Moons and Planets

• Type: Chapter or Part of a Book
• Date: 2022

Authors

Malato, Maria Luísa (Author) FLUP; Wagner-Lawlor, Jennifer A. (Author) Other

Book

Title: The Palgrave handbook of utopian and dystopian literatures

Pages: 523-533

ISBN: 978-3-030-88653-0; 978-3-030-88656-1

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-88654-7

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan. Springer

Indexing

Crossref

Other information

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-88654-7_41

Abstract (EN): A character from Fontenelle’s 1686 Entretiens sur la plurarité de mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) observes that those who know the most about a planet are not its inhabitants, but their spectators; that is, an acute and fresh observation of Earth needs a perspective from elsewhere: the moon, the planets, another dimension of space–time. We cannot separate this reflection about “plural worlds” (Fontenelle), from the one about “possible worlds” (Suvin); both multiplicity and possibility are essential to the utopian genre. This chapter focuses on literary utopias—particularly before the twentieth century—with “outer-space” settings. These texts can interrogate, in extremis, the boundaries and presumptions of the genre itself. The chapter concludes with a reading of Jeanette Winterson’s exemplary The Stone Gods.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 11