Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Contents
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Utopia of Thomas More
- 3 From Rational Eutopia to Grotesque Dystopia
- 4 Interlude: The Island Syndrome from Atlantis to Lanzarote and Penglai
- 5 Enlightenment Utopias
- 6 Orientalism: European Writers Searching for Utopia in China
- 7 Chinese Philosophers and Writers Constructing Their Own Utopias
- 8 Small-Scale Socialist Experiments, or “The New Jerusalem in Duodecimo”
- 9 Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? and Dostoevsky’s Dystopian Foresight
- 10 When Socialist Utopianism Meets Politics …
- 11 Bellamy’s Solidarity and Its Feminist Mirror Image in Herland
- 12 Chinese Occidentalism: The Nostalgia for a Utopian Past Gives Way to the Idea of Progress
- 13 H.G. Wells and the Modern Utopia
- 14 Dystopian Fiction in the Soviet Union, Proletkult, and Socialist-Realist Utopianism
- 15 Mao Zedong’s Utopian Thought and the Post-Mao Imaginative Response
- 16 Utopias, Dystopias, and Their Hybrid Variants in Europe and America since World War I
- 17 Concluding Observations
- References
- Subject Index
- Index of Names
4 - Interlude: The Island Syndrome from Atlantis to Lanzarote and Penglai
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2021
- Frontmatter
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Contents
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Utopia of Thomas More
- 3 From Rational Eutopia to Grotesque Dystopia
- 4 Interlude: The Island Syndrome from Atlantis to Lanzarote and Penglai
- 5 Enlightenment Utopias
- 6 Orientalism: European Writers Searching for Utopia in China
- 7 Chinese Philosophers and Writers Constructing Their Own Utopias
- 8 Small-Scale Socialist Experiments, or “The New Jerusalem in Duodecimo”
- 9 Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? and Dostoevsky’s Dystopian Foresight
- 10 When Socialist Utopianism Meets Politics …
- 11 Bellamy’s Solidarity and Its Feminist Mirror Image in Herland
- 12 Chinese Occidentalism: The Nostalgia for a Utopian Past Gives Way to the Idea of Progress
- 13 H.G. Wells and the Modern Utopia
- 14 Dystopian Fiction in the Soviet Union, Proletkult, and Socialist-Realist Utopianism
- 15 Mao Zedong’s Utopian Thought and the Post-Mao Imaginative Response
- 16 Utopias, Dystopias, and Their Hybrid Variants in Europe and America since World War I
- 17 Concluding Observations
- References
- Subject Index
- Index of Names
Summary
Until the eighteenth century most European stories about utopian societies were situated on an island. Undoubtedly that convention was partly motivated by the discovery, since the days of Columbus and Vespucci, of faraway territories. Often, the land where seafarers anchored after voyages of many months was an island, with a mild or tropical climate, lush vegetation, and rich wildlife. The natural setting appeared idyllic, and if the inhabitants were not openly hostile their different way of life could arouse the utopian imagination and would stimulate the projection of an ideal state without religious conflict, political corruption, economic hardship, or oppressive sexual morality. Thomas More set an example in this respect too, as his Utopia was situated on an island near the Brazilian coast. The insular geography provided an ideal setting for the construction of a perfect society. The inhabitants could easily ward off unwelcome intruders and contact with the depraved outer world was not encouraged.
The changing European tradition
The seafaring explorers of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were not the first to consider the island a topos of potential bliss. A thousand years earlier the legendary Irish monk Saint Brendan had located a mythical island resembling paradise that some commentators have identified as one of the Canary Islands. Still earlier, in Greek mythology, the Garden of the Hesperides with its much desired sacred apples was situated on an island west of the Strait of Gibraltar, and Plato recorded the oral tradition of the beautiful island of Atlantis to which Bacon referred in his New Atlantis.
Critias, one of the characters in the dialogues Timaeus and Critias, is the major source of information about Atlantis. Plato goes to some lengths to emphasize the historical reliability of Critias’s story by explaining its narrative genealogy. As a young boy Critias had learned from his grandfather about the visit of the statesman and poet Solon (c. 640-c. 560 BCE) to Egypt. An elderly Egyptian priest had told Solon that, different from the Greeks, they had recorded the ancient history of Athens and Atlantis in the sacred writings that were preserved in their temples.
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- Perfect WorldsUtopian Fiction in China and the West, pp. 83 - 94Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2012