Unpacking utopia: Uncustomary inspections of the ideological baggage of exploration, empire, and otherness in selected English and American utopian fictions.

摘要

This study in literary utopia places critical focus on the travel narrative frame that conventional interpretation reads only as a simplistic formula for giving verisimilitude to the genre's discovery plots, credibility to its imaginary social alternatives, and vicarious estrangement to its readers, who are thereby invited to suspend disbelief so that they may instead evaluate whether political institutions and communal practices so depicted offer models for improving their society. Re-examination of canonical English and American utopian fictions published over the course of these nations' colonial and post-colonial relationships suggests that utopian travel's significance as utopian realism's transparent mediator has elided the ways it subjects utopian imagination to the ideological demands of empire-building. Utopianism's search for communal ideals and structures to rectify the disadvantages and displacements of oppressed groups not only develops within the interplay of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism but also romanticizes the alienation, egression, and exploitation on which this triangulation of socio-political power depends; conventional literary utopia de-realizes both internal and external threats to nation and empire by defining disaffected travelers and foreign Others as resources indispensable to the eutopian perfection of hegemonic systems. Analyses of Utopia (1516), New Blazing World (1666), and Herland (1915) challenge familiar habits of reading to argue that these texts do not model ideal solutions for societal ills; they use parody of literary utopia's acquisitive foreign travels and eutopological idealism to resist and expose ideological pressures and discursive practices seen as enforcing politicized limits on utopianism's critical and creative energies. While these chapters demonstrate a need for continued reassessment of utopian fiction's role in reproducing, reshaping, or rejecting Anglophone imperialisms, from the early modern period to the present, the last tests twentieth-century feminist utopian fiction's claim to constitute a radical oppositional discourse. Analysis of the time and multidimensional travel plots in Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and The Female Man (1975) and comparative inquiry into the Xenogenesis trilogy (1987--89) and Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1990) lead this study to conclude that utopia remains an ambiguous promise of oppression and liberation.