UTOPIAS from the Bible to the World Wide Web

Home Page for John Lenz's First Year Seminar, Spring 2003

Dep't of Classics, Drew University, Madison, NJ

  (previously offered in Fall 1996 and Spring 2002, and in the Graduate School in Fall 1997)

UTOPIAS:  other mega-sites

Writing Handbook for the Course:  The Longman Writer's Companion

Internet Resources for the Liberal Arts and the Humanities

UTOPIAS IN FICTION AND HISTORY, ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY

ANCIENT

The Garden of Eden: Genesis 1-3;
Paradise: Revelation 17-22.21 (end);
Golden Age (Greek): Hesiod, Works and Days (selection);
Golden Age (Roman): Ovid: in the Norton edition of More, pp. 89-90.

Plato's Republic, The Classic Political Utopia:

THE RENAISSANCE

The First "Utopia":  THOMAS MORE (1478-1535), Utopia (1516)

 The New World as a Utopia: Michel de Montaigne, "Of Cannibals" (trans. by Charles Cotton)

 Campanella, "City of the Sun" (1602, pub. 1623)

 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT

 The First Futurist Utopia (before sci-fi):   Mercier, Louis-Sébastian (1740-1814):

SOCIALIST UTOPIAS: Realizing the Perfect Community in the Real World

Robert Owen (1771-1858): (i) Information & List of Works; (ii) Text of A New View of Society, Or, Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character, and the Application of the Principle to Practice(1813-1816)

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848).

Shakers and American Utopian Communities by Jessica Cook (Worcester Polytechnic Institute; thesis was online)

AMERICA IN NEED OF A UTOPIA (the New World has become an Old World)

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward
Texts (each with convenient chapter-by-chapter table of contents, and completely searchable):
    Looking Backward:  2000-1887(1888)
   Looking Backward:  2000-1887 (1888)
    Looking Backward:  2000-1887 (1888) (same as previous copy)
Edward Bellamy:  A Nineteenth Century Visionary:   page with texts, essays, links
Iceberg: Utopia, Dystopia, and Myopia in the Late-19th Century [America] by Jorn Munkner:   online essay, somewhat idiosyncratic

William Morris,News from Nowhere, or, an Epoch of Rest (1890)
   William Morris Home Page on the Victorian Web
   William Morris and His Circle (exhibit)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935): Herland (1915)

Garden Cities

La-La Land:   Mark Girouard, Cities and People, pp. 348-352 (from New Jerusalem to the Garden City) and pp. 362-375 (Los Angeles, a new garden of Eden?).

John Lennon, "Imagine" (song-lyrics, 1971)

Get Your Utopia Out of My Face!   Dystopias or Anti-Utopias

Zamyatin's We

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (novel of 1986 and film based on it, written by Harold Pinter)

A Green Revolution:  Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia (1975)

The Future in Cyberspace: "someday we're all going to ..."
  Readings on, and about, the World Wide Web and Cyberculture:

John R. Lenz:  e-mail me now orcheck out my Home Page
Associate Professor, Department of Classics,University, Madison, NJ  07940  USA