Utopia (Norton Critical Editions) |
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Editorial Review / Publisher's Information:
Product Description
Robert M. Adams’s celebrated translation of Utopia has been meticulously revised for the Second Edition of this Norton Critical Edition as have the accompanying annotations. "Backgrounds" is designed to assist student readers in an appreciation of Utopia by shedding light on the different points of view contemporary with More’s work. Included are new selections from Saint Benedict and Tasso, as well as a medieval satire on the land of Cockayne. "The Humanist Circle", a carefully chosen selection of letters, includes another important contribution by Erasmus.
"Criticism" includes five new thought-provoking essays by Alistair Fox, Edward L. Surtz, G. R. Elton, Northrop Frye, and Robert M. Adams. Also new are selections from two modern anti-utopias or quasi-utopias—Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two—plus a selection from Edward Bellamy’s once futuristic but now almost contemporary Looking Backward, which may be compared and contrasted with More’s masterpiece.
An updated Selected Bibliography is also included. .
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Customer Reviews:
• Literary Garden Of Eden
15 December, 2006
This was required reading for a graduate course in the Humanities. A great story and important historical work in literature. History of Utopia begins with Thomas More's book in 1516 he coins the phrase Utopia. Ideal societies have been around before like Garden of Eden, city on a hill. For Moore the idea of utopia was intended to be an ironic one. One of the problems you are faced with when reading his utopia is that you cannot really tell when he is serious and when he is being satirical. He writes on the border of the lyrical and satirical, you cannot really tell when he is trying to be funny or serious. The other problem is the Thomas More who speaks to us in the story is not the Thomas More who actually lived. He wrote himself into a character. He is intending it to be ironic. Utopia is Greek for "Good Place, and "no place." He is punning an ironic two-sided term he clearly intended irony when he wrote this text, which provided the foundation for a new genre for social representation. Now, according to Lewis Mumford, who wrote the book "The Story of Utopia" 1922, one of the first comprehensive studies of Utopian representation in Western Civilization, the word Utopia signifies human folly or human hope, the vain hope of perfection. The vain hope of remaking our own imperfect natures, so that we can establish the blissful harmonious communal life. On one hand, he is entirely playful and paradoxical. Thomas More could be bigoted (against Protestants), small minded, not a saint as portrayed. Among all the things, he was a great wit, great sense of humor. On the other hand, it seems that Utopia could be a reflection of his devout Catholicism. He has been represented as a Roman Catholic martyr. In which case you want to take him seriously, altering the model of menses a set of new aims for moral and social objectives. Of course, More's death is important to consider in this life he is glorified in the film, "A Man for All Seasons." He was a Renaissance man, he was a lawyer, statesman, Christian humanist a classical scholar an advocate for women's rights he was also Henry 8's Lord Chancellor.
In 1514, he was sent to Flanders to negotiate a wool treaty and while there, he meets and befriends Peter Giles who is the town clerk of Antwerp, and allegedly tells him "It is my intention to write a book about the way a country should be governed according to my principals. But, it is dangerous to write about those things in England while king Henry the 8 wrath is so easily encouraged, I could perhaps write that I met an old sailor in your house and introduce that man as a globetrotter, who had traveled all over the world and had seen places that we don't even know the existence of. What he had seen there was so unbelievable as compared to the life in Europe that the islands the countries he had visited would seem to belong to another world. Therefore, the title of my book will be "Utopia" a word that means "no where." That sailor will have traveled all over Europe and lived sometime in France Germany, and England. That is why he could compare the ideal community he got acquainted with in Utopia, to the ones he got to know in our countries, and that way I would keep myself out of the matter." After he returned to London, he wrote the fist chapter. Now, what would that tell us about the Utopian imagination, the creation the public presentation of a Utopia? Moore was beheaded in 1535; he would not recognize marriage to Ann Boleyn as lawful to the church. In 1534, Henry becomes head of the church, but Moore remains loyal to pope. In 1935, Moore is canonized. We have to take Moore's religion very seriously. Moore thought Protestants should be burned, he was greedy and proud, not a perfect man. Yet he had this wish for a Utopia.
All utopian fictional ideas of mythic proportion occupy kind of distant realm of the afterlife, myth, faith that unite all of these elements in a matter that is so rich and potentially illuminating and invaluable for scholars students that are interested in working across boundaries and in understanding and exploring the value of working across boundaries. Societies woven and inhabited by populations some of them very select, the exceptionally virtuous or blessed in some cases getting there requires a metaphysical transformation, in other cases it requires a harrowing journey that has to be understood as some ways metaphorical and some ways literal. There is always a sense that to reach Utopia requires a transformation of the human self how do we get away from our flaws, how do we get away from our seemingly inevitable and invariable nature of our being.
