Abstract
Utopias fail. Utopias of one do not. They are perfect worlds. Yet their success comes at a cost. They are radically singular-and thus exclusive and inimitable. Utopias of One is a major new account of utopian writing. Joshua Kotin examines how eight writers-Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne-construct utopias of one within and against modernity’s two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. The book, in this way, captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds-for themselves alone. Utopias of One makes a vital contribution to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. The book also models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.
Original language | English (US) |
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Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Number of pages | 206 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781400887866 |
ISBN (Print) | 9780691176710 |
State | Published - Jan 1 2017 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- General Arts and Humanities
- General Social Sciences