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.