Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History

Marina Leslie draws on three important early modern utopian texts—Thomas More's Utopia, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, and Margaret Cavendish's Description of a New World Called the Blazing World—as a means of exploring models for historical transformation and of addressing the relationship of literature and history in contemporary critical practice. While the genre of utopian texts is a fertile terrain for historicist readings, Leslie demonstrates that utopia provides unstable ground for chartin