The Forms of Utopia: Paradox, Labyrinth, and Recursion in the Renaissance

A new analysis of utopia as a literary form, with recursive patterns that draw from early modern logic and mathematicsIn this ingenious and provocative book, Jenny Mann asks us to shift our understanding of utopia from its politics to its form.Beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), one of the most influential books of all time, Mann shows that utopia’s recursive patterns-its frames, folds, knots, meanders, and turns- enable the perpetual invention of limitless artificial worlds. Mann demonstrates how paradox, labyrinth, and recursion, in the hands of More, William Shakespeare, and Margaret Cavendish, become techniques of utopian invention.Drawing on concepts from logic and mathematics, including the Liar’s Paradox and the conundrum of squaring the circle, to make sense of utopia’s impossible geometries, she offers fresh and illuminating considerations of More’s Utopia, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Cavendish’s Blazing World, each representing a different form of utopia.These sect