Introduction : origin stories -- Thomas More's "Peninsula made an island" -- Uneven development in Bacon's New Atlantis -- Utopia, Ireland, and the Tudor shock doctrine -- Dispossession and women's poetry of place -- Reforming utopia in Macaria and Areopagitica
Summary
This book examines the rise of the early English utopia in the context of emergent capitalism, one that foreshadows the Enlightenment discourse of political economy while giving us another historical perspective on the beginnings and enduring conflicts of global capital