Utopias of One / / Joshua Kotin.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press Complete eBook-Package 2018
• VerfasserIn: Kotin, Joshua,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2017]; ©2018
• Year of Publication: 2017
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (216 p.) :; 1 halftone. 2 line illus.

Utopias fail. Utopias of one do not. They are perfect worlds. Yet their success comes at a cost. They are radically singular-and thus exclusive and inimitable.Utopias of One is a major new account of utopian writing. Joshua Kotin examines how eight writers-Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne-construct utopias of one within and against modernity's two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. The book, in this way, captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds-for themselves alone.Utopias of One makes a vital contribution to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. The book also models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction. Utopias of One -- PART I. THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA -- Learning from Walden -- W.E.B. Du Bois's Hermeticism -- PART II. THE SOVIET UNION -- Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam's Utopian Anti - Utopianism -- Anna Akhmatova's Complicity -- PART III. THE WORLD -- Wallace Stevens's Point of View -- Reading Ezra Pound and J. H. Prynne in Chinese -- Utopias of two -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Transliteration & Translation -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index