A Short History of Utopian Studies

This article presents a brief review of the constitution and development of utopia as a field of study, with an emphasis on the years preceding its revival in the 1970s. The study follows a similar trajectory to the one outlined in various articles in the special issue of SFS devoted to the history of sf criticism (#78, July 1999)-a growing awareness, first of all, that there are similarities between certain works which lead to attempts to group together such works as well as to identify what they have in common and to give this new genre a name. In the case of utopia, awareness of a new genre can be traced to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as writers imitate More's Utopia (1516), often taking advantage of the imaginary voyage to imagine alternative societies. Until the nineteenth century, however, most commentators continued to use such terms as "political," "allegorical," or "philosophical" to refer to literary utopias, and it was only in the nineteenth century that we can observe the emergence of the term utopia to designate these works. The next step (in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries) was to try to develop a canon of these works, one which, until the 1950s, often explicitly excluded science fiction. The study of utopia took on new life following the upsurge in utopian writing at the beginning of the 1970s.