Abstract

Oscar Wilde’s interest in utopia is well known, largely because of the famous aphoristic statement—a departure from the usual Wildean epigram—found in the midst of his essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1891). To the anticipated criticism that his vision of a world in which scientists use “wonderful and marvelous things” to replace human labor might seem pejoratively “Utopian,” he responds that “a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”1 This series of poignant sentences has ..