Abstract
To write with any confidence about the purposes of a book as notoriously enigmatic as Utopia may seem a very foolhardy enterprise even at this date. Some of the more tendentious interpretations which were put forward in the past have been so convincingly challenged that they can no longer be regarded as seriously tenable: it would require wilful blindness to believe now that More’s book was either a blueprint for a proto-Marxist state or an early plan for British imperialism. Yet disagreement remains such that of the two editors of the standard modern scholarly edition, one regards the passages on Utopian religion and philosophy as a relatively insignificant tour de force (‘humanistic intellectual fancy-work’)1 and the other thinks them so important that he has written two books about them. And I shall have the temerity to argue that the first is mistaken and the second very gravely misinterprets what he rightly sees as important. As I suggested above, literary texts are by nature permanently open to varied interpretation; but of Utopia there is not a normal variety but a quite abnormal multiplicity of mutually contradictory interpretations.
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Notes
J. H. Hexter, The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation (1973) p. 119.
David M. Bevington, ‘The Dialogue in Utopia: Two sides to the Question’, Studies in Philology, vol. 58 (1961), pp.496–509.
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© 1985 Peter New
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New, P. (1985). Utopia: Form as Model. In: Fiction and Purpose in Utopia, Rasselas, The Mill on the Floss and Women in Love. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07704-5_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07704-5_2
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