Reference Work on More’s Utopia (2024)
Shrank, Gathy, and Phil Withington, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More's Utopia. Oxford Handbooks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. 816 pp.
“The first volume to bring together chapters considering vernacular translations of Utopia globally between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries
Features chapters on the contexts in which Thomas More originally wrote Utopia
Discusses 'utopianism' in fields as diverse as literature, economy, cartography, Hollywood, and environmental planning
The accessible Introduction outlines the life and times of Thomas More and explains the significance of Utopia and the critical attention it has attracted
Thomas More's Utopia is one of the most iconic, translated, and influential texts of the European Renaissance. This Handbook of specially commissioned and original essays brings together for the first time three different ways of thinking about the book: in terms of its renaissance contexts, its vernacular translations, and its utopian legacies. It has been developed to allow readers to consider these different facets of Utopia in relation to each other and to provide fresh and original contributions to our understanding of the book's creation, vernacularization, and afterlives. In so doing, it provides an integrated overview of More's text, as well as new contributions to the range of scholarship and debates that Utopia continues to attract. An especially innovative feature is that it allows readers to follow Utopia across time and place, unpacking the often-revolutionary moments that encouraged its translation by new generations of writers as far afield as France, Russia, Japan, and China.
The Handbook is organized in four sections: on different aspects of the origins and contexts of Utopia in the 1510s; on histories of its translation into different vernaculars in the early modern and modern eras; and on various manifestations of utopianism up to the present day. The Handbook's Introduction outlines the biography of More, the key strands of interpretation and criticism relating to the text, the structure of the Handbook, and some of its recurring themes and issues. An appendix provides an overview of Utopia for readers new to the text.
Author Information
Cathy Shrank, Professor of Tudor and Renaissance Literature, University of Sheffield,Phil Withington, Professor of Social and Cultural History, University of Sheffield
Cathy Shrank took her degrees in Cambridge in the 1990s, and has worked at King's College London, Aberdeen, and Sheffield. She has published extensively on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and culture, and is a scholarly editor of early modern texts, including Shakespeare's Sonnets. Major grants as PI include the AHRC-funded 'Origins of Early Modern Literature', a Major Leverhulme Research Fellowship, and the AHRC-funded project 'Penniless? Thomas Nashe and Precarity in Historical Perspective'.
Phil Withington trained as a social and economic historian at Cambridge in the early 1990s and worked at Aberdeen, Leeds, and Cambridge before joining the Department of History at Sheffield in 2012. He has published extensively on social history of the renaissance, urban culture and urbanization, and the history of intoxicants and intoxication. Major grants as PI include an ESRC mid-career fellowship, the ESRC/AHRC-funded project 'Intoxicants and Early Modernity', and the HERA-funded project 'Intoxicating Spaces'.
Contributors:
Katherine Astbury
Musab Bajaber
Jennifer Bishop
Wiep van Bunge
Dermot Cavanagh
Zsolt Czigányik
Andrew Hadfield
Ingrid Hanson
Eliza Hartrich
Alfred Hiatt
Peter Hill
Angie Hobbs
Chloë Houston
Jessica S. Hower
Louise Johnson
Darcy Kern
Martin Lutz
Tehyun Ma
Cat Moir
Diane Morgan
Frances Nethercott
Lucy Nicholas
Joanne Paul
Nicole Pohl
Miguel Angel Ramiro Avilés
David Harris Sacks
Teruhito Sako
Gabriela Schmidt
Richard Scholar
Cathy Shrank
Johan Siebers
Janet Stewart
Carla Suthren
Andrew Taylor
Floris Verhaart
Marcus Waithe
Rebecca Weaver-Hightower
Rhys Williams
Phil Withington
Andrew Zurcher”
Description from the publisher’s website.
