ABSTRACT
The literary eutopia, or positive utopia, is “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than the society in which the reader lived” (Sargent 1994: 9). “Eutopia,” a pun on “eu” (good) 1 “topos” (place) as well as “ou” (no) 1 “topos” (place), is not, nor was it ever intended to be, an identiable place. Indeed, vagueness about location is a common strategy in narratives about these alternative communities. For example, in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), although Raphael Hythloday describes the geographical features of the crescent-shaped eponymous isle, he never explicitly locates it. Geographic isolation and distance have then become mainstays of eutopian narratives. This is perhaps not surprising; after all, the
“discovery” of the non-European continents and islands provided visionaries of the fteenth and sixteenth centuries with actual and imaginary space in which to create both practicing and literary experiments. The new space in the world reinforced the sensibility found in the landscape painting and pastoral poetry of the time that effused the presence of an arcadian locale in which dreams could be lived.
