Abstract
Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) is the first of ‘the “classic” modern utopias’ (Kumar, 1987, p. 23). Its conception of utopia is ambiguous, as its title indicates - ‘is this eutopia, the good place, or outopia, no place - and are these necessarily the same thing?’ (Levitas, 2011, pp. 2–3). This classic modern literary utopia relates to the hopes and scepticisms surrounding the discovery in the early sixteenth century of ‘new and unexpected worlds’ (Davis, 2000, p. 95). Columbus landed in the New World of the Americas, the order of the universe was redefined by Copernicus and Kepler, and the immense scientific and technical advances of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made visible formerly hidden realms of life and raised confidence in imagining worlds hitherto inconceivable. As Lawrence Principe writes of the individuals of this time: ‘Peering through ever-improving telescopes, they saw immense new worlds - undreamt-of moons around Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and countless new stars. With the equally new microscope they saw the delicate details of a bee’s stinger, fleas enlarged to the size of dogs, and discovered unimagined swarms of “little animals” in vinegar, blood, water, and semen’ (Principe, 2011, p. 2).
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