With the publication of Utopia in 1516, Thomas More inaugurated a new genre, reviving a theme already known to the Greeks. Is utopia indeed the ideal place or is it not a place at all? In this open interpretation lies a discourse on happiness, at the margins of existential order and dominant thought. But what is the reason we are speaking?
This volume aims to demonstrate that utopia is not only highlighted through political criticism. The search for and construction of relationships between the ideal and the real equally traverse literature, theater, music, art, and architecture—and all these expressions of utopia also stem from history and paradox.
Beyond the interpretations and successive appropriations of utopia, the approximately seventy contributors to this work wish to redefine, behind the allegory and through intense verbal polysemy, the notion of a fictional structure in a predetermined time, from Augustine's City of God to virtual worlds, from the Golden Age to the Apocalypse, from Rousseau and Walter Benjamin to Dadaism and counterculture.
Michèle Riot-Sarcey is a historian and emeritus professor at the University of Paris-VIII. Her notable works include Le réel de l’utopie (1998), L’utopie en questions (2001), and Histoire du féminisme (2002).
Thomas Bouchet, with a rich writing and research portfolio, is the author of works including Le Roi et les barricades (2000), and is a historian and associate professor at the University of Lausanne.
Antoine Picon specializes in the History of Architecture and Technology of the 20th/21st century. He is co-director of Doctoral Programs at Harvard Graduate School of Design and the author of works including Les saint-simoniens: Raison, imaginaire et utopie (2002).
