Abstract
In the 1880s, the idea of a fourth dimension of space broke loose from the fevered discussions of mathematicians and geometers to emerge as a fertile utopia. It was, after all, both an exemplary ‘no place’, accessible only to the mind or the imagination and — at least in its popular iterations of the 1880s and 1890s — an exemplary ‘good place’, promising universality, the progressive evolution of the human consciousness and access to super-human powers. With the fin de siècle, however, this speculative utopia had in certain manifestations turned sour, reflecting concerns over the ways that science and empire had reconfigured space in this period.
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Blacklock, M. (2012). ‘On the Eve of the Fourth Dimension’: Utopian Higher Space. In: Gregory, R., Kohlmann, B. (eds) Utopian Spaces of Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230358300_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230358300_3
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