Utopia and Its Discontents: Plato to Atwood

Utopia and its Discontents traces literary representations of ideal communities from Plato to the 21st century. Each chapter offers close readings of key utopian and anti-utopian texts to demonstrate how they construct, challenge and explore the ideas and forms of earlier utopian writings and the social and political ideals of their own periods. The book explores how literary utopias are often as much about the past as they are about the present and the future. The study concludes by arguing against the idea of the utopia has been almost entirely eclipsed by the dystopian in contemporary culture
Utopia and Its Discontents covers such topics as:
This is an essential study for students and scholars of utopian literature.