Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel

Jason H. Pearl

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813936246
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Historians of the Enlightenment have studied the period's substantial advances in world cartography, as well as the decline of utopia imagined in geographic terms. Literary critics, meanwhile, have assessed the emerging novel's realism and in particular the genre's awareness of the wider world beyond Europe. Jason Pearl unites these lines of inquiry in Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel, arguing that prose fiction from 1660 to 1740 helped demystify blank spaces on the map and make utopia available anywhere. This literature incorporated, debunked, and reformulated utopian conceptions of geography.

Reports of ideal societies have always prompted skepticism, and it is now common to imagine them in the future, rather than on some undiscovered island or continent. At precisely the time when novels began turning from the fabulous settings of romance to the actual locations described in contemporaneous travel accounts, a number of writers nevertheless tried to preserve and reconfigure utopia by giving it new coordinates and parameters.

Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and others told of adventurous voyages and extraordinary worlds. They engaged critically and creatively with the idea of utopia. If these writers ultimately concede that utopian geographies were nowhere to be found, they also reimagine the essential ideals as new forms of interiority and sociability that could be brought back to England. Questions about geography and utopia drove many of the formal innovations of the early novel. As this book shows, what resulted were new ways of representing both world geography and utopian possibility.

Bibliography

Adams, John. “Outer Space and the New World in the Imagination of Eighteenth-Century Europeans.” Eighteenth-Century Life 19.1 (1995): 70–83.

Adams, Percy G. Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983.

Addison, Joseph. Cato. The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama. Ed. J. Douglas Canfield et al. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2001. 186–216.

Addison, Joseph, and Richard Steele. The Spectator. 5 vols. Ed. Donald F. Bond. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.

Ahmed, Siraj. The Stillbirth of Capital: Enlightenment Writing and Colonial India. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Albanese, Denise. New Science, New World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.

Alkon, Paul K. Origins of Futuristic Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 2006.

Anderson, Misty. “Tactile Places: Materializing Desire in Margaret Cavendish and Jane Barker.” Textual Practice 13 (1999): 329–52.

Anderson, William S. “Paradise Gained by Horace, Lost by Gulliver.” Yearbook of English Studies 14 (1984): 151–66.

Anderson, Virginia DeJohn. “New England in the Seventeenth Century.” The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 1. Ed. William Roger Lewis et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 193–217.

Andreae, Johann Valentin. Christianopolis. Trans. and ed. Felix Emil Held. New York: Oxford University Press, 1916.

Appelbaum, Robert. “Anti-geography.” Early Modern Literary Studies 4.2 (1998): 1–17.

———. Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Appleby, John C. “Women and Piracy in Ireland: From Gráinne O’Malley to Anne Bonny.” Bandits at Sea: A Pirates Reader. Ed. C. R. Pennell. New York: New York University Press, 2001. 283–98.

Aravamudan, Srinivas. “Defoe, Commerce, and Empire.” The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe. Ed. John Richetti. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 45–63.

———. Enlightenment Orientalism: Reconsidering the Rise of the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

———. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.

Archer, John Michael. Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993.

Armitage, David. The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

———. How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

———, ed. Theories of the Novel Now. Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42.2–43.1 (2009–10).

Armstrong, Nancy, and Leonard Tennenhouse. The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Astell, Mary. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. Ed. Patricia Springborg. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2002.

Aubin, Penelope. The Noble Slaves. London, 1722.

Azim, Firdous. The Rise of the Colonial Novel. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Backscheider, Paula R. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

———. Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.

Backscheider, Paula R., and John Richetti, eds. Popular Fiction by Women, 1660–1720: An Anthology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Bacon, Francis. The Works of Francis Bacon. Ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath. 15 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900.

Baczko, Bronislaw. Utopian Lights: The Evolution of the Idea of Social Progress. Trans. Judith L. Greenberg. New York: Paragon House, 1989.

Baer, Joel H. “Bold Captain Avery in the Privy Council: Early Variants of a Broadside Ballad from the Pepys Collection.” Folk Music Journal 7 (1995): 4–26.

———, ed. British Piracy in the Golden Age. 4 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007.

———. “‘Captain John Avery’ and the Anatomy of a Mutiny.” Eighteenth-Century Life 18.1 (1994): 1–26.

———. “‘The Complicated Plot of Piracy’: Aspects of English Criminal Law and the Image of the Pirate in Defoe.” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 23 (1982): 3–26.

Bailyn, Bernard. Atlantic History: Concept and Contours. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Bailyn, Bernard, and Philip D. Morgan. Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Balasopoulos, Antonis. “‘Suffer a Sea Change’: Spatial Crisis, Maritime Modernity, and the Politics of Utopia.” Cultural Critique 63 (2006): 123–56.

———. “Unworldly Worldliness: America and the Trajectories of Utopian Expansionism.” Utopian Studies 15.2 (2004): 3–35.

———. “Utopia Insulae Figura: Utopian Insularity and the Politics of Form.” Transtext(e)s/Transcultures: Journal of Global Cultural Studies 4 (2008): 22–38.

Ballaster, Ros. Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

———. “New Hystericism: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko; The Body, the Text, and the Feminist Critic.” New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts. Ed. Isobel Armstrong. New York: Routledge, 1992. 283–95.

———. “Restoring the Renaissance: Margaret Cavendish and Katherine Philips.” Renaissance Configurations: Voices, Bodies, Spaces, 1580–1690. Ed. Gordon McMullan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. 234–52.

———. Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684–1740. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.

Bannet, Eve Tavor. “Secret History; or, Talebearing Inside and Outside the Secretorie.” Huntington Library Quarterly 68 (2005): 375–96.

———. Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720–1810: Migrant Fictions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Barnes, Geraldine. “Curiosity, Wonder, and Dampier’s Painted Prince.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 6.1 (2006): 31–50.

Barnes, Geraldine, and Adrian Mitchell. “Measuring the Marvelous: Science and the Exotic in William Dampier.” Eighteenth-Century Life 23.3 (2002): 45–57.

Barthes, Roland. “The Reality Effect.” The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. 141–48.

———. S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974.

Battigelli, Anna. Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998.

Bauer, Ralph. The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, and Modernity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Beach, Adam R. “Behn’s Oroonoko, the Gold Coast, and Slavery in the Early Modern Atlantic World.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 39 (2010): 215–33.

Beckles, Hilary M. “The ‘Hub of Empire’: The Caribbean and Britain in the Seventeenth Century.” The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 3. Ed. William Roger Lewis et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 218–39.

Behn, Aphra. The Works of Aphra Behn. Ed. Janet Todd. 7 vols. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1995.

Bender, John. Ends of Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.

———. Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Bennett, Jonathan. Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Central Themes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Benton, Lauren. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One Utopia and Geography
• Two The Flickering Blazing World
• Three Remembering Paradise in Oroonoko
• Four Urban Solitude and the Crusoe Trilogy
• Five Piracy and Brotherhood in Captain Singleton
• Six Misanthropia and Gulliver’s Travels
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index