Entertainment / Literature / Utopian Literature: The term utopia comes from a Greek pun. In Greek, eu + topos (good' + 'place') and ou + topos (no' + 'place') sound very similar. Thus, utopia at once suggests a perfect society and an impossible one. Utopian literature is a term for any writing that presents the reader with (or explores the idea of) a perfect society in the physical world, as opposed to a perfect society existing in an afterlife.The first literary utopia was probably Plato's ideal commonwealth in the Republic, circa 400 BCE, in which a group of debating philosophers seeking to define justice end up as a mental exercise creating a hypothetical perfect polis, or self-governing city of about 8,000 citizens. In this imaginary society, philosophers are the rulers, goods and women are communally owned, slavery is taken for granted, and children are bred eugenically. Artists, actors, and poets are largely exiled. Ramn Llull's utopia in Blanquerna (c.1280) continued the tradition, but had little literary impact. Sir Thomas More's Utopia solidified the genre in 1516 and his name for the imaginary kingdom became the term used in reference to the genre more generally. Later versions include Andreae's Christianopolis, Campanella's City of the Sun, Bacon's New Atlantis, Samuel Gott's New Jerusalem, Winstanley's The Law of Freedom in a Platform, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, William Morris's News from Nowhere, Theodor Hertzka's Freeland, H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia (my personal favorite), and more recent editions like Ecotopia.
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