Other Englands: Utopia, Capital, and Empire in an Age of Transition

Abstract

Sarah Hogan’s Other Englands traces the origins of the utopia genre to the emergence of transatlantic imperialism and agrarian capitalism in the early modern period. Combining Marxist historiography and literary criticism, Hogan’s book offers new insights into the transitional character of early modern utopias, which gave expression to modes of being and structures of feeling that had not yet been clearly conceptualized. The encounter with the New World and the social dislocation brought about by primitive accumulation and the enclosure of the commons generated an experience of the present as transitional or provisional, and this sense of the present as Other contributed to the formation of an early modern utopian sensibility: a frame of mind oriented to a radically different but still this-worldly future, projected outward in the form of “other Englands.”

Key Words:

• Early Modern Literature
• Imperialism
• Marxism
• Transition Debate
• Utopia

Notes

1 Karl Marx, “For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. R. C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 15.