Traversing Utopian Nature: A Proto-Ecological Approach to Thomas More’s Utopia

Abstract

An understanding of the ecological philosophy of More’s Utopia ensues both a textual and contextual analysis. This fact/fiction interrelationship, inherent within utopian texts, makes any critical attempt to concentrate solely on their historical context or textual format flawed and reductive. More’s society was an agrarian, feudal, subsistence economy on the verge of transformation to a capitalist market economy. Land enclosures, referred to by More in the First Book of Utopia, represent a site for defining oppositional views regarding nature/human relationships. In early modern texts, pastoral and georgic concepts of nature were blurred in a perpetual process of interpenetration. It is this liminal position, which Utopia assumes as a fictional as well as a factual space that invites its interpretation as a chronotope. My research is concerned with dealing with a canonical text like Utopia from an ecocritical perspective. Questions which concern me in this research revolve around: The relation between textual and contextual Nature in this text, Exploring the relationship between nature and humans from its earliest expressions and tracing within these early expressions the beginnings of contemporary ecological troubles.