To help with a broader perspective..
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Ideas@h-net.msu.edu (October 2003)
Robert Appelbaum. _Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England_. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xi +
256 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-521-81082-5.
Reviewed for H-Ideas by Arthur Williamson <williamsonah@csus.edu>;, Department of History, California State University, Sacramento
Utopia and the Construction of Modernity
Between James VI and I's accession to the English throne in 1603 and the consolidation of the Stuart Restoration in about 1670, English society witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of utopian political writing. So Robert Appelbaum maintains, and his claims go further. The period, he says, comprises "a unique epoch," one which promoted political idealism through a wide literature in ways both unprecedented and never again repeated (p. 8). For Appelbaum, this utopian literature eventually extended to speeches, political pamphlets, sermons, constitutions, systematic treatises--in addition to more imaginary works such as dramas, poetry, and "utopias" as commonly understood.
