The Forms of Utopia: Paradox, Labyrinth, and Recursion in the Renaissance - Rilegato

Mann, Jenny C.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0691283664 ISBN 13: 9780691283661

Casa editrice: Princeton University Press, 2026

Riassunto

A new analysis of utopia as a literary form, with recursive patterns that draw from early modern logic and mathematics

In this ingenious and provocative book, Jenny Mann asks us to shift our understanding of utopia from its politics to its form. Beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), one of the most influential books of all time, Mann shows that utopia’s recursive patterns―its frames, folds, knots, meanders, and turns―enable the perpetual invention of limitless artificial worlds.

Mann demonstrates how paradox, labyrinth, and recursion, in the hands of More, William Shakespeare, and Margaret Cavendish, become techniques of utopian invention. Drawing on concepts from logic and mathematics, including the Liar’s Paradox and the conundrum of squaring the circle, to make sense of utopia’s impossible geometries, she offers fresh and illuminating considerations of More’s Utopia, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Cavendish’s The Blazing World, each representing a different form of utopia. These sections are framed by interludes that feature an artwork or artifact―an intarsia-paneled door, a turf maze, a silver coin―that materially expresses an element of utopia’s puzzling structure. To study utopia, she argues, we must enter its structure and follow the disorienting paths. Utopia works by transforming enclosed spaces―a book, a play―into sites of infinite possibility.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull'autore

Jenny C. Mann is professor of English at New York University. She is the author of The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime and Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Princeton University Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2026
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0691283664
• ISBN 13: 9780691283661
• Rilegatura: Tapa dura
• Numero di pagine: 248
• Contatto del produttore: Princeton University Press; https://press.princeton.edu/books; ; 7th Floor, New South Building; PRINCETON; NJ; 8544; U.S.A.
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile