Three Early Modern Utopias by Thomas More

Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. Together these texts illustrate the diversity of the early modern utopian imagination, as well as the different purposes to which it could be put.ĪBOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines (1668), a precursor of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, engages with some of the sexual, racial, and colonialist anxieties of the end of the early modern period. New Atlantis (1627) offers a fictional illustration of Francis Bacon's visionary ideal of the role that science should play in the modern society. This edition also includes two other, hitherto less accessible, utopian narratives. Utopia was only one of many early modern treatments of other worlds. This edition reprints Ralph Robinson's 1556 translation from More's original Latin together with letters and illustrations that accompanied early editions of Utopia. Enormously influential, it remains a challenging as well as a playful text. His Utopia is at once a scathing analysis of the shortcomings of his own society, a realistic suggestion for an alternative mode of social organization, and a satire on unrealistic idealism. With the publication of Utopia (1516), Thomas More introduced into the English language not only a new word, but a new way of thinking about the gulf between what ought to be and what is.

Plato's 'The Republic' is often cited as one of earliest attempts at addressing just such a society.

Thomas More: Utopia/ Francis Bacon: New Atlantis/Henry Neville: The Isle of Pines While Thomas More first coined the word utopia in his 1516 book of the same name, the concept of a near perfect society dates at least back to the period of classical antiquity.

Three Early Modern Utopias by Thomas More