigor and lucid exegesis, the essays in this volume track a long history of utopian textuality stretching from the ancient to the contemporary, and in so doing, Balasopoulos makes the demands of the "not yet" more legible, felt, and relevant.

— Sarah Hogan, Associate Professor of English, Wake Forest University

Autoren/Hrsg.

Balasopoulos, Antonis

Weitere Mitwirkende

Wegner, Phillip E.

Moylan, Tom

Kelly, Michael G.

Fischer, Joachim

Baccolini, Raffaella

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments - Note on the text - List of Figures and Illustrations - INTRODUCTION - Labors of the Figure: On Utopia and Textual Practice - PART I: ORIGINATIONS: OF CITIES, POLITICS, AND ANIMALS - The Fractured Image: Plato, the Greeks, and the Figure of the Ideal City - Pigs in Heaven? Utopia, Animality and Plato’s Huopolis - Celestial Cities and Rationalist Utopias - PART II: NOVUMS: OF MONEY, OCEANS, ISLANDS AND POPULATIONS - “The Latter End of [the] Commonwealth Forgets the Beginning”: Empire and Utopian Economics in Early Modern New World Discourse - “Suffer a Sea Change”: Spatial Crisis, Maritime Modernity, and the Politics of Utopia - “Utopiae Insulae Figura”: Utopian Insularity and the Politics of Form - Dark Light: Utopia and the Question of Relative Surplus Population - PART III: MUNDANITY AND DISRUPTION: MODERNITY, MODERNISM, UTOPIA - The Dialectics of Reverie: Daydreaming and the (Un)Fair City - Ghosts of the Future: Marxism, Deconstruction, and the Afterlife of Utopia - Factories, Utopias, Decoration and Upholstery: On Utopia, Modernism and Everyday Life - PART IV: IN THEORY: MARXISM AND UTOPIA, HISTORIES AND FUTURES - Utopia and Marxism - Anti-Anti-Utopia for Post-Socialist Times: Fredric Jameson’s An American Utopia in Perspective - POSTSCRIPT - Labors of the Figure II: On George Gavriel’s “Floating City” - Works Cited - Index

Über Autor(innen)

Antonis Balasopoulos is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cyprus. His research has focused on comparative utopian studies, political theory, and literary criticism. Author of more than 50 scholarly essays, he is the co-editor of Reading Texts on Sovereignty (2021) and editor of A.L. Morton’s The English Utopia (2023).