Reference has already been made to the emergence of a distinctive pattern of utopian narrative during the Renaissance, and to its relation to some of the other available narrative models of the period. Before exploring its later transformations, however, it would be helpful to examine its distinguishing features in more detail. As has already been argued, utopian fiction reflects not just the ideological climate of its day, not just the influence of available literary models, but also the writer's own awareness of and response to a specifically utopian literary tradition. This being so, an examination of the earliest exemplars of this tradition, of the works which in so many ways set the agenda for subsequent utopian fiction, may be seen as an essential prerequisite for an understanding of the radical changes in both ideology and narrative structure which such fiction has undergone in the past hundred years.

The obvious starting point for such an examination, of course, is More's Utopia : the work from which the genre itself takes its name. Yet to examine it in isolation presents some equally obvious problems. While, as Morson observes, the whole notion of genre presupposes shared assumptions on the part of both author and reader as to its nature and ruling conventions, it follows that:

Subsequent utopian fictions, in other words, by their common pursuit of some, but not all of the possibilities adumbrated by More, have served to establish a generic model with which the exemplar—Utopia —is only partially congruent.