Utopia (Norton Critical Editions) by
Thomas More
Literary Garden Of Eden
Robert M. Adams’s celebrated translation of Utopia has been meticulously
revised for the Second Edition of this Norton Critical Edition as have the
accompanying annotations. Backgrounds is designed to assist student
readers in an appreciation of Utopia by shedding light on the different
points of view contemporary with More’s work. Included are new
selections from Saint Benedict and Tasso, as well as a medieval satire on
the land of Cockayne. The Humanist Circle, a carefully chosen
selection of letters, includes another important contribution by Erasmus.
Criticism includes five new thought-provoking essays by Alistair Fox,
Edward L. Surtz, G. R. Elton, Northrop Frye, and Robert M. Adams.
Also new are selections from two modern anti-utopias or quasi-utopias—
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two—plus
a selection from Edward Bellamy’s once futuristic but now almost
contemporary Looking Backward, which may be compared and contrasted
with More’s masterpiece. An updated Selected Bibliography is also
included. .

Personal Review: Utopia (Norton Critical Editions) by Thomas
More
This was required reading for a graduate course in the Humanities. A
great story and important historical work in literature. History of Utopia
begins with Thomas Moore's book in 1516 he coins the phrase Utopia.
Ideal societies have been around before like Garden of Eden, city on a hill.
For Moore the idea of utopia was intended to be an ironic one. One of the
problems you are faced with when reading his utopia is that you cannot
really tell when he is serious and when he is being satirical. He writes on
the border of the lyrical and satirical, you cannot really tell when he is
trying to be funny or serious. The other problem is the Thomas Moore who
speaks to us in the story is not the Thomas Moore who actually lived. He
wrote himself into a character. He is intending it to be ironic. Utopia is
Greek for "Good Place, and "no place." He is punning an ironic two-sided
term he clearly intended irony when he wrote this text, which provided the
foundation for a new genre for social representation. Now, according to
Lewis Mumford, who wrote the book "The Story of Utopia" 1922, one of the
first comprehensive studies of Utopian representation in Western
Civilization, the word Utopia signifies human folly or human hope, the vain
hope of perfection. The vain hope of remaking our own imperfect natures,
so that we can establish the blissful harmonious communal life. On one
hand, he is entirely playful and paradoxical. Thomas Moore could be
bigoted (against Protestants), small minded, not a saint as portrayed.
Among all the things, he was a great wit, great sense of humor. On the
other hand, it seems that Utopia could be a reflection of his devout
Catholicism. He has been represented as a Roman Catholic martyr. In
which case you want to take him seriously, altering the model of menses a
set of new aims for moral and social objectives. Of course, Moore's death
is important to consider in this life he is glorified in the film, "A Man for All
Seasons." He was a Renaissance man, he was a lawyer, statesman,
Christian humanist a classical scholar an advocate for women's rights he
was also Henry 8's Lord Chancellor.
In 1514, he was sent to Flanders to negotiate a wool treaty and while
there, he meets and befriends Peter Giles who is the town clerk of
Antwerp, and allegedly tells him "It is my intention to write a book about the
way a country should be governed according to my principals. But, it is
dangerous to write about those things in England while king Henry the 8
wrath is so easily encouraged, I could perhaps write that I met an old sailor
in your house and introduce that man as a globetrotter, who had traveled
all over the world and had seen places that we don't even know the
existence of. What he had seen there was so unbelievable as compared
to the life in Europe that the islands the countries he had visited would
seem to belong to another world. Therefore, the title of my book will be
"Utopia" a word that means "no where." That sailor will have traveled all
over Europe and lived sometime in France Germany, and England. That is
why he could compare the ideal community he got acquainted with in
Utopia, to the ones he got to know in our countries, and that way I would

keep myself out of the matter." After he returned to London, he wrote the
fist chapter. Now, what would that tell us about the Utopian imagination,
the creation the public presentation of a Utopia? Moore was beheaded in
1535; he would not recognize marriage to Ann Boleyn as lawful to the
church. In 1534, Henry becomes head of the church, but Moore remains
loyal to pope. In 1935, Moore is canonized. We have to take Moore's
religion very seriously. Moore thought Protestants should be burned, he
was greedy and proud, not a perfect man. Yet he had this wish for a
Utopia.
All utopian fictional ideas of mythic proportion occupy kind of distant realm
of the afterlife, myth, faith that unite all of these elements in a matter that is
so rich and potentially illuminating and invaluable for scholars students that
are interested in working across boundaries and in understanding and
exploring the value of working across boundaries. Societies woven and
inhabited by populations some of them very select, the exceptionally
virtuous or blessed in some cases getting there requires a metaphysical
transformation, in other cases it requires a harrowing journey that has to
be understood as some ways metaphorical and some ways literal. There
is always a sense that to reach Utopia requires a transformation of the
human self how do we get away from our flaws, how do we get away from
our seemingly inevitable and invariable nature of our being.
These places offer anecdotes to painful and tragic realities to human
existence. They are historical in nature you cannot understand any utopia,
whether it is represented in a sci-fi movie, or novel or feminist utopia; they
must be placed in some kind of a historical context. A fascinating
proposition to explore, all utopias all acts of the utopian imagination strike
us as constituting in one manner or another statements, critiques or
observations about the world we occupy at that given moment. Therefore,
any utopia is a reflection and study of the world that we are occupying at
that given moment and what we wish it were rather than what it is at that
moment. Therefore, utopia is a deeply and inescapably a historical
manner organizing the human imagination. I don't think any utopia works
in a fixed and eternal way because for every generation and every age
they have to imagine their own utopia. Of course utopian experiments
were not just talking about fiction or wishing it were so, were talking about
actual Soviet Revolution of 1917, were looking at movements looking to
bring about radical profound social and political changes that are so deeply
utopian in nature. So utopians are aesthetic, philosophical, sociological,
they are imagined and fictional, but you can look a history and find
attempts most of which failed to bring about these kind of communities that
Emerson, Thoreau, these 19th century American egalitarian attempts to
create the ideal agrarian society. 1960 hippies reawakening movement of
going back to the natural and living off the land. Even today's green and
ecological revolution you find in them utopian aspects that resonate so
richly with the history of envisioning the ideal society, an ideal place.

Oscar Wilde once said "A map of the world that does not include Utopia, is
not even worth glancing at for it leaves out the one country at which
humanity has always landed, and when humanity lands there it looks out
sees a better country set sail. Progress is the realization of utopias." So
when we talk about utopias we are not only talking about a desire or a wish
or a longing for perfection, we are talking about an order of progress, a
way in which we intend to advance, a way in which we envision or imagine
improvement and progress. A progress narrative, psychoanalysis is
utopian. Freud's theory of psychoanalysis is a scientific expression of the
utopian imagination. The idea that where id was, the ego shall be. The
idea of a talking story, the idea that we can master our neurosis that we
can harness them that we can move from unconscious behavior to
conscious behavior. Marxism and all the grand philosophies of the 19th
and 20th centuries are grand utopian narratives. Feminism is a grand
utopian narrative in and of itself.
Recommended reading for anyone interested in history, psychology,
philosophy, and literature.
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