Lyman Tower Sargent

Very useful for my purpose, but given that my purpose was 'help me construct a syllabus for a sophomore college class on utopian and dystopian literature,' I'm not sure it'll be useful for your purpose. Sargent has a decent pair of introductory paragraphs, but then turns the whole thing into a long list of utopian texts, traditions, theories and deeds, complete with ultra-compact plot summaries. The good news is that this makes the book perfect as a bibliographical reference tool. The bad news is that it just isn't very interesting. But it is reasonably well written, and a good starting point--and that's presumably the purpose of a very short introduction. Just don't expect a rollicking good time.… (mehr)

From God's Eden to Ursula LeGuin's Odonians, with all sorts of paradises in between --
Ovid's Golden Age, where untilled earth produces corn, milk arrives in rivers, and honey drips from the holmoak tree.
Prester John's magic spring which allows a man to remain age 32 however long he might live.
The land of Cockaigne where the jolly people drink only wine because "Water serveth there no thing/ but for sight and for washing."
Thomas More's UTOPIA (which started the Utopian genre) where "none of their cities may contain above six thousand families" and "they have no lawyers" considering them "as a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters."
Samuel Butler's amazing parody contains the "Colleges of Unreason" where the word "idiot" is defined as "a person who forms his opinions for himself."
The 19th century Shakers live in celibacy and dance like crazy to release sexual tension, yet their neighbors at Oneida practice "complex marriage," every man married to every woman.
Then there are the dystopias, my favorite being Zamyatin's WE, living total transparency in glass houses.… (mehr)