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(Harvey J Kaye, Professor Emeritus of Democracy & Justice, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay)

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(Patricia McManus, Senior Lecturer, School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Brighton)

A. L. Morton's classic 1952 study of utopias in the context of British social history constitutes one of the earliest sustained engagements with the social and ideological sources of the utopian imagination, the importance of the class struggle for literary production and of literary production for cultural, if not political hegemony. Traversing English literary history from the medieval poem on the Land of Cockaygne to Sir Thomas More, to William Morris's News from Nowhere and the subsequent decline of the genre and the eventual rise of anti-utopian and dystopian strains in the early twentieth century, The English Utopia remains provocative and critically engaging more than seventy years after its original publication. In addition to charting its significance as an intervention, the present edition also brings to light Morton's complex role as Left political activist, historian, scholarly catalyst and cultural critic - a paradigmatic instance of the engaged and public intellectual.