Hispanic Utopias

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(Andrew Ginger, Professor of Comparative Studies, Vice Provost for International Engagement, Northeastern University. Oficial de la Orden de Isabel la Catolica)

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(Laurence Davis, Senior Lecturer in Government and Politics, University College Cork and co-editor of Anarchism and Utopianism and The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed)

This historical reader offers a survey and an anthology of utopian speculation written in Spanish and other Hispanic languages since the 16th century. It not only provides further proof that this genre has been a key intellectual tool for imagining and debating the modern world, but also dismantles the cliche that Hispanic societies have been refractory to utopia by illustrating both the fertility of utopian writing in Hispanic languages and the links of that writing with local archetypes such as Don Quixote. The present volume expands the utopian canon and the very concept of utopian literature in two directions: incorporating the rich and as yet little studied work of authors writing in Spanish, Catalan and Galician, it simultaneously draws attention to the speculative and anticipatory content of a variety of non-fictional texts which have tended to be overlooked by existing scholarship.