These places offer anecdotes to painful and tragic realities to human existence. They are historical in nature you cannot understand any utopia, whether it is represented in a sci-fi movie, or novel or feminist utopia; they must be placed in some kind of a historical context. A fascinating proposition to explore, all utopias all acts of the utopian imagination strike us as constituting in one manner or another statements, critiques or observations about the world we occupy at that given moment. Therefore, any utopia is a reflection and study of the world that we are occupying at that given moment and what we wish it were rather than what it is at that moment. Therefore, utopia is a deeply and inescapably a historical manner organizing the human imagination. I don't think any utopia works in a fixed and eternal way because for every generation and every age they have to imagine their own utopia. Of course utopian experiments were not just talking about fiction or wishing it were so, were talking about actual Soviet Revolution of 1917, were looking at movements looking to bring about radical profound social and political changes that are so deeply utopian in nature. So utopians are aesthetic, philosophical, sociological, they are imagined and fictional, but you can look a history and find attempts most of which failed to bring about these kind of communities that Emerson, Thoreau, these 19th century American egalitarian attempts to create the ideal agrarian society. 1960 hippies reawakening movement of going back to the natural and living off the land. Even today's green and ecological revolution you find in them utopian aspects that resonate so richly with the history of envisioning the ideal society, an ideal place.
Oscar Wilde once said "A map of the world that does not include Utopia, is not even worth glancing at for it leaves out the one country at which humanity has always landed, and when humanity lands there it looks out sees a better country set sail. Progress is the realization of utopias." So when we talk about utopias we are not only talking about a desire or a wish or a longing for perfection, we are talking about an order of progress, a way in which we intend to advance, a way in which we envision or imagine improvement and progress. A progress narrative, psychoanalysis is utopian. Freud's theory of psychoanalysis is a scientific expression of the utopian imagination. The idea that where id was, the ego shall be. The idea of a talking story, the idea that we can master our neurosis that we can harness them that we can move from unconscious behavior to conscious behavior. Marxism and all the grand philosophies of the 19th and 20th centuries are grand utopian narratives. Feminism is a grand utopian narrative in and of itself.
The Norton Critical Edition is the best way to read "Utopia" since it has several essays illuminating the work through a modern and postmodern lens.
Recommended reading for anyone interested in history, psychology, philosophy, and literature.
- Amazon Customer Review
• Thought Provoking
14 November, 2009
The most insightful look at life 500 years ago written by a well to-do person with a broad first hand perspective. It seems like he was propelled to write this book because of his disgust over "thieves" being hung 20 at a time. Today it would be referred to as "assembly-line" style. An insidious way of getting rid of "excess" people. Of course, it was all legal, above board, and morally correct (Hey, stealing is wrong, it says that in the Ten Commandments). The back story is that all the tenant farmers were being thrown off the huge Estates to make way for sheep. The change from crop land to pasture land. More profitable, and, less labor intensive. The itinerent farmer with no other skills eventually is forced to steal to survive. You're left to guess what the wife does. With the children, Oliver Twist comes to mind.
"UTOPIA" seems to be More's answer to the problem, the problem of greed in human nature. His idea is communal living, no private property. Probably what the "hunter/gatherer" era of human developement was like, but set in a "city" setting. An interesting concept 350 years before Karl Marx.
Made me think of all the foreclosures going on today. Does losing your house and job create a higher crime rate. How much does it cost to incarcerate a family of four? What's the cost/benefit analysis of incarceration verse, well, not hanging, lethal injection? The business of making money, and the problem of "excess" people, whata' ya gonna do? Great book, very thought provoking. What's Society's role? Ethically. Morally. Food stamps and unemployment? Or some technique to channel the greed.
- Amazon Customer Review
• Good For Its Time??
25 January, 2008
While I am glad I read this, I couldn't help comparing it with today's society-building or world-building Speculative Fiction. With that in mind, More's invented society is lacking in depth and completeness. Perhaps my making the comparison is unfair since we're talking 500 years difference (and today's writers have More to look back to). I just added a 4th star for that. It is a required read for anyone wanting to write a similar story or book.
- Amazon Customer Review
• Breath Taking
04 August, 2003
The vivid imagery in this book is so absolutely unbelievable, it's breath taking. What would a perfect society do? Say? Eat? Sir Thomas More gives his version of the perfect society in all its splendor in Utopia. This book is throughly enjoyable for people 12 and above. If you've ever dreamed of a perfect society this is the book for you.
- Amazon Customer Review
• A Great Translation Of A Timeless Classic
28 June, 2006
This edition of Thomas More's Utopia is expertly translated by Adams from the Latin and easy to read. Adams' footnotes are informative and often times a hilarious addition to More's work.
Taking a more modern approach to More, Adam's footnotes suggest that perhaps More does not take his perfect society literally, and expects the reader to read between the lines and see that such a society is obviously not possible. This is a theory of More's thought processes that I agree with, so I found this translation and Adam's thoughts quite welcome and agreeable.
However, there are many schools of thought on the issue as to whether More was completely serious about the suggested society in Utopia, although a knowledge of More as a person would suggest that he employed a subtle sarcasm throughout his life, and therefore it is not a stretch to suggest that Utopia was laced with this same humor and etched with ironic impossibilities that More hoped an educated person would be able to see.
Additionally, the fact that More places himself as a character in the book, and narrates through the use of a man whose name literally translated means "nonsense-peddler" leaves little doubt in my mind that to take More's Utopia at face-value is to do a disservice to More, the intellectual scholar that he was, and Utopia itself.
- Amazon Customer Review
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