[.ca] Three Early Modern Utopias: Thomas More: Utopia / ... (ISBN 0192838857)

Prose which still affects our thinking:
Literature before James Joyce, before Jane Austen, before Daniel Defoe: No Ulysses, no Emma, no Robinson Crusoe - for modern readers it is hard to imagine a stock of English literature without the existence of these and other important writers and their 'novels'. What kind of literature could one refer to in a pre-novelistic age? As a matter of fact, there were authors, such as Sir Thomas More and Sir Francis Bacon, who wrote prose which, indeed, still affects our thinking. However, neither More nor Bacon used English, but chose Latin as their original means of expression. For what reasons? And none of these authors was in fact a free-lance writer - they were all occupied in public and political spheres. What made them actually write fictional works? How does their fiction relate to their cultural environment - or, what was regarded as 'fiction'? These texts cover a century of political, religious, scientific and literary debates and gave rise to a new understanding of knowledge, and introduced influential literary devices.