UTOPIA THOMAS MORE DAVID WOOTTON FREE

She is excellent on the tension in Bacon between veiling and revelation, on his providential history and vision of human empire, and on the relevance of his recent disgrace to New Atlantean politics. masters rather than shadows its materials, in which the distance between the original and its image is essentially erased, and each counterfeit is new made in its own image', but I may be kidding myself). Leslie then turns to The New Atlantis, on which, again, she is most interesting when least vatic (I think I fathom the statement that Bacon's 'poesis. But many will relish her observations on the garland from which hangs the 1518 map of Utopia, the shape of Utopian letters, and the complexities of Utopian placenames. between Utopia's entry into history and the rhetorical construction of self' (43). Some statements, again, are provocative but cryptic: thus a certain woodcut shows how 'the gulf bet ween Utopia and Hythlodaeus spans the divide. Noting Renaissance humanists' contradictory desire to locate cultural difference and exemplary models, Leslie scrutinizes Utopian maps and alphabet (a glance at the antipodean maps of Joseph Hall's Mundus alter et Idem would have deepened the historical argument). This last needs more precise definition, as does 'humanist,' if only because cultural materialism's despised 'other' - that 'liberal humanist,' poor naive fellow - should not be confused with the elusive More, whose own historicism, as witness his Richard III, wavered between cagey irony and tragic skepticism. The chapters on More's Utopia thus offer 'a map of the uneven topography of humanist historicism' (26) and comment on how Utopia relates to 'the humanist historical project' (30). Leslie's first chapter argues that we too often mistake utopia for accurate prophecy or unrealizable dream, not the 'allegoresis of history' that it really is (13). Boswell shows how the English read Utopia as everything from program to fantasy Logan writes tellingly on the irresponsibility of seeing only More's playfulness.

Two works missing here would have served her well: Jackson Boswell's 1994 compilation of printed English allusions to More up to 1640 and George Logan's The Meaning of Thomas More's Utopia. (Evidently the anthropomorphizing of texts continues apace: 'authors' lie stiffening in the postmodern morgue while texts enjoy some get-up-and-go, even if, on page 1, a utopia is also 'enmeshed in a web of historical contingencies to which it cannot but draw attention even as it struggles to escape.') Hoping to focus on the (unspecified) 'models for historical transformation engaged and revised' by these utopias, Leslie says she will analyze 'the history and politics of reading utopia' and trace 'utopia's shifting location in the historical imagination.' Too tall an order, probably, for so short a book: the 'contingencies' are only minimally sketched in and this 'historical imagination' barely traced. In her clever if elusive study of utopian fictions by More, Bacon, and Margaret Cavendish, Marina Leslie says that she will treat early modern utopias not as 'self-reflexive retreat from history' or 'self-annihilating exposure Es] of it' but as 'a critical practice investigating the historical subject in the interrogative mode' (8).

Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1999. Utopia with Erasmus's 'The Sileni of Alcibiades.' Ed. Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History. APA style: Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History.Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History.' Retrieved from 2000 Renaissance Society of America 14 Jun.

UTOPIA THOMAS MORE DAVID WOOTTON FREE

MLA style: 'Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History.' The Free Library.

Utopia thomas more david wootton