Utopian fiction is arguably the most political of all literary genres and can be studied from a literary as well as a political point of view. Political scientists have taken the vantage point of their own discipline in their studies of utopian designs and projects. However, in my examination of utopian narratives, I have chosen the framework of literary scholarship, assuming, as Ricoeur has done, that narration employs specific strategies of persuasion that expository arguments do not and that the cognitive and emotive effects of narration on the readers’ mind differ from those of predominantly rational expositions. In a literary reading, formal devices, such as metaphor and hyperbole, setting and plot, irony and parody, add to the significance of a text. Historical research about the rise and diffusion of a literary genre requires examination of the reception of texts, including creative response, rewriting, and intertextual relations.

Writers of utopian fiction often emphasize the literary tradition to which they wish to belong. They claim a respectable lineage and by doing so underscore the respectability of the genre as well as their own utopian narrative. For instance, Cabet refers in his utopian novel to Rousseau, Campanella, Bacon, Thomas More, and Plato. Wells cites Bellamy, Morris, Cabet, Bacon, and Campanella, and also More and Plato. Skinner mentions a similar list of predecessors, including new names such as Thoreau, Butler, and Hilton. Such tributes to the authors of utopian fiction indicate the awareness of a limited and valuable body of utopian narratives – a “canon” of utopian literature – that have influenced the selection of texts discussed in this book.

In Chinese literature, intertextual references similarly provide a lead for finding interesting utopian texts. Here Confucius’ utopia, which can be gleaned from the Analects, is a point of departure and has triggered both approbatory and, in modern times, rather critical reactions; the Confucian legacy has been subjected to fundamental criticism in Lu Xun’s dystopian narratives. Lao She shows in his Cat Country to be indebted to Swift; Lin Yutang refers to Rousseau and Zhuang Zi; Wang Shuo’s dystopian fiction ridicules the heroic, indeed utopian, models of Maoist times.