Awards

• Nominated for American Society for 18th-Century Studies Louis Gotschalk Prize 2016
• Nominated for Harry Levin Prize 2016
• Nominated for MLA Prize for a First Book 2015
• Nominated for Morris D. Forkosch Prize 2016

Overview

What is utopia if not a perfect world, impossible to achieve? Anahid Nersessian reveals a basic misunderstanding lurking behind that ideal. In Utopia, Limited she enlists William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and others to redefine utopianism as a positive investment in limitations. Linking the ecological imperative to live within our means to the aesthetic philosophy of the Romantic period, Nersessian's theory of utopia promises not an unconditionally perfect world but a better world where we get less than we hoped, but more than we had. For the Romantic writers, the project of utopia and the project of art were identical. Blake believed that without limits, a work of art would be no more than a set of squiggles on a page, or a string of nonsensical letters and sounds. And without boundaries, utopia is merely an extension of the world as we know it, but blighted by a hunger for having it all. Nersessian proposes that we think about utopia as the Romantics thought about aesthetics-as a way to bind and thereby emancipate human political potential within a finite space. Grounded in an intellectual tradition that begins with Immanuel Kant and includes Theodor Adorno and Northrop Frye, Utopia, Limited lays out a program of ""adjustment"" that applies the lessons of art to the rigors of life on an imperiled planet. It is a sincere response to environmental devastation, offering us a road map through a restricted future.

Full Product Details

9780674434578

Table of Contents

Reviews

Nersessian s project, to counter the consumerist fantasy of limitless consumption with the Utopia of a sustainable ecology, is skillfully executed. Her argument s backbone is in her virtuoso analyses of form. Unraveling the rhetorical strategies at work in a range of Romantic texts, she is both original and genuinely insightful This is a book that manages to be moral, informative and entertaining all at once Against an enduring ideological critique, of which Romanticism has been the particular target, Nersessian s view of a humane and socially engaged body of literature works as a powerful corrective.--Uttara Natarajan Times Higher Education (06/11/2015)

Lively, learned, and subtle, Utopia, Limited may well help initiate a resurgence in the teaching and study of Romanticism.--Mark Edmundson, University Professor, University of Virginia

Author Information

Anahid Nersessian is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available