근현대 영미문학 속 유토피아 연구

Abstract

This study aims to genealogically investigate the history of utopia in English/American fictions by employing spatial theory and closely reading three fictions: Thomas More’s Utopia, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2002-1887, William Morris’s News From Nowhere. Those fictions represent utopias differently in terms of space, social institution and ideology. Thomas More’s Utopia, a harbinger of utopian ideas and imagination, represents utopian space as an insulated space where equality dominates and people work collectively and live together. The space in Utopia contains the idea of flawless society which resembles no less socialist’s space than communist’s one. The tradition of utopia develops via several thinkers’ ideas and practices including Charles Fourier, Charles Henri de Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen. Those thinkers from France and England share the ideas of syndicalism, socialism, and in some cases anarchism. Influenced by More’s Utopia and those Utopian socialists, Bellamy and Morris represent their ideas of utopia in opposite direction. Bellamy describes vividly the future society in the U.S. where national party dominates the whole economic and political instutitions centralizing power for absolute equality and welfare of laborers. In opposite, as a response to Bellamy’s industrialized utopia, Morris represents pastoral and anarchistic utopia which is built upon long history of struggle between the have and the have-not. (Kangwon National University)