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Unpacking Utopia. Edition No. 1
VDM Publishing House, May 2009, Pages: 292
English and American literary utopias often use a
travel narrative frame that presents more than a
simple formula for making their fantastic discoveries
and vicarious estrangements seem as credible,
entertaining, and useful to readers as the
real-life adventures and factual accounts of
exploration these fictions have imitated since
Columbus stumbled upon his 'new world.' What becomes
of utopianism's claims to locate intellectual and
speculative resources for human liberation, communal
perfection, and civilized progress in the cultural
properties of imaginary foreigners once its
literature's productive and restrictive relations to
the imperialist, colonialist, and capitalist
ideologies of so-called Western nations have been
exposed? For literary scholars, cultural
historians, and others interested in studying utopian
fiction's generic construction from the
romanticizations of alienation and exploitation that
empowered 500 years of Anglophone empire-building,
this book offers its deconstructive analyses of
paradoxical utopia's parodies of travel and its
discourses.
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