In memory of a writer with the rare combination of democratic humanism and fantastic world-building imagination.

More's Utopia, like the humanist ideology it represents, celebrates dialogue—it is probably not going too far even to say that the fiction fetishizes dialogue. And yet, the depiction of Utopia is notably monological, for reasons that bear on both humanism of this moment and on the emergence of prose fiction as a vehicle for ideological critique.

In his dissertation "Medial Situations and Generic Possibility in the Long Eighteenth Century," Colin Moore argues that the picaresque fiction is predicated on a basic communicative situation that he calls "an encounter with a stranger," and that this condition in turn determines the nature of time and space in such a fiction. That is, each episode is a "one-time" event, and the landscape of the fiction is a ribbon of road on which the narrator and the reader cannot stop or go backward.

Thomas More's Utopia (1516) is an odd but inescapable model for early modern European and transatlantic prose fiction, including the first novels. In the next few weeks I will reflect here on how an aspect of More's fictional commonwealth has a predictive power over later fictions: that is, what cannot be seen, done, or said in Utopia.