Abstract

Chloë Houston’s The Renaissance Utopia: Dialogue, Travel and the Ideal Society traces two main developments in utopian literature from 1516 until its proliferation in the middle years of the seventeenth century. The first is the transition from utopia as philosophical satire to utopia as an imaginative means to achieve social reform. Second is the movement from utopias primarily being written as dialogues to utopias being written as narratives. Houston argues that as writers sought to reach a wider readership they rejected the dialogue form, which prompted a shift from a reliance on the dialogue in the sixteenth century to the adoption of a narrative form in the mid-seventeenth century. Her chronological approach...