When future intellectual historians come to examine the second half of the twentieth century, they may well be struck by what might seem a widespread penchant for premature obituaries. During this period there have been announced not only the Death of the Novel, and of the Author, but also the End of Ideology, and even—in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet bloc—the End of History. Yet while all the above appear to be carrying on their way unperturbed by announcements of their demise, the status of another alleged casualty—utopia—is more questionable. It is significant, for example, that two of the most important surveys of utopian writing in recent years, the Manuels’ Utopian Thought in the Western World (1979), and Krishan Kumar's Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (1987), while reflecting widely differing ideological stances, should both reach pessimistic conclusions as to the future of utopia. Against this, of course, one might cite such phenomena as the new wave of feminist utopian writing during the 1970s, the re-evaluation of utopianism by Marxist theorists such as Ernst Bloch, or the significant expansion of the field of utopian studies over the past twenty years. Yet while this has led some commentators to conclude, more optimistically, that new approaches to utopia have opened up a promising new field of oppositional struggle on the cultural front, a more cynical assessment of such renewed critical interest in utopian studies might be that the academy is where ideas end up when they have nowhere else to go.

Contradictory viewpoints, however, are scarcely new in the field of utopian studies: indeed, it has become something of a commonplace that the very concept of utopia itself is one fraught with contradictions and ambiguity. Whether such contradictions and ambiguity are disabling, or enabling, however, is another matter. Whether utopia's inherent contradictions inevitably undermine the social alternatives portrayed, leading to an equally inevitable reinscription of most of the inequities it seeks to resolve, or whether by contrast such contradictions open the way to the fruitful exploration of diverse possibilities remains open to debate— although in recent discussions of utopia an increasingly common critical narrative appears to be that, while the former used to be the case, new ways of both writing and reading utopias are now making the latter increasingly possible.