Histoire transnationale de l'utopie littéraire et de l'utopisme (review)

I.

This is an impressive and fascinating work, one that in its scope and ambition can only be compared to works like Frank Manuel and Fritzi Manuel's 1979 Utopian Thought in the Western World (which is included in the bibliography here, although the Manuels are mistakenly cited as editors rather than authors). Like the earlier study, Vita Fortunati and Raymond Trousson (with the collaboration of Paola Spinozzi) have given us the history of utopian literature, one that avoids some of the limitations of that earlier work by dividing the task up among some eighty contributors. But unlike Fortunati and Trousson's earlier editorial enterprise—The Dictionary of Literary Utopias (Paris: Champion, 2000)—this work is not composed of discreet entries in a reference book but, rather, of contributions to a grand narrative of the genre that they outlined and planned (although they explain at the beginning that they will not cover utopia and utopianism in Africa and Asia). Unfortunately, as with the Manuels' work, the Histoire transnationale gets weaker once it reaches the nineteenth century.

The editors have divided the story of the literary utopia into five periods; after a brief account of the origins of utopian literature, from antiquity through the Middle Ages, the bulk of the work is divided into four periods that are spread over the past five centuries (with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries combined). Each of these periods is organized according to four types of entries. The first, "Beacons," are four or five key utopian works of the period, each presented by a different author, and in most cases they are not an introduction to the work but assume some familiarity with the text. The second type, "Utopianism and the History of Ideas" is perhaps the most interesting section, as different authors present different aspects and features of utopianism within a historical context. The Renaissance, for instance, contains seven essays: on the ideal city in the Renaissance, on the discovery of the Other in Europe (following Las Casas), on geographical discovery and the sociopolitical idea of the utopia, on the city-state in Italy and England, on utopia and political treatise in Italy, on utopian tensions in Florence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and on the reception of More's Utopia in Spain. The third type of chapter—"Utopian Landscapes"—approaches the genre from the various countries in which there was a significant utopian production: in the first period this landscape is made up of England, Italy, and Germany; the second expands with the addition of France, Portugal, and Russia; the nineteenth century sees the addition of the United States (and surprisingly, the exclusion of France); and the utopian landscape of the twentieth century grows to include the Eastern bloc, Spain, South America, and Quebec. This approach works well for the first two periods, but as I shall argue in a moment, it runs into difficulties with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and while England, Germany, and Italy appear in all four periods, other countries appear, or in the case of France, disappear, rather haphazardly. Finally each of the four sections ends with a brief "Synthesis" that attempts to sum up the period and its utopian production. These syntheses, however, are not really very successful and might have worked better as introductions to each section.

II.

Reading the book as a whole is an engrossing process, as key themes appear and are augmented or approached from a different angle from article to article, key players become a footnote in another article, and the situation is reversed in the following piece. Overall, despite some duplication, the fact that each article is written by a different scholar often makes the overlaps more interesting, by adding a fresh perspective, at least through the sections prior to the nineteenth century. Moreover, unlike the Manuels' book, there is much more emphasis on the political and historical context rather than...