Customer Reviews

Three Early Modern Utopias: Thomas More: Utopia / Francis Bacon: New Atlantis / Henry Neville: The Isle of Pines (Oxford World's Classics)

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This edition of More's Utopia (and Bacon, and Neville), is a valuable volume in one respect: it makes available historic early translations/editions of these three texts. However, this aspect makes it less than desirable for one major intended audience of Oxford Classics: students in college courses. In particular, the 1557 edition of More's Utopia, while a fascinating read from a historical perspective (e.g. the use of "weal-public" alongside synonyms like commonweal, commonwealth, and republic), is simply too difficult and antiquated for most college students to understand and appreciate what is going on in this important text. I'm a college instructor and I ordered this volume because it seemed to offer a good value for all three works. But my students found it MUCH too hard to understand (and I have to admit, the Utopia text was even slow going for me), so I had to post an online version in more contemporary English for them to read, and the week's discussion was hijacked by this problem of the text. Bottom line, if you are looking for a course text that will engage your students, keep shopping, because this edition will only frustrate them (and you, when you have to find another text of Utopia for them to read).

As usual, Oxford does a good job with translations, introductions and notes.

More's "Utopia" is the longest and best of the three works presented in this book, at least as far as fleshing out the details of how a utopian civilization would really look, particularly when situated among other civilizations. But, since most people are familiar with it to some degree, I'll discuss the other two writings in more detail.

Bacon's "New Atlantis" is the least satisfying of the three utopian civilizations. First, it isn't complete, barely beginning before it ends. Second, it seems to be more about scientific specialization (i.e. how the New Atlantic culture has made great strides in various fields of science [e.g. agriculture, astronomy]) than about utopian society per se. It is interesting how Bacon relates these islanders, far from Europe, to the famed ancient Atlantean society.

Neville's "Isle of Pines" is an interesting tale of shipwreck and discovery. A ship sinks near the coast of a faraway island, killing everyone except a man with the last name "Pine" and a few women, one of whom is black. What follows is a fascinating story of old/new-world racism and debauchery. Basically, the Pine fellow starts bedding ALL the women (two of whom, if I recall, are sisters) because, you know, they're not getting rescued any time soon and they've got to keep civilization going. Eventually, they all dispense with the wearing of clothes. Then ALL the women get pregnant and turn into baby factories and everyone breeds like rabbits until there are hundreds of people within one or two generations. The interesting tack that Neville takes is that Pine only sleeps with the black woman at night, she "craftily" sneaking into his bed. In addition, her progeny happen to be the bad apples of the island, which is discussed from the perspective of some visiting sailors many years after the shipwreck. Fascinating view into the European mind from several centuries back.

I have enjoyed Oxford World Classics for a long time because of the notes, biographies, and other content that is added to the book to supplement the stories themselves. This is a decent collection of three stories, with all the necessary notes and such. If you're curious about Utopia, buy this book and you'll get two other visions of Utopia as well, making for a good overall reading experience (once you get past the old language, which is rather clunky at times, but that is how it was written) and you'll learn a few things too.

This collection is excellent. By bringing together a richer context for these works, a clearer view of early modern social dreaming comes into view; this is useful since that period shapes our world so much.

Literature before James Joyce, before Jane Austen, before Daniel Defoe: No Ulysses, no Emma, no Robinson Crusoe - for modern readers it is hard to imagine a stock of English literature without the existence of these and other important writers and their `novels'. What kind of literature could one refer to in a pre-novelistic age? As a matter of fact, there were authors, such as Sir Thomas More and Sir Francis Bacon, who wrote prose which, indeed, still affects our thinking. However, neither More nor Bacon used English, but chose Latin as their original means of expression. For what reasons? And none of these authors was in fact a free-lance writer - they were all occupied in public and political spheres. What made them actually write fictional works? How does their fiction relate to their cultural environment - or, what was regarded as `fiction'? These texts cover a century of political, religious, scientific and literary debates and gave rise to a new understanding of knowledge, and introduced influential literary devices.