Abstract

Utopian Moments is an edited volume of essays with an exceptionally wide reach, covering 250 years of the utopian canon, from More's archetype to Le Guin's The Dispossessed. The editors, Miguel A. Ramiro Avilés and J. C. Davis, clearly favor the classics, or what Lyman Tower Sargent, in his contribution, calls "exemplars of the mainstream of utopian writing". All the usual suspects are here—Campanella, Bacon, Harrington, Fourier, Owen, Bellamy, Wells, and others—plus a few "wild cards" thrown in to keep things interesting. True, similar projects have been done before. Claeys's excellent Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature and Claeys and Sargent's comprehensive Utopian Reader...