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The last years of the 19th century witnessed a significant surge in both the production and the popularity of narrative utopias. Its causes are multiple and include the crisis, particularly in advanced industrial capitalist societies, of laissez-faire capitalism and the rise of capitalist monopolies; the increasing threat of downward mobility or dependency for the professional and mercantile middle classes; the rising militancy of the labor movement; and the emergence of socialist (as well as anarchist) political parties and movements. Narratives informed by utopian speculation as well as dystopian anxiety (within or outside utopian fiction proper) thus became means through which writers and readers in industrial capitalist societies of the fin de siècle responded to the crisis of legitimacy of an earlier faith in unimpeded progress, filling the void opened up by the increasingly visible failures of free-trade capitalism and the comparative impotence of economic and political alternatives during the period. Dozens of utopian literary fictions and some properly dystopian ones were published, but Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) form indisputable cornerstones, being the century’s most popular and most aesthetically celebrated utopian literary texts, respectively. Additionally, they are works that are closely interlinked, not only because Morris’s “utopian romance” was significantly motivated by his critical reading of Bellamy but also because both texts dramatize the ambivalence with which earlier (Enlightenment and early 19th-century) ideas of historical progress had come to be viewed by the century’s end. They do so through fictional frameworks that either complicate or severely problematize the certainties of earlier, mostly non-narrative utopias. Despite its popularity, Looking Backward has long tended to be critically underestimated for a variety of reasons, including its anti-political implications, its naïve progressivism, its statism and its emphasis on consumerism, its apparent hostility to working-class militancy, and its stale portrayals of femininity. Curiously, such underestimation coincides with Bellamy’s own largely dismissive attitude toward the literary qualities of his text, which he came to see as merely instrumental in communicating doctrinal content. Matters, however, are very different once Looking Backward is considered from the standpoint of form: the ideological certainties of progress are undermined by the complexities presented in “gazing backward,” confidence in the future is vitiated by moments of intense anxiety and the encounter with the uncanny, the complexities and ambiguities involved in the framing of the fiction undermine the idea of its mere instrumentality. Ultimately, the effect of estrangement that Bellamy’s narrative generates tends toward a genuinely cognitive direction—that of historicizing his own present rather than proffering anodyne solutions for the future. Notwithstanding Morris’s own stark criticism of Bellamy’s narrative and the effective replication of its premises by later critical appraisals, News from Nowhere is, on closer inspection, far more dialogically related to its precedent than has frequently been supposed. For it features both a very similar device of narrative framing (with a narrator who sleeps and wakes into a utopian future) and very similar preoccupations with the dystopian underside of utopian visions of redeemed futurity. Of course, there are important differences, as well: Morris eschews not only the urban and administratively centralized emphases involved in Bellamy’s fiction but also—by and large—the reliance on a fully developed rational blueprint for the future, focusing instead on the lived experience of utopian difference and hence on the education of desire. This last has important theoretical consequences for the very way in which utopia would be henceforth conceptualized, particularly by Marxist literary criticism: the utopian text emerges as something far more complex than an illustration of preconceived ideological theses: it is an open-ended experiment that aims to make place for a radical openness to possibility rather than to provide ready-made doctrinal answers.

From its earliest beginnings in the Western world to the end of the Renaissance, utopian literature has developed in four primary ways: as myth about the blissful but vanished past of humanity; as prophecy about a future state of bliss, particularly in millennial visions of the post-apocalyptic kingdom of God; as explicitly posited philosophical and rationalist speculation on how an ideal or at least plausibly better city and society could be attained; and as full-blown fiction, which deploys a range of fictional speech acts. Though in certain ways its ideational origins lie in a rich interplay of topoi derived from mythic antiquity and from the Hellenistic, Roman, and early Christian cultural world, utopian literature in its most formally complex form—that of the utopian fiction—only arises in the Renaissance. In this form, which will ultimately yield the utopian novel of the 19th century, the literary utopia occupies an idiosyncratic position between realism and fantasy fiction, lacking grounding in verisimilar space or time, but also eschewing the ahistoricism and escapism of fantasy. Utopian literature has been mostly understood in terms of moral and sociological functions, ranging from its utility as an instrument of anticipation, or at least fertile speculation about the possible and desirable, to its ability to posit norms and regulatory ideals or, more negatively, its penchant for dogmatism and the abstractions of blueprint and method. A different picture emerges, however, if one considers utopias from the standpoint of how they produce social meaning—an approach that foregrounds the role of textual and semiotic factors without making ethical assumptions about the better or worse character of utopian textual worlds. At stake, rather, is the grasp of utopian literature in terms of an organizational imaginary, according to which society is something that can be beneficially re-formed and rearranged after first being critically analyzed as to its constitutive elements and institutions. At their earliest, utopias were the repository of myths about a world free from the pains of labor and the horrors of war, from greed and often from private property as well. By the time of Plato’s philosophical writings in the 4th century bce, utopian vision had become at once more modest and more realistic and technical, most prominently in its connection to social engineering. The earliest elements of playful fictionality emerge in the Hellenistic world, which incorporates the theme of travel and the element of the marvelous, often in a satirical vein. The early Christian world tends toward a divide between allegorical abstraction, particularly in elite versions of Christian Neoplatonism, and the more heterodox possibilities of divinely mediated subversion of established social forms and structures in the millenarianism of the lower classes. The Renaissance utopia, finally, emerges after Sir Thomas More’s homonymous text of 1516 as a complex synthesis and mediation between elite and subaltern pursuits, antiquity and modernity, Christian morality and scientific materialism, constituting utopists themselves as mediators and guarantors of social harmony in an otherwise rapidly changing and turbulent world.