Narrative

Abstract

Utopian narrative has been a remarkably resilient form since its invention as a fictional subgenre by Sir Thomas More. What narrative resources did More provide later writers? Why has “utopian narrative” turned out to be so accommodating of all kinds of speculation visions, such that we can still recognize, in dystopian and some science fiction literature, the skeleton of More’s original narrative structuring? This chapter argues that the original Utopia—far from the blueprint/travel-guide model that was long associated with it—builds in what Bakhtin would call “the dialogic” mode of fiction. Focusing first on More’s text, the chapter turns to the many ways later writers have exploited the plasticity of a form that was never just a “blueprint model” of a utopian commonwealth—but always a process model that insists on the anticipatory nature of utopian hope. A final section analyzes Jeanette Winterson’s remarkable The Stone Gods (2007), which masterfully entangles the spatial and temporal metaphors so central to the history of utopian narrative.