Thomas More: Utopia/ Francis Bacon: New
Atlantis/Henry Neville: The Isle of Pines With the
publication of Utopia (1516), Thomas More introduced
into the English language not only a new word, but a new
way of thinking about the gulf between what ought to be
and what is. His Utopia is at once a scathing analysis
of the shortcomings of his own society, a realistic
suggestion for an alternative mode of social
organization, and a satire on unrealistic idealism.
Enormously influential, it remains a challenging as well
as a playful text. This edition reprints Ralph
Robinson's 1556 translation from More's original Latin
together with letters and illustrations that accompanied
early editions of Utopia. Utopia was only one of many
early modern treatments of other worlds. This edition
also includes two other, hitherto less accessible,
utopian narratives. New Atlantis (1627) offers a
fictional illustration of Francis Bacon's visionary
ideal of the role that science should play in the modern
society. Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines (1668), a
precursor of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, engages with some
of the sexual, racial, and colonialist anxieties of the
end of the early modern period.Together these texts
illustrate the diversity of the early modern utopian
imagination, as well as the different purposes to which
it could be put. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years
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