New Worlds Reflected: Travel and Utopia in the Early Modern Period (review)

This collection explores the relationship between travel and utopia, how constructions of idealized societies are related to the condition of their being located elsewhere. Since utopias always embody, in some way, a critique and reflection of the author’s existing society, their construction necessitates a degree of distance between ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’. To contemplate a ‘no-place’ implies a mental, if not a physical, journey, a venturing forth to find new perspectives and points of view. In the early modern period imaginative journeys and conceived alternative societies interacted, often tragically and violently, with hard realities. With European exploration in the New World, imaginative constructions collided with alien societies and geographies, resulting in paradigmatic intellectual shifts and challenges to political, religious, and social traditions.

The volume is predicated on the assumption that, from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) onwards, fictional utopias were indebted to contemporary travel narratives: actual and imaginary journeys of distance and time interacted with mental shifts and intellectual change. The relationship between literary utopias and travel narratives was reciprocal. Travel discourses drew on constructions of utopias in the search for vocabularies and structures that could articulate encounters with the new and the wondrous. The focus of the volume is the rich space of exchange between these two types of writing, thus the essay collection contributes to developments and dialogues in the fields of both utopian and travel literature.

As editor Chloë Houston observes, a utopia is a ‘no-place’ so it is impossible to travel there, yet at the same time the utopian location ‘exists at a distance from the present time and place’ thus ‘utopia simultaneously depends on the idea of travel for its own existence and refutes the possibility that it can be reached through physical journey’ (p. 1). More’s ‘presentation of Utopia as a travel narrative draws attention to the ambiguities and uncertainties of real travel writing’ (p. 2). The ‘inherent untrustworthiness of travel writing itself’ bound it closely to constructions of utopias, which, Houston suggests, may be considered as a form of travel writing (p. 5). Houston and Andrew Hadfield, who provides a useful afterword, observe that travel writing is self-reflexive in nature, always commenting on the here and now, as well as elsewhere.

The volume is divided into three thematic parts: (1) utopia and knowledge, (2) utopian communities and piracy, and (3) utopia and the state, with three essays in each section. The volume presents a diversity of subjects and approaches: some examine fictional worlds in utopian texts, while other contributions consider the worlds presented in travel writing. In the first section, David Harris Sack’s article explores aspects of Richard Hakluyt’s perspectives on the spiritual dimension of England’s quest for empire. From the time of Columbus, for instance, apocalyptic hopes became connected with voyages of discovery, and new geographical knowledge was seen by Hakluyt as analogous to the rebuilding of Solomon’s Temple.

William Poole then explores the origins of science fiction with Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (1634) and Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (1638), which describe imaginary voyages and fictional locations. Line Cottegnies examines the literary and historical contexts of Margaret Cavendish’s The BlazingWorld (1666), such as millenarianism and the impact of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627). Cottegnies sees Cavendish’s text as responding to and critiquing the Baconian ideal.

The second section explores how physical journeys and experiences in the New World interacted with utopian ideals in travellers’ accounts. Kevin P. McDonald’s contribution examines the tragic gap between the promotion of Madagascar as a utopian colonial location and the harsh realities for the English colonists in the seventeenth century. Claire Jowitt then explores how piracy was reframed rhetorically as standard mercantile behaviour in the discourses of empire in Hakluyt’s The Famous Voyage of Sir Francis Drake (1577).

Analisa DeGrave’s study of Palmeres is a particularly intriguing essay about a little-known settlement...