Dystopias and counter-utopias appeared as a literary (sub)genre long before the well-known texts authored by Zamyatin, Orwell and Huxley in the twentieth century. This book documents the emergence and development of classical anti-utopias from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It starts from the idea that Renaissance utopias were conceived as humanistic alternatives to the Terrestrial Paradise of the Christian tradition. Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Johann Valentin Andreae, Tomasso Campanella and many other thinkers and writers sought to recover the Garden of Eden for humans, attempting to replace the City of God with a City of Man. However, utopian optimism was soon to be challenged by several theoretical critiques and institutional attacks, legitimized by three main doctrinal positions: Counter-Reformation theology, Cartesian rationalism and English empiricism. Throughout the early modern age, these ideologies shaped a series of resolute arguments against the hope that mankind could establish by itself a perfect society and a paradise on earth. Starting with Joseph Hall and Artus Thomas, many authors took on official and public censorship and reshaped their fiction into critiques of utopian visions. Instead of imagining ideal places, they began to conceive counter-utopian societies and terrestrial infernos. This book therefore charts the early modern cartography of the antiutopian subgenre, while also focusing on numerous case analyses.

Corin Braga is Professor of Comparative Literature at Babes-Bolyai University, Romania.