Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity
Phillip Wegner
University of California Press, 2002
ISBN: 0520228294
Drawing from literary history, social theory, and political critique, Imaginary Communities explores utopian literature as a medium for understanding modernity. Phillip Wegner considers the genre from its earliest manifestation in Thomas More’s sixteenth-century work, Utopia, to some of the most influential utopias of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He also discusses the ideas of provocative writers such as Ernst Bloch, Louis Marin, Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Henri Lefebvre, Paul de Man, Karl Mannheim, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Zizek, and Homi Bhabha. Notable for its breadth of literary, cultural, and historical engagement, this book invites us to rethink the history of modernity, so that we might begin to imagine anew the space of our own present and future.
