Thomas More's Utopia is one of the most iconic, translated, and influential texts of the European Renaissance. This Handbook of specially commissioned and original essays brings together for the first time three different ways of thinking about the book: in terms of its renaissance contexts, its vernacular translations, and its utopian legacies. It has been developed to allow readers to consider these different facets of Utopia in relation to each other and to provide fresh and original contributions to our understanding of the book's creation, vernacularization, and afterlives. In so doing, it provides an integrated overview of More's text, as well as new contributions to the range of scholarship and debates that Utopia continues to attract. An especially innovative feature is that it allows readers to follow Utopia across time and place, unpacking the often-revolutionary moments that encouraged its translation by new generations of writers as far afield as France, Russia, Japan, and China. The Handbook is organized in four sections: on different aspects of the origins and contexts of Utopia in the 1510s; on histories of its translation into different vernaculars in the early modern and modern eras; and on various manifestations of utopianism up to the present day. The Handbook's Introduction outlines the biography of More, the key strands of interpretation and criticism relating to the text, the structure of the Handbook, and some of its recurring themes and issues. An appendix provides an overview of Utopia for readers new to the text.
Volume editor:
Cathy Shrank,
Phil Withington
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 253mm,
Width: 178mm,
Spine: 50mm
Weight: 1.578kg
ISBN: 9780198881018
ISBN 10: 0198881010
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Pages: 816
Publication Date: 30 November 2023
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Phil Withington and Cathy Shrank: Introduction to Thomas More's Utopia Part One: Origins and Contexts 1: Angie Hobbs: More and the Republics of Plato 2: Carla Suthren: Hythloday's Books: Utopia, Humanism, and the Republic of Letters 3: Andrew Zurcher: Nec minus salutaris quam festivus: Wit, Style, and the Body in More's Utopia 4: David Harris Sacks: The Religions of the Utopians: Sin and Salvation in Thomas More's Utopia 5: Joanne Paul: 'Nothing is private anywhere': Utopia in the context of More's thought 6: Andrew Hadfield: Utopia and Travel Writing 7: Jessica S. Hower: Utopia's Empire: Thomas More's Text and the Early British Atlantic World, c. 1510-1625 8: Eliza Hartrich: The Urban Context for Utopia: The English Urban System, 1450-1516 9: Andrew Taylor: Utopia Unbound: The Fabrication of the First Latin Editions, 1516-1519 Part Two: Translations and Editions, 1524-1799 10: Lucy Nicholas: ad fontes et ad futurum: A Survey of Latin Utopias 11: Gabriela Schmidt: From Prototype to Genre: Translations and Imitations of Utopia in Early Modern Germany (1524-1753) 12: Darcy Kern: Receiving More: Utopia in Spain and New Spain 13: Cathy Shrank: Utopia in Sixteenth-Century Italy 14: Richard Scholar: Inventing Utopia: The Case of Early Modern France 15: Jennifer Bishop: Utopia in Tudor London: Ralph Robinson's Translations and their Civic, Personal, and Political Contexts 16: Dermot Cavanagh: Dialogue, Debate, and Orality in Ralph Robinson's Utopias 17: Wiep van Bunge: 'Het onbekent en wonderlijk Eyland': Frans van Hoogstraten's translation of Utopia (1677) 18: Phil Withington: Utopia and Gilbert Burnet in 1684 19: Floris Verhaart: From Humanism to Enlightenment: Nicolas Gueudeville and his Translation of Thomas More's Utopia 20: Katherine Astbury: Thomas Rousseau, Translator of an Enlightened Utopia Part Three: Translations and Editions after 1800 21: Marcus Waithe: False Friends (and their Uses): Thomas More's Utopia Among the Victorians 22: Janet Stewart: The Cultural Politics of Translation: Translating Thomas More's Utopia into German in the Late Nineteenth Century 23: Frances Nethercott: Not Just a Light-Hearted Joke: Russian Moreana from the Age of Karamzin to the Rise of Social Democracy and Lenin's 'Stele of Freedom' 24: Zsolt Czigányik: Utopia in Eastern Central Europe: The Hungarian Scene 25: Louise Johnson: A Catalan in Search of Humanists: Josep Pin i Soler's Translation of More's Utopia (1912) 26: Cat Moir: The Historical Fallacy: Utopia and the Problem of Fiction in Weimar Germany 27: Teruhito Sako: Japanese Translations of More's Utopia 28: Tehyun Ma: The Multiple Lives of Utopia in Modern China 29: Peter Hill: Utopia and Utopian Writing in Arabic Part Four: Beyond Utopia 30: Chloë Houston: Early Modern Utopian Fiction: Utopia and The Isle of Pines 31: Nicole Pohl: Of Survival and Living Together: The Eighteenth-Century Utopian Novel 32: Ingrid Hanson: Conversation, Formation, and Forms of Utopia in Fin-de-Siècle Socialist Journals 33: Rebecca Weaver-Hightower and Musab Bajaber: Utopia, the Imperial Settler Utopia, and Imperial Settler Science Fiction 34: Johan Siebers: Away from the Ancestral Home: Utopia and Philosophy in Bloch and Beyond 35: Miguel Angel Ramiro Avilés: Human Rights and/in Utopia? 36: Martin Lutz: Utopia and Moral Economy 37: Diane Morgan: Utopia and Architecture 38: Alfred Hiatt: Mapping Utopia 39: Rhys Williams: Contemporary Utopianism: An Island Renaissance Appendix A: Outline of More's Utopia Bibliography
Cathy Shrank took her degrees in Cambridge in the 1990s, and has worked at King's College London, Aberdeen, and Sheffield. She has published extensively on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and culture, and is a scholarly editor of early modern texts, including Shakespeare's Sonnets. Major grants as PI include the AHRC-funded 'Origins of Early Modern Literature', a Major Leverhulme Research Fellowship, and the AHRC-funded project 'Penniless? Thomas Nashe and Precarity in Historical Perspective'. Phil Withington trained as a social and economic historian at Cambridge in the early 1990s and worked at Aberdeen, Leeds, and Cambridge before joining the Department of History at Sheffield in 2012. He has published extensively on social history of the renaissance, urban culture and urbanization, and the history of intoxicants and intoxication. Major grants as PI include an ESRC mid-career fellowship, the ESRC/AHRC-funded project 'Intoxicants and Early Modernity', and the HERA-funded project 'Intoxicating Spaces'.
