Bøger i Utopianism and Communitarianis serien

This collection speaks to common themes and strategies in women's writing about their different worlds, from Margaret Cavendish's seventeenth-century Blazing World of the North Pole to the "men-less" islands of the French writer Scudery to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century utopias of Shelley and Gaskell, and science fiction pulps, finishing with the more contemporary feminist fictions of Le Guin, Wittig, Piercy, and Michison. It shows that these fictions historically speak to each other and together amount to a literary tradition of women's writing about a better place.

In the mid 1800s, deep in the Long Island pine barrens, Modern Times was established as an experimental community whose members would not be bound by any government, church, constitution, or bylaws. Never more than 150 strong, set on a plat of only 90 acres, here was a haven for nonconformists. Its currency was words; its religion was discussion; its standard of conduct was unfettered individual freedom. Low Living and High Thinking at Modern Times, New York rescues this model village from obscurity and demonstrates its importance in the history of American communitarianism and social reform, especially in its pursuit of economic justice, women's rights, and free love. The first full-length study of Modern Times, Wunderlich's account offers telling portraits of this small but significant group of reformers, pioneers, freethinkers, and sexual radicals. For 13 years they tested the precepts of the founders of the community, the philosophical anarchists Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews, who advocated the sovereignty of the individual and private, but profitless enterprise. Each person lived as he or she pleased, provided this did not impair the right of another to do the same; and each traded goods and services at cost, rather than market value, enabling cash-poor pioneers to own homesteads. The community championed every kind of reform, from abolitionism, women's rights, and vegetarianism to hydropathy, pacifism, total abstinence, and the bloomer costume. Indifference to marital status and the advocacy of a free-love vanguard contributed to the community's controversial and somewhat illicit reputation. In 1864, seeking to remove themselves from the limelight, Modern Times'sremaining settlers renamed the village Brentwood. Wunderlich pieces together the village, person-by-person, by relying on primary sources such as land deeds, census entries, and eyewitness accounts. He also sheds new light on Warren and Andrews, two key figures in the communitarian movement, and discusses at length such important contemporaries as Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols, Robert Owen, John Humphrey Noyes, Horace Greeley, John Stuart Mill, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and George Ripley.

Qingyun Wu's work is a unique discovery in literary studies in the West. Chinese utopian literature paired with its English counterparts form an original and valuable contribution to world literature. In widely varying historical and cultural texts that span the last five centuries, Wu analyzes the theme of female rule, including a critique of patriarchy and emphasizing a vision for women. To date, Chinese utopias have been insufficiently explored and unavailable to Western scholars. Wu's theories of the politics of female rule, as seen in Chinese and English literature since the end of the sixteenth century, are predicated on three significant changes that have taken place during those periods. These include an outright rejection of rule by women to rule by women in the guise of men, from individual to collective>Works examined include Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen, Luo Maodeng's Sanbao's Expedition to the Western Ocean, Florence Dixie's Gloriana, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed, Chen Duansheng's The Destiny of the Next Life, Li Ruzhen's The Flowers in the Mirror, and Bai Hua's The Remote Country of Women. This critical view of the development of feminist utopias in both the East and West will be of interest to scholars of women's studies, political science, and anthropology as well as to those in literature for both the classical and modern periods.