In 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.
To study utopia, she argues, we must enter its structure and follow the disorienting paths.
