Matthew Beaumont

Utopia, Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England, 1870-1900 (Historical Materialism Book Series, Vol. 7) Matthew Beaumont

This book uncovers the historical preconditions for the explosive revival of utopian literature at the nineteenth-century fin de siecle, and excavates its ideological content. It marks a contribution not only to the literary and cultural history of the late-Victorian period, and to the expanding field of utopian studies, but to the development of a Marxist critique of utopianism. The book is particularly concerned with three kinds of political utopia or anti-utopia, those of 'state socialism', feminism, and anti-communism (the characteristic expression of this last example being the cacotopia). After an extensive contextual account of the politics of utropia in late-nineteenth century England, it devotes a chapter to each of these topics before developing an original reinterpretation of William Morris's seminal Marxist utopia, News from Nowhere